DOJ asks Supreme Court to let DHS use immigration database to purge state voter rolls

The Department of Justice (DOJ) asked the Supreme Court Tuesday to lift a lower court order and allow the Trump administration to use a flawed federal immigration database to initiate voter registration purges.

The petition marks the department’s latest rushed attempt to leapfrog an appellate court and get the Supreme Court’s conservative-appointed majority to stay a lower ruling blocking President Donald Trump’s attempt to increase the executive branch’s control over elections. 

The DOJ filed the request just days after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the administration’s motion to pause U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s June order blocking its use of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system.

Originally designed to help states check the citizenship status of people applying for government benefits, the Trump administration has tried to turn the SAVE program into a new system to monitor state voter registration lists.

In her order, Sooknanan found that the endeavor violated several federal laws, “haphazardly” threatened “the sacred right to vote” and “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.”

In his filing to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer called Sooknanan’s order “indefensible” while claiming it “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by States to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”

In a statement Tuesday, Democracy Forward*, which is representing the pro-voting and privacy groups challenging the modified SAVE program, criticized the DOJ’s appeal to the Supreme Court.

“Court after court has rejected the Trump-Vance administration’s effort to revive an unlawful system that puts Americans’ privacy and fundamental freedom to vote at risk,” Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman said. “Now, after failing to get its way in the lower courts, the administration is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, despite the law being clear that DHS’s actions cannot continue.”

“The stakes could not be higher: millions of Americans’ sensitive personal information and the integrity of our elections are on the line, just weeks before the midterm elections. We will continue working alongside our clients and partners to protect voters, their privacy, and the rule of law at every step of the process,” Perryman added.

Though Sauer claimed DHS was using SAVE in response to requests from states, the department’s leadership has tried to force states to use the program or lose out on emergency and disaster grants.

Additionally, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened state election chiefs earlier this year with criminal charges if they do not use the SAVE program to check their voter rolls.

“The states who choose not to participate with the SAVE program, and they choose not to participate in secure elections, we will make sure that we make those states a priority to look at who voted in their states and will hold them, the election officials, accountable,” Mullin said.

Voting groups and privacy groups have repeatedly warned that the SAVE program was never designed to check voter eligibility and, when used in this manner, would likely erroneously disqualify eligible voters.

In fact, in states where the database has been used, eligible voters were routinely flagged as noncitizens.

After Sooknanan’s order went into effect, the administration shut down the SAVE database for use as a voter registration list citizenship checker. Before then, the Trump administration used it to check the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters. Those checks flagged thousands of people as potential noncitizens, but further investigations found that most were actually eligible voters.

The Trump administration has claimed the modified SAVE program is needed to prevent noncitizens from voting. However, it’s already a crime to vote as a noncitizen, and vanishingly few noncitizens try to vote, as dozens of studies and state audits have shown.

Though the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals kept Sooknanan’s order in place, it did order that the Trump administration’s underlying appeal be expedited. 

Now, the DOJ has gone directly to the Supreme Court before the appeals court has officially weighed in on the matter.

DHS’s overhaul of the SAVE database is just one prong in its effort to shape state voter rolls and influence who can vote.

Following the playbook outlined in Trump’s March 2026 executive order, DHS is also centralizing Americans’ sensitive personal data to compile lists of people eligible to vote in every state.

Combined, the lists would amount to a national voter registration list managed by the federal government — something that has never existed before.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is among the plaintiffs challenging the SAVE program’s expansion, sued DHS last week over the compilation of those lists. 

This story has been updated with additional details throughout.

*Democracy Docket Founder Marc Elias is the chair of Democracy Forward’s board.