Trump administration will use passport data for voter citizenship checks, court filing reveals

The Trump administration will start using passport records as it hunts for noncitizens on the voter registration rolls, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a filing Tuesday evening.

The move would dramatically expand the administration’s efforts to marshall federal data as it attempts to exert control over elections. Those efforts, previously centered around Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records, have already been hampered by successful legal challenges.

Now, in a vaguely worded status report in Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) v. Trump*, the DOJ said that the U.S. Department of State would soon file a federal register notice proposing to share “information contained in the Passport Services Records system,” with other, unnamed federal agencies.

According to the filing, that notice would authorize “information sharing with various entities utilizing federal government verification platforms, for the purpose of verifying the identity or citizenship for users accessing government websites and applications, voter eligibility, and other governmental services.”

The State Department records the administration intends to share include the private identifiable data of everyone who has ever applied for a U.S. passport.

The 1974 Privacy Act requires the federal government to provide public notice of any proposed new use of individuals’ private information like their names or Social Security numbers. The court filing said the notice could be filed in the Federal Register as soon as Oct. 22.

The status report comes as the plaintiffs in DSCC v. Trump continue to challenge the implementation of President Donald Trump’s mail voting executive order. 

While the U.S. Supreme Court recently stopped the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from carrying out Trump’s order, other provisions remain unblocked. 

The focus of the DSCC v. Trump legal battle has shifted to those provisions, which direct DHS to create lists of citizens in every state using its own data, Social Security Administration records and “other relevant Federal databases.” 

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit recently asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to require the administration to provide the court regular updates on the executive order’s implementation — specifically on DHS’s efforts to compile state citizenship lists. 

Nichols, a Trump appointee, previously enjoined USPS’s implementation of the executive order a day before the Supreme Court affirmed a similar court order issued by a federal judge in Massachusetts. 

*The Elias Law Group (ELG) represents plaintiffs in this case. ELG Firm Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.