DHS citizenship database must remain suspended, D.C. judge says in scathing opinion 

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has denied the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) request to pause her order shutting down use of its modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to certify registered voters’ citizenship status. 

In a blistering 23-page opinion Wednesday, District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan berated the federal government’s attorneys for failing to notify her about a related case in Florida. A federal judge in that litigation issued an order Tuesday demanding DHS allow Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio to use SAVE again, saying the agency was bound by a November 2025 settlement agreement with the state.

That led to conflicting federal court orders about the database.

“The Federal Defendants… knew that this suit had the potential to implicate the permissible ‘terms’ under that agreement and their statutory ‘authority’ to make certain concessions in a consent decree,” Sooknanan wrote. “The Defendants choose to ignore those considerations, making any injury arising from that decision self-inflicted.”

The denial means Sooknanan’s injunction issued in June will remain in place while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit hears DHS’s pleas for a reversal. 

“Further, the equitable relief obtained as a result of the Florida consent decree governs only the states that are parties in that action,” Sooknanan wrote. “Thus, it would not be a basis to stay the effects of the Court’s order with respect to other SAVE users.”

The order will also continue to block DHS from adding data from the Social Security Administration to SAVE.

In seeking a stay, DHS’s lawyers argued “[s]omewhat audaciously” that the D.C. court’s order brought them out of compliance with the Florida agreement, Sooknanan wrote, noting that the “consent decree was filed on November 28, 2025, and approved on December 1, 2025—nearly two months after the Plaintiffs filed this action.”

Sooknanan didn’t limit her ire to just DHS. She also took the judge in the Florida case, District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell II, to task. 

She wrote that the court “erred in significant ways” and “may well correct those errors down the road once made aware of them.”

The Florida court also made its decision without receiving an adverse briefing from other states that would be affected, an approach Sooknanan called “fundamentally unsound.” 

Her court’s 75-page opinion last month was “the result of thorough, adverse briefing on the merits,” Sooknanan wrote. “The Northern District of Florida court spent roughly one paragraph to reach differing conclusions, and did so without the benefit of adverse parties raising every argument in their favor and pointing out the flaws in contrary ones. The errors in the resulting order, both on the nature of review when entering a consent decree and on the merits issues themselves, illustrate why courts do not proceed in this way.”