Trump ‘trampled’ voter privacy by feeding info into Homeland Security system, judge says
Trump ‘trampled’ voter privacy by feeding info into Homeland Security system, judge says
Publish Date: 2026-06-22 19:15:00
Source Domain: www.dailyfly.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Trump administration illegally overhauled a U.S. Department of Homeland Security computer program in its hunt for noncitizen voters, a judge ruled Monday in a stinging decision that laid into federal officials for violating the privacy of millions of Americans.
The ruling struck at the core of President Donald Trump’s project to assert authority over state-run elections ahead of the November midterms. Under Trump’s control, the executive branch has spent the past year attempting to obtain state voter rolls to feed into the computer program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a President Joe Biden appointee for a district court based in Washington, D.C., condemned the Trump administration’s behavior over 75 pages and vacated a series of notices Homeland Security had published to implement the computer program.
“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. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
Sooknanan’s decision, if upheld, could hamper the administration’s ability to implement an executive order aimed at restricting voting by mail. The order requires Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state using information from SAVE, along with other federal databases.
Homeland Security has long operated SAVE, but prior to the second Trump administration it was primarily a tool to check whether individual immigrants were eligible for various government benefits. Last year, the agency reconfigured SAVE to allow for simultaneous searches of millions of names and allowed states to upload their voter rolls for the purpose of identifying possible noncitizens.
While some Republican-led states took Homeland Security up on the offer, most states have resisted demands to turn over their voter…
