Supreme Court Revives Controversial Citizenship-Check System
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday revived a federal data system that the Department of Homeland Security has repurposed to check the citizenship of registered voters, granting the Trump administration an emergency stay that clears the way for the expanded program to operate weeks before the midterm elections, NPR reported.
The 6-3 ruling broke along ideological lines, with the conservative majority siding with the administration and the three liberal justices dissenting. The decision lifts a June injunction from a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., who had found the revamped system unlawful, and sends the case back to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
At issue is the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE — a 40-year-old federal tool that the administration overhauled in 2025 into a bulk citizenship-verification engine for state voter rolls. Critics warn the system is error-prone and could unlawfully flag and remove eligible U.S. citizens, particularly recently naturalized ones, just as voting gets underway.
What the Ruling Does
The Supreme Court’s order is an unsigned, or per curiam, stay — not a final ruling on the merits. As NBC News reported, the justices granted the government’s emergency request after two lower courts concluded the administration’s changes to the database were likely unlawful.
The majority reasoned that the National Voter Registration Act bars the broad, systematic purging of voter rolls in the 90 days before a federal election, which “limits the potential impact” of the decision this year. But the Court held that the government may still use the modified SAVE for individualized inquiries, which it said are permitted even during that period.
“All agree that the order prevents the Federal Government from using the modified SAVE program to conduct individualized inquiries, which are permitted under federal law during this [90-day] period,” the majority wrote. “The District Court’s order thus inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”
The Court also accepted the administration’s argument that a provision of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act authorizes DHS to disclose citizenship information — including Social Security data — to states, and that the government has “an obligation to respond” to states seeking it. As BBC News noted, the use of SAVE by individual states remains voluntary.
A Lasting Dissent
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson authored the dissent, faulting the majority for not weighing the harms of letting the system operate. “The District Court highlighted such harms, noting the risk that States might cancel the voter registrations of at least some recently naturalized citizens or force such persons to provide proof of citizenship before voting,” she wrote.
Jackson framed the balance sharply: “The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the non-existent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.”
She also challenged the majority’s reading of the 1996 law, noting that in the three decades since it was enacted, “the government has never invoked [the provision] in that way — even as it has repeatedly refined the SAVE program.”
How SAVE Was Transformed
SAVE was created by Congress in 1986 to let government agencies verify noncitizens’ immigration status when they applied for public benefits. For decades it was used narrowly and typically required an immigration identification number and per-query fees.
The Trump administration remade it after a March 2025 executive order directing federal agencies to share citizenship data with state election officials. DHS linked SAVE to Social Security Administration records for the first time, enabled bulk queries, and encouraged states to upload their entire voter rolls.
According to Solicitor General D. John Sauer, since May 2025 the updated system has verified more than 65 million voters across 26 states and flagged 28,635 as potential noncitizens. Sauer argued that blocking it “makes it harder to detect ineligible voters, undermining the integrity of federal elections and public confidence in the results of those elections.”
In June 2026, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, blocked the modified SAVE, finding it violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” she wrote. A D.C. Circuit panel then declined, 2-1, to stay her ruling — prompting Sauer’s September appeal to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s order reversed course.
The Evidence of Errors
The practical concern is accuracy. The plaintiffs — led by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center — argued in a brief that Congress never authorized a “master database of U.S. Citizens” and that the government lacks data to build one accurately. “Disregarding these laws, the government has recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights,” they wrote.
After the ruling, the groups said in a statement that the decision “puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” adding that the litigation is not over.
Reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune documented that DHS rushed the revamped tool into use while still adding data, leading to persistent misidentifications of people born outside the U.S. who later became citizens. In one Missouri county, more than half the voters flagged as noncitizens turned out to be citizens.
Texas, an early adopter, ran its entire list of roughly 18 million registrations through SAVE, which flagged 2,724 voters as potential noncitizens. County officials gave those individuals 30 days to prove citizenship and removed those who did not respond. According to a Texas Secretary of State press release, a follow-up review found that 578 of the flagged voters demonstrated citizenship — 506 of them after passport data was added to SAVE — and the office directed counties to reinstate them. Texas referred 117 cases, about 4.2% of those flagged, for investigation of potential noncitizen voting.
Since the state began checking its rolls with SAVE, only three noncitizen voters have been charged with illegally voting in Texas. In Travis County, roughly 10% — and potentially more — of nearly 100 flagged voters proved to be citizens, according to the BBC. Noncitizen voting in U.S. elections is extremely rare.
What to Watch
The ruling’s immediate effect on the midterms is uncertain. Because the NVRA still bars systematic purges within 90 days of a federal election, the most consequential near-term question is how aggressively the administration will use SAVE for individualized removals.
The ruling is also entangled with a broader administration push. A separate executive order calls for building state-by-state lists of adult U.S. citizens, a project that has passed its own deadline and is under legal challenge. On Friday, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the government to give 30 days’ notice before launching any portal to publish such lists.
Supporters of the decision were quick to welcome it. “It just makes it easier for states to get federal citizenship data to help them clean up voter rolls,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told NBC News. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, told the BBC that his office vets the data carefully: “There’s always guardrails in place, to make sure that we never denied the right to vote.”
Because the Supreme Court acted on an emergency stay rather than the merits, the legal fight is far from settled. The case now returns to the D.C. Circuit, where the plaintiffs intend to defend the district court’s finding that the expanded SAVE violated multiple laws — a battle that will determine whether the system survives beyond this election cycle.