On June 22, 2026, a federal judge in Washington D.C. blocked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using its citizenship database to remove voters from registration rolls.
In her 75-page decision, District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan said:
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. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.
The Court therefore sets aside and vacates the 2025 SAVE modified system and the related notices because they were contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and without observance of procedure required by law.
The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification. So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.
According to Democracy Docket:
Trump's order [March 25, 2026: "PRESERVING AND PROTECTING THE INTEGRITY OF AMERICAN ELECTIONS"] directed DHS to overhaul SAVE, taking a database of the immigration status of roughly 26.5 million people and turning it into a citizenship-checking system with access to the personal information of most Americans. The upgrades allowed for bulk searches using partial social security numbers and made the database freely available to state and local election officials.
The ruling orders DHS to set aside the modifications to the SAVE system along with the System of Records Notices (SORNs) issued following the updates, and return them to their status quo before the changes.
Source:
Saksa, Jim. (June 22, 2026). "In blow to Trump, federal judge blocks DHS from using citizenship database to purge voters". Democracy Docket. Retrieved 2026-06-24.
Note that on March 31, 2025 Trump issued a related executive order entitled "ENSURING CITIZENSHIP VERIFICATION AND INTEGRITY IN FEDERAL ELECTIONS".
Jun 25, 2026 Update
Yesterday, District Court Judge Denise Casper ruled that Trump's March 25, 2026 executive order oversteps his authority by attempting to overhaul states' administration of federal elections.