Red states demand restored access to citizenship database for purging voters

By Jim Saksa

FILE - President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others, tour "Alligator Alcatraz," a new migrant detention facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility, July 1, 2025, in Ochopee, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

Four Republican-led states want their access restored to a federal database for checking their voter registration records for noncitizens. 

In a court filing Wednesday, they requested access to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database after a federal judge recently shut it down in response to a lawsuit from pro-voting groups.

Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Iowa 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. The states settled with DHS after President Donald Trump took office, gaining access to DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system. 

DHS promised that the SAVE system would allow for bulk searches with social security numbers — aspects of SAVE’s expansion that U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan explicitly enjoined last week. 

The four states filed a motion Tuesday, asking a federal judge in Pensacola, Fla. to enforce the settlement agreement and restore their access to the SAVE program. U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherwell II, a Trump appointee, immediately ordered DHS to respond to the emergency motion by Thursday. 

DHS is unlikely to fight the motion, and it’s unclear whether some other party will be able to intervene to oppose it. If granted, the motion would poke a hole in Sooknanan’s order, which DHS is appealing.

Trump ordered the overhaul of the SAVE database as part of his March 2025 executive order, directing DHS to work with the Social Security Administration to make the system easier to use as a citizenship checking tool for state election officials. 

The League of Women Voters quickly sued, and after months of litigation, Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, ruled that SAVE’s modifications violated the Social Security Act’s prohibition on disclosing social security numbers, various provisions of the 1974 Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote in her 75-page decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

Sooknanan acknowledged the settlement agreements in her opinion, but dismissed DHS’s arguments that they should prevent her from blocking the SAVE modifications.

The expanded SAVE program was used to check the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters, mostly from Republican-led states. The program flagged thousands of voters as potential noncitizens, but later investigations showed many were actually citizens eligible to vote.