Florida judge lets Republican-led states use DHS citizenship database for voter purges, contradicting D.C. judge’s order

A federal judge in Florida ruled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must allow four Republican-led states to again use a federal database to search for noncitizens on their voter registration rolls.

The decision conflicts with a previous ruling by a federal judge in Washington, D.C. that blocked access to the database. It will likely unspool into a tangle of competing court orders in the coming months. 

Last month, District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan held that Trump’s March 2025 executive order directing DHS to turn its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system into a deeply defective citizenship checker ignored privacy laws and violated the Constitution. Sooknanan’s order effectively ended the expanded SAVE program, which had already been used to check the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters by Republican election officials. 

But District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherwell II issued a competing order Tuesday after Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Iowa petitioned for enforcement of a November 2025 settlement with DHS. 

The states had sued DHS in 2024, arguing that the agency wasn’t doing enough to help them uncover noncitizens on their voting rolls during President Joe Biden’s administration. After Trump took office, they settled with the government under an agreement providing access to DHS’s SAVE system. The settlement also promised that DHS would implement the kind of upgrades — like the ability to conduct bulk searches using partial social security numbers (SSN) — that Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, explicitly enjoined in her decision. 

Wetherwell, a Trump appointee, ordered DHS to “immediately comply with the court approved settlement agreement in this case by reinstating Plaintiffs’ access to the bulk-upload and SSN-search features in the SAVE system.” 

“Defendants are plainly in violation of the settlement agreement because it is undisputed that they disabled the bulk-upload and SSN-search features that the agreement expressly required the SAVE system to have,” Wetherwell wrote. “The fact that Defendants disabled those features to comply with Judge Sooknanan’s order does not change the fact that they violated the agreement.” 

“This Court is not bound by Judge Sooknanan’s order, and with all due respect, the Court disagrees with the conclusions in that order,” Wetherwell added.

The obvious conflict between the two federal court orders will trigger a rash of litigation, as parties try to leverage the two contradictory rulings against each other in a coming series of filings seeking stays, injunctions and appeals. 

The plaintiffs in the Washington D.C. lawsuit — the League of Women Voters (LWV) and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) — filed an amicus brief in the Florida lawsuit and will presumably look to appeal Tuesday’s decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Trump administration appealed Sooknanan’s decision to the D.C. Circuit Court last week, and LWV filed its response Tuesday. 

Federal district court judges are not bound by their peers’ decisions. And even if LWV and EPIC win in the D.C. Circuit Court, that ruling would not bind Wetherwell down in Florida.

The issue will likely remain in flux until at least one of the circuit courts rule. Ultimately, the question could appear before the U.S. Supreme Court, perhaps in an emergency petition for review on the so-called shadow docket.

Sooknanan acknowledged the states’ settlement agreement in her opinion, but dismissed DHS’s arguments that they should prevent her from blocking the SAVE modifications. She noted that the DHS settlement was made in November 2025 — months after LWV and EPIC filed their lawsuit challenging the SAVE modifications.

In her ruling, Sooknanan noted that DHS entering a consent decree with the four states in November that would prevent “the very [outcome] sought” in the ongoing LWV lawsuit filed in September wasn’t “consistent with the equitable considerations of clean hands, ‘good faith,’ and the prevention of ‘forum shopping.” 

In his decision, Wetherwell blamed the parties — the four GOP-led state plaintiffs and the defendant, DHS — for not notifying each court of the ongoing litigation in the other. 

“[I]t is unfortunate that the parties to this case did not bring Judge Sooknanan’s case to this Court’s attention before it approved the settlement agreement and/or the parties to Judge Sooknanan’s case did not bring this Court’s order approving the settlement agreement to her attention sooner than they did so the conundrum that now exists might have been avoided through principles of comity.” 

But that didn’t prevent him from rewarding DHS and the Republican states, and casting the federal agency as a victim caught in the crossfire here. “The Court understands that this puts Defendants in a bind because they are subject to two contradictory orders—one from this Court requiring them to include certain features in the SAVE system and one from Judge Sooknanan prohibiting them from doing so,” Wetherwell wrote. “One of the orders has to give, and not surprisingly, the Court is not persuaded by Defendants’ (and the amici’s) arguments that its order is the one that should give.”