REPORT: The SAVE Database Blocked — When a Federal Judge Says No to Voter Profiling

The Social Security Act: A Fundamental Protection That Is Often Overlooked

The first violation identified by Judge Sooknanan concerns the Social Security Act, which expressly prohibits the disclosure of Social Security numbers for purposes other than those specifically authorized by law. By linking SAVE to SSA data and allowing bulk searches using partial Social Security numbers, DHS violated this fundamental prohibition. The judge concluded that federal agencies lacked the legal authority to make these changes, and that their decision to do so anyway was “arbitrary and capricious.”

The scope of this violation is considerable. Social Security numbers are among the most sensitive pieces of information held by the U.S. government. Their compromise—even partial, even for purposes presented as legitimate—opens the door to a cascade of abuses. The court expressly noted that Congress had put these protections in place decades ago precisely to prevent the creation of a centralized database of this kind. What the Trump administration did in 2025 is exactly what Congress had sought to prevent.

The Privacy Act of 1974 and the APA: Procedural Law Flouted

The second violation concerns the Privacy Act of 1974, a bipartisan law passed in the wake of Watergate specifically to prevent the federal government from maintaining centralized files on its citizens. This law requires, among other things, that any new “system of records” be publicly announced via a System of Records Notice (SORN), allowing citizens to comment and challenge it. The administration did publish SORNs, but according to the judge, it did so hastily, incompletely, and after it had already begun rolling out the system—a deliberate reversal of the democratic regulatory process.

The third violation—that of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—stems directly from the first two. The APA requires federal agencies to act within their statutory authority, in a non-arbitrary manner, and in accordance with required procedures. Judge Sooknanan concluded that the revised SAVE system was “unlawful, arbitrary, and capricious, exceeding statutory authority, and adopted without regard to the procedures required by law.” The court’s order invalidates and rescinds the entire modified SAVE system as well as the associated registration system notices, and orders DHS to revert to the status prior to these modifications.

Violating three laws at once—that’s not a good-faith error; it’s a calculated strategy of transgression. They rush to build it, roll it out before legal challenges can succeed, and hope the damage will be irreversible. I recognize this method: it’s the policy of fait accompli applied to civil rights.

The League of Women Voters Takes the Lead

The legal challenge that led to this historic ruling was brought by a group of plaintiffs comprising organizations advocating for voting rights and privacy, as well as five U.S. citizens whose names have not been made public. Leading this coalition is the League of Women Voters—one of the oldest and most respected nonpartisan voting rights organizations in the United States, founded in 1920. They were joined by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which specializes in the protection of personal data.

The plaintiffs were represented by attorneys from several organizations: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the Fair Elections Center, and Democracy Forward. Democracy Forward, through its president Skye Perryman, hailed the decision as “an important victory for the American people and our democracy,” adding that the data had been consolidated illegally in violation of privacy laws. The plaintiffs’ attorney, Nikhel Sus, called the ruling a “complete victory” and expressed satisfaction that the judge had reinforced their argument that the federal government has no implied authority to indiscriminately share sensitive information between agencies.

Real Victims, Names, Faces

The five anonymous citizens among the plaintiffs are not abstract symbols—they are real people whose voting rights were directly affected by the revamped SAVE system. Anthony Nel, a registered voter in Texas, is one of the most telling documented cases: his voter registration was canceled after Texas ran its voter rolls through SAVE. He was eventually reinstated after presenting his renewed passport to his county’s election officials, and was able to participate in the primary and runoff elections in Texas this spring. But how many other citizens in his situation lacked the tenacity or the means to defend themselves?

The judge noted that several of the plaintiffs had been wrongly flagged as non-citizens by SAVE, which led to the cancellation of their voter registrations. Subsequent investigations, including one conducted by ProPublica in February 2026, had already established that the system’s error rate in identifying non-citizen voters was at least 14%—an astronomical figure for a tool intended to protect electoral integrity. Of the approximately 21,000 voters flagged as potential non-citizens among the 60 million then verified, a significant proportion turned out to be legitimate U.S. citizens.

When I read that 14% of the people flagged as “non-citizens” by a government tool are in fact full-fledged U.S. citizens, I cannot remain indifferent. This is the face of voter suppression disguised as administrative technology. And that face is one we recognize throughout history—it does not always wear a mask.

Democracy advocates applaud the ruling; Republicans are up in arms

Judge Sooknanan’s decision immediately sparked a flood of political reactions. On the Democratic side, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the ruling “a major victory for free and fair elections,” stating that he had been denouncing for months what he called “one of Trump’s most sinister strategies to undermine our elections in November .” He noted that Democrats had blocked the SAVE America Act in the Senate—a bill distinct from the SAVE program, bearing a similar acronym and aimed at requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration—and that they would continue to do so.

On the Republican side and within the Trump administration, the reaction was disconcertingly predictable. The DHS general counsel, identified as Percival, stated on X: “It is astounding to see how fiercely the left resists our efforts to solve problems it claims do not exist. ” This statement, as rhetorically elegant as it is intellectually hollow, is the archetype of the politics of denial: if the problem doesn’t exist (non-citizens voting en masse), why build an illegal database of 67 million voters to solve it?

The Daily Wire strikes back, the right digs in

Conservative media were quick to frame the decision in the opposite light. The Daily Wire ran the headline “A Biden Judge Blocks a Common-Sense Election Security Measure,” choosing to highlight the judge’s political affiliation rather than the legal substance of her decision—a well-worn smear tactic in the arsenal of the American right. This strategy involves delegitimizing the judiciary by linking every unfavorable decision to the partisan identity of the judge who issues it, rather than to its legal merit.

It is noteworthy, however, that Judge Sooknanan’s decision is not based on political considerations but on a precise legal analysis of three federal laws. She does not say that verifying voters’ citizenship is a bad idea in and of itself—she says that the method used is illegal, that procedures were not followed, and that the concrete result was the unjust removal of legitimate voters. This is a distinction that conservative rhetoric takes great care to systematically erase.

I am struck—once again—by how easily a debate about fundamental rights can be turned into a debate about the political identities of judges. This isn’t politics; it’s manipulation. And the saddest part is that it works on a significant portion of the American electorate.

The electoral context that makes everything more urgent

The decision of June 22, 2026, comes amid an extremely tense electoral climate. The November 2026 midterm elections are looming, and with them, the battle for control of the U.S. Congress. Since 2025, the Trump administration has stepped up its efforts to change the electoral rules ahead of these elections—efforts that, according to a video documenting the legal proceedings, have been rejected by federal courts nine times since the beginning of 2026. The June 22 decision marks this ninth legal setback.

For voter registration, the practical consequences are immediate: the 25 states that used SAVE to verify their voter rolls can no longer do so under the revised version. DHS is required to revert to the system in place prior to the 2025 changes. Registrations that were canceled based on erroneous flags from the revised SAVE system now raise complex legal questions: Should these cancellations be reviewed? Should the affected voters be automatically re-registered? The ruling does not directly address these questions, but it lays the legal groundwork on which these battles will be fought in the coming months.

The Specter of Voter Purges in American History

American history is rife with examples of voter purges—massive initiatives that, under the guise of “cleaning up voter rolls,” have resulted in the exclusion of legitimate voters, often disproportionately affecting certain communities. In previous years, North Carolina saw more than 100,000 eligible voters removed during such a purge—U.S. citizens and long-time residents, some of whom had participated in every election for decades. One of the most poignant accounts posted on social media following the June 22 decision refers to the brother of a North Carolina voter who was removed during a previous purge even though he was fully eligible.

Judge Sooknanan’s ruling must be understood within this historical context. It does not occur in a political vacuum—it is part of a long and painful tradition of struggles for universal suffrage in the United States. The judge herself clearly identified this: “This case involves two fundamental rights that protect Americans from the abuse of government power: the right to privacy and the right to vote.”

There is something deeply troubling about the fact that, in 2026, in the world’s oldest modern democracy, a federal judge must remind the government that the right to vote is “sacred.” We thought these battles had been won. They never are won once and for all.

Two “SAVE” Initiatives for the Same Strategy

It is essential to distinguish between two initiatives bearing the same acronym, SAVE, a situation that creates confusion that some political actors do not seem eager to clear up. On the one hand, there is the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program—the DHS administrative tool that has existed since 1986 and is at the heart of the June 22 court ruling. On the other hand, there is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, also known as the SAVE Act, a legislative bill that has not yet been passed and that would require proof of citizenship to register on federal voter rolls.

This second SAVE Act, supported notably by Republican Representative Chip Roy of Texas and actively promoted by Donald Trump, would require voters to prove their U.S. citizenship with a federal photo ID—such as a passport or birth certificate—at the time of registration. Republican Senator Mike Lee is also among its champions. According to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, an organization dedicated to defending democratic institutions, approximately 21 million Americans would have difficulty obtaining the documents needed to vote if this bill were passed. The administration has defended this measure as a way to eliminate voter fraud involving non-citizens—fraud that, according to available data, is virtually nonexistent on a large scale.

A Two-Pronged Strategy: Legislative and Administrative

What the June 22 decision reveals is that the Trump administration has pursued a two-pronged strategy: on the one hand, pushing the legislative SAVE Act through Congress; on the other, using the administrative SAVE program to achieve the same results through executive action without waiting for legislative approval. Democrats in the Senate have blocked the legislative SAVE Act on several occasions. The administration responded by accelerating the rollout of the revamped administrative SAVE program—thereby bypassing the normal democratic process in favor of a presidential executive order.

Judge Sooknanan explicitly noted this logic in her decision: “The agencies rushed to comply with an executive order designed to reshape federal elections. ” In other words, the executive branch attempted to achieve by executive order what the legislative branch had denied it. It is this transgression of institutional balances—beyond even the violation of specific laws—that perhaps constitutes the most profound issue in this case.

What concerns me most about this case is not the intent—reducing non-citizen voting is, in principle, defensible. What concerns me is the method: bypassing Congress, violating privacy laws, deploying a flawed system known for its errors, and calling it “electoral integrity.” Integrity rarely requires procedural tricks to prevail.

A mass-screening tool with alarming capabilities

Before it was blocked, the revamped SAVE system operated as follows: state and local election officials could submit their voter registration lists to the system, which cross-referenced them against the DHS database (immigration status) and the SSA database (Social Security numbers, citizenship). The system allowed for mass searches using partial Social Security numbers, making it a far less accurate tool than its proponents led people to believe. Any approximate match between a registered voter and an entry in the immigration databases could trigger a flag labeling the voter as “potentially non-citizen.”

The fundamental problem—identified by both independent experts and internal DHS memos—is that immigration databases do not always reflect individuals’ current status. A person who held a visa twenty years ago and has been a naturalized U.S. citizen for fifteen years may still appear in immigration records. If their naturalization record is not properly cross-referenced—and in millions of cases, it is not—the system may falsely flag them. Naturalized citizens, often from immigrant communities, are thus systematically at heightened risk of false positives.

IRS Data, Biometric Data: The Scope Was Expanding

According to testimony gathered during the legal proceedings and investigative reports, the revamped SAVE system was not limited to data from DHS and the SSA. It also incorporated data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Labor, and even biometric data. What the court video documenting the case describes as a “data lake” is, in fact, one of the largest collections of sensitive personal information ever assembled by the federal government—and it was done without explicit legislative authorization from Congress.

Judge Sooknanan ordered not only that the revised SAVE system be invalidated, but also that the associated System of Records Notices (SORNs) be rescinded and that the program be restored to its pre-2025 state. In practical terms, this means that the centralized database built by the Trump administration must be dismantled—a massive administrative undertaking whose practical details have yet to be determined.

I am no expert in government data management, and I readily admit it. But when a court orders the “dismantling” of a database that aggregates information from the IRS, DHS, SSA, and the Department of Labor, one is justified in wondering whether this injunction is actually enforceable—or whether some of the data isn’t already, in one way or another, stored somewhere on a server from which it can no longer be deleted.

The Path to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals

Judge Sooknanan’s ruling is not final in the sense that the Trump administration can challenge it before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, considered one of the most important appellate courts in the country, particularly for cases involving the federal government. Government attorneys may request a stay of execution—that is, a temporary suspension of the order while the appeal is pending. If this request were granted, the revised SAVE system could theoretically continue to operate for several more months.

However, obtaining a stay of execution for a ruling so thoroughly reasoned—75 pages, three distinct legal violations, evidence of willful negligence—is far from a foregone conclusion. The Court of Appeals would have to assess the appeal’s chances of success on the merits, and the legal landscape is, to say the least, unfavorable to the administration. If the appeal were to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court’s current composition—with a conservative majority—could theoretically overturn the decision, but the legal rigor of the Sooknanan decision makes this scenario uncertain even in that context.

Nine Legal Defeats and a Strategy Running Out of Steam

The fact that the June 22 ruling marks the ninth judicial rejection of the Trump administration’s electoral initiatives since the beginning of 2026 is significant. It paints a picture of an administration whose methods—presidential executive orders bypassing Congress, administrative changes without adequate notice, and hasty rollouts of flawed systems—systematically clash with the institutional safeguards that previous generations took care to establish. Each legal defeat delays the administration’s electoral agenda, and as November 2026 approaches, the window of opportunity to circumvent these obstacles is narrowing.

On that same day, June 22, a Maryland court also denied a request by the Department of Justice for unredacted voter records—yet another illustration of the coordinated judicial resistance to the administration’s plan for federal electoral redistricting. This is no coincidence of timing: the legal cases initiated in 2025 are now reaching their conclusion, and the toll on the executive branch is heavy.

Nine judicial defeats in just six months. If a foreign democratic government—say, a European one—were to rack up this many setbacks in its own courts on electoral issues, we would be talking about an institutional crisis. Why do we hesitate to use that term when it comes to the United States?

Immediate Protections for Current Voters

For voters already registered in the 25 states that were using the revamped SAVE system, the June 22 ruling provides immediate protection: these states can no longer use this tool to flag their registered voters as potential non-citizens, and therefore can no longer remove them from the rolls on that basis. This does not mean that all removals already carried out are automatically reversed—each state has its own procedures for challenging and reinstating registration—but it does shut the door on new SAVE-based purges.

For people who have already been removed from the rolls due to SAVE false positives, the situation is more complex. Some of them, such as Anthony Nel in Texas, were able to have their registrations reinstated by presenting documentary evidence. Others may not have been aware of their removal until it was too late to participate in an election. Judge Sooknanan implicitly acknowledges this problem when she notes that some of the plaintiffs’ members did indeed have their registrations canceled—but her order does not provide for an automatic reinstatement mechanism for these past victims.

Voter Registration Before November 2026: A Window of Uncertainty

For new voters seeking to register before the November 2026 midterms, the ruling provides a degree of clarity: the revised SAVE Act cannot be used to block or flag their registrations. However, other verification mechanisms—those in place prior to the 2025 amendments—remain legally operational. Furthermore, the legislative SAVE Act, if passed by Congress before November—which seems unlikely given Democratic filibusters in the Senate—could create new barriers to registration, regardless of the June 22 court ruling.

The Brennan Center for Justice had estimated that if the SAVE Act were passed in its current form, some 21 million Americans would have difficulty producing the documents required to vote—such as a passport or birth certificate. The vast majority of these 21 million people are among the poorest, the oldest, those living in the most remote rural areas, and those from historically marginalized communities. This is no demographic coincidence.

When we read that 21 million Americans might have trouble voting if the law were passed, and we overlay this demographic map onto the standard electoral map, the conclusion is hard to avoid. This isn’t a conspiracy theory—it’s political arithmetic. And arithmetic doesn’t lie.

The League of Women Voters: A Century of Advocacy

The League of Women Voters, founded in 1920—the very year the 19th Amendment granted American women the right to vote—is the oldest and most respected nonpartisan organization advocating for suffrage in the United States. Its involvement in this case is significant: it embodies the continuity of a century of struggles to ensure that every eligible citizen can exercise their right to vote without artificial barriers. The organization’s national president, Marcia Johnson, stated after the ruling that the decision was “a significant triumph for voters” and that attempts to create a centralized federal voter registry threatened the fundamental right that lies at the heart of democracy.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a co-plaintiff in this lawsuit, adds another dimension: the protection of personal data in the digital age. EPIC has long documented the systemic risks associated with the centralization of government data, and this lawsuit against the revamped SAVE program is part of a broader effort to defend civil liberties in the era of mass digital surveillance. The convergence between the right to vote and the right to privacy—which Judge Sooknanan herself highlighted in her decision—is precisely the battleground that these organizations had identified as central.

Democracy Forward, CREW, and Fair Elections Center: The New Guard

Alongside these long-standing organizations, newer players have played a crucial role in building the legal case. Democracy Forward, founded in 2017, specializes in challenging abuses of executive power through the courts. CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) has recognized expertise in exposing procedural violations by federal agencies. The Fair Elections Center focuses specifically on barriers to voter registration and voting. Together, these organizations built a legal case strong enough to convince the judge of the three distinct legal violations—an effort that requires as much discipline as it does resources.

What these organizations collectively represent is American civil society in action—that network of nongovernmental organizations which, in the United States more than in any other Western democracy, serves as an institutional counterweight to abuses of power. Europe has stronger state mechanisms for these functions; America, on the other hand, relies on this private civic infrastructure. The quality of this court ruling owes much to them.

I often think about what these organizations represent—teams of lawyers, researchers, and analysts who often work with limited resources against the federal government apparatus. This asymmetrical struggle, when it leads to a victory like the one on June 22, is proof that American democracy is not yet dead. Battered, certainly. But not dead.

Voter Fraud by Non-Citizens: Myth or Reality?

It is impossible to honestly analyze this issue without addressing the central question that the Trump administration cites to justify its entire agenda: Are non-citizens voting illegally on a large scale in the United States? The answer, based on the available data, is unequivocal: no. All serious studies on the subject—conducted by academic researchers, nonpartisan organizations such as the Brennan Center, or even government commissions—reach the same conclusion: election fraud in the United States is extremely rare, and documented cases of non-citizens voting are marginal compared to the total number of votes cast.

A presidential commission on election integrity, created by Trump himself after his 2016 election, was disbanded in 2018 after failing to produce significant evidence of large-scale fraud. Data from the DHS itself, prior to the 2025 changes, did not support the claim of widespread non-citizen voting. Yet the administration used this unsubstantiated argument to justify the creation of a centralized database covering 67 million voters. Judge Sooknanan did not need to rule on this political issue—she simply found that the method was illegal, regardless of the merits of the stated objective.

The Real Threat to Democracy: Voter Deterrence

Beyond direct voter purges—which have already been documented and are cause for concern—the revamped SAVE system created a second, perhaps more insidious risk: voter deterrence. Voters who learn that their personal data has been compiled into a federal database, cross-referenced with immigration and Social Security records, and potentially scrutinized by state authorities may choose not to register or vote for fear of drawing attention to themselves. This phenomenon—which legal scholars call the “chilling effect”—disproportionately affects communities with legal immigrant backgrounds, including fully eligible naturalized citizens.

Judge Sooknanan explicitly mentioned this in her ruling: the use of unreliable data could “chill” the legitimate exercise of the right to voter registration. This risk of deterrence is structurally anti-democratic, as it reduces participation without leaving a formal trace—no one officially prevented these citizens from voting; they simply self-censored themselves in the face of an intimidating atmosphere.

The most effective voter suppression is the kind that leaves no evidence—the kind that instills fear without ever physically removing a voter from the line. Building a massive government database on voters, even illegally, produces exactly this effect. This isn’t politics—it’s anti-democratic social engineering.

A Mirror for Western Democracies

What has been happening in the United States since 2025 regarding voting rights is of great interest to European democracies and liberal democracies in general. The pattern is now well known: an administration that exploits its control of the executive branch to change electoral rules without going through the legislature; a judiciary that resists but whose legitimacy is systematically attacked; and a civil society that serves as the last institutional bulwark. This pattern is not exclusively American—we see variations of it in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey. The difference is that the United States still has a robust and independent judiciary.

From this perspective, Judge Sooknanan’s ruling is a confirmation of American institutional resilience. It does not solve the structural problem—an administration determined to circumvent the rules will find other avenues—but it demonstrates that safeguards exist and that they work, at least partially. For European observers accustomed to relying on independent data protection agencies and constitutions that are more explicit on these issues, the American legal battle may seem exhausting and uncertain. It is. But it produces results.

Trump: A Necessary Evil or a Systemic Threat?

The case of the overhauled SAVE system illustrates once again the fundamental tension that Donald Trump represents for the West. When it comes to standing firm against geopolitical adversaries—China, Russia, Iran—Trump exerts an energy that his European allies often struggle to match. When it comes to domestic democratic institutions—separation of powers, judicial independence, protection of civil rights—he acts as a corrosive force that his own courts have had to rein in nine times in six months. The question of whether this tension is manageable—whether the “necessary evil” might become a systemic evil—remains open. What June 22, 2026, showed is that American institutions are still holding firm. But they will not hold out indefinitely unless citizens, elected officials, and civic organizations continue to fight.

I’m not naive: a court ruling, even an excellent one, cannot save a democracy on its own. What saves a democracy is the sum of thousands of actions—lawyers filing appeals, judges standing firm, civic organizations documenting events, and voters registering despite the obstacles. June 22, 2026, is a victory in this war of attrition. Not the last battle, not the final victory. Just one step.

When a Court Says What Politicians Refuse to Hear

Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan’s June 22, 2026, ruling is remarkable in several respects. First, for its clarity: in 75 pages, she methodically demonstrates that the revised SAVE system violates three distinct federal laws, that it has caused documented harm to actual voters, and that maintaining it would pose a threat to the right to vote. Second, for its scope: by ordering the dismantling of the system and a return to the previous state, she does not settle for a mere stay—she mandates a structural correction. Finally, in terms of its political message—even if the judge herself would deny it—this decision tells the Trump administration that the ends do not justify the means, and that the right to vote is not a variable to be adjusted in a partisan electoral calculation.

For the approximately 67 million voters whose data was illegally processed through this system, the decision brings a mixture of relief and bitterness. Relief that the machine has been shut down. Bitterness that the damage—unjust de-registrations, exposed data, eroded trust in the electoral system—has already been done, and in some cases will be difficult to repair before November 2026. Democracy is winning legal battles. It is also losing voters along the way.

The Choices the Future Demands

The coming months leading up to the November 2026 midterms will be decisive. The Trump administration can appeal, seek new legal avenues, or attempt to obtain from Congress the legislative authorization that the courts have refused to grant it by executive order. The SAVE Act remains on the table. Other verification mechanisms—less centralized and with a stronger legal framework—could be developed. And in the meantime, every eligible American citizen who fails to register to vote—whether out of discouragement, fear, or ignorance of their rights—is a net loss for American democracy.

What this case ultimately reveals is that democracy is a fragile system that requires constant vigilance—on the part of the judiciary, civil society, the media, and the citizens themselves. Judge Sooknanan has done her part. The League of Women Voters has done hers. The five anonymous plaintiffs who dared to challenge the federal government have done theirs. The question is whether, collectively, American society will do its part—at the polls in November 2026, despite all the obstacles.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist