Trump Administration Sued Over Massive ‘Interagency Database’ of Americans’ Private Information

Advocacy groups are suing to block the Trump administration’s creation of vast, centralized databases of Americans’ personal information for purging voter rolls and launching criminal investigations. 

The groups filed a federal class-action lawsuit Tuesday in Washington D.C. against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the heads of those agencies in their official capacity, alleging violations of federal privacy and regulatory procedure laws. 

“The federal government’s secretive and unlawful collection and consolidation of Americans’ personal data is a clear example of the constitutional crisis we are living through,” Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters (LWV), one of the plaintiffs, said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “Our federal government is abusing its power to access American’s personal information, and several states are using that private data to harm voters and our individual right to privacy.”

The other plaintiffs are LWV’s Virginia and Louisiana chapters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and five individual Americans.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March directing DHS to expand the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’s Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program for use in checking the citizenship of registered voters, incorporate Social Security data, and make it free for state election officials to use. Since then, DOJ has taken voter registration roll data it has collected from some state election officials and shared it with DHS for use with SAVE. 

The plaintiffs allege that the administration has also consolidated data from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor to create interagency databases holding Social Security numbers, tax information, medical records, biometric data, and children’s case files, all without first providing the public notice and comment period required by law. The lawsuit also claims the defendants exceeded their statutory authorities in developing the interagency databases, violating the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Under the 1974 Privacy Act, whenever the government proposes to use a private individual’s data in a new manner, the agency is required to provide notice in the Federal Register detailing the purpose, to allow the public and Congress to weigh in. To date, there has been no notification published in the Federal Register. 

The lawsuit proposes to sue on behalf of a class made up of the “millions of American citizens and permanent residents whose records have been unlawfully pooled into new or revised centralized records systems at DHS, as well as organizations whose members and missions are harmed by Defendants’ attempts to ignore the laws protecting Americans’ privacy.”

Some Republican secretaries of state have said they’ve used the expanded SAVE program to search their voter registration records for potential non-citizens. Federal prosecutors appointed by Trump have also aggressively pursued felony charges in non-citizen voting and registration cases. 

A coalition of government watchdog groups — Democracy Forward*, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Fair Elections Center — filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs. 

“News reports have repeatedly identified ways in which this administration is mishandling sensitive information and putting Americans’ data privacy at risk. And now, yet again, this administration is playing fast and loose with our personal information – building exactly the kind of ‘Big Brother’ databases Congress has repeatedly outlawed more than 50 years ago,” said Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward. “Pooling sensitive personal records from across the government not only violates the law, it threatens Americans’ privacy, voting rights, and civil liberties. We’re in court to stop it.”

*Marc Elias, the founder of Democracy Docket, serves as board chair of Democracy Forward.