In Late, Obscure Notice, DHS Turbocharges Trump’s Voter Purge Database, Evading  Privacy Protections

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) quietly formalized sweeping changes to a federal immigration database Friday, turning it into a national “voter verification” tool that appears to sidestep federal privacy protections and will make it easier to remove large numbers of voters from the rolls. 

The department cited President Donald Trump’s anti-voting executive orders as the spur for the move.

A Systems of Records Notice (SORN), published by DHS in the Federal Register in its final form Friday, redefines how the department and state officials can use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database — a program originally created to check the immigration status of noncitizens applying for public benefits. 

The change adds voter registration and verification to SAVE’s official purpose, vastly expanding who and what data can be entered and searched. It allows DHS to share the data with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), which under Trump has embarked on a sweeping effort to pressure states to tighten voting rules and remove voters from the rolls.

And for the first time, DHS explicitly adds natural-born U.S. citizens to the system’s scope, allowing verification through Social Security numbers, passports and, soon, driver’s licenses.

The SORN comes months after the Trump administration expanded SAVE, even though federal law requires public notice in advance of such significant changes. The filing neglects to mention that SAVE was already modified and is currently being used by states to purge voter rolls.

“On January 20, 2025, and March 25, 2025, respectively, the President issued Executive Orders 14159, Protecting the American People Against Invasion and 14248, Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” the notice reads. “Executive Order 14159 directs the Secretary to ‘ensure that state and local officials have, without the requirement of the payment of a fee, access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered.”

The notice formally transforms SAVE — a database long criticized for inaccuracies — into a central hub for checking voter citizenship status. 

“USCIS has incorporated a feature to allow SAVE user agencies to create a SAVE case using a full or partial Social Security number and other government-issued enumerators (e.g., passport number; driver’s license number),” the notice adds. “Additionally, user agencies with appropriate legal authority may now view, within SAVE, other user agencies’ case data through a linking mechanism based on either benefit type granted (e.g. Medicare) or by state.”

The change gives state and local election officials access to the same immigration database used by law enforcement and benefit agencies — with the ability to upload voter registration lists for mass checks. Already, states like Texas and Tennessee have uploaded their entire voter rolls into SAVE for citizenship verification. 

Voting rights advocates warn the system’s design and data sources may lead to false matches that could wrongly flag eligible voters as noncitizens. A court filing Wednesday suggested around a quarter of flagged voters in one major Texas county were incorrectly identified as potential noncitizens. 

Meanwhile, the language “in addition to those disclosures generally permitted under 5 U.S.C. 552a(b)” may open the door for DHS to share data outside the traditional limits allowed by federal law.

The Privacy Act of 1974 was designed to prevent the federal government from building centralized dossiers on citizens without transparency or oversight.

By expanding SAVE’s “routine uses,” DHS now claims the authority to share data with DOJ, the SSA, and state election officials for “any other purpose authorized by law, including verification of registrants and registered voters in voter registration and voter list maintenance processes.”

A recently released interagency agreement between DHS and SSA provides few guardrails limiting how citizens’ data can be used or guidelines for protecting it, as ProPublica reported Thursday.

That notice presents a major shift in federal power over election data and provides infrastructure for voter verification that could enable politically motivated purges or investigations under the guise of “election integrity.”

The change comes amid ongoing litigation from the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and others, who sued DHS and the Department of Justice for expanding SAVE without public notice. The notice published Friday appears to retroactively legitimize the same actions the lawsuit challenged — effectively curing the agencies’ procedural violations while preserving the program’s expanded reach.