A Biden-appointed federal judge in Washington vacated the Justice Department’s nationwide drive to collect state voter rolls and flag noncitizens, halting the program even in states that had already agreed to take part.
The Hill reported that U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan issued a 78-page ruling on Friday striking down the department’s entire voter list maintenance policy and invalidating it across the country.
The decision blocks the Trump administration from continuing the effort, including in the at least 18 states that had voluntarily cooperated. Sooknanan found the Justice Department exceeded its legal authority and violated federal privacy laws by seeking sensitive voter data and sharing it with other agencies.
The program grew out of an executive order from President Trump last year. That order directed federal officials to work with states to identify potential election law violations ahead of the November midterms. Common Cause and four voters sued in April, casting the effort as an attempt to build a sprawling new voter surveillance and purging apparatus and to seize control of registration procedures long handled by the states.
Under the now-vacated policy, the Justice Department requested unredacted voter registration lists, names, addresses, and partial Social Security numbers. It shared those records with the Department of Homeland Security for checks against the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, known as SAVE, a federal tool used to confirm immigration and citizenship status. Participating states agreed to remove voters flagged as ineligible within 45 days of notice.
Sooknanan ruled the department failed to adequately weigh the danger of wrongly removing eligible voters, even though it knew federal citizenship records contain errors. She pointed to a 2006 Social Security Administration audit that found roughly 3.3 million U.S. citizens had been misidentified as noncitizens.
In the opinion, the judge wrote:
"DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of American people,"
She added:
"The Court vacates a policy that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more,"
Multiple states had already won separate challenges to the Justice Department’s rule in their own jurisdictions before the nationwide vacatur. The ruling leaves the policy dead even where governors and secretaries of state had chosen to cooperate.
Election integrity work has repeatedly collided with lower-court blocks, a pattern familiar to anyone watching how the administration has handled other high-stakes legal fights, including when Trump directed the DOJ on a major firearms ruling.
Plaintiffs framed the collection of basic registration data as a threat to privacy and voting rights. The court accepted that the policy had already taken citizens off the rolls and could hit more. What the ruling does not erase is the core problem the executive order targeted: noncitizens appearing on voter lists and the practical need for states to verify eligibility with reliable federal records.
The district court order did not end the fight. Just The News reported that the Supreme Court paused a lower-court injunction and allowed states to use the expanded SAVE database for bulk citizenship verification of voter rolls. The unsigned opinion noted that federal law already requires the government to answer state requests to verify citizenship and that Sooknanan’s order “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.” Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented.
That emergency relief lets states resume checking registered voters against federal records, including Social Security data, on a voluntary basis. It marks a clear win for the administration’s broader push to give election officials better tools against ineligible registrations.
Separate DOJ decisions in other arenas have drawn similar scrutiny over timing and priorities, from the choice not to reopen a probe of Jerome Powell to shifting personnel on sensitive investigations.
Fox News reported that the Supreme Court’s order temporarily permits the Trump administration to proceed with the revamped SAVE system while the appeal continues, staying Sooknanan’s block. States remain free to opt in. Existing law still limits systematic purges within 90 days of an election, which constrains how much can change before the midterms.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, writing that in her view the harm from burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs what she called the nonexistent harm to the government when it is stopped from an action it likely lacks authority to take. Election law scholar Michael Morley of Florida State University described the high court’s step in practical terms: it allows the federal government to share information it already holds about apparent citizenship status so officials can register eligible voters and keep noncitizens off the rolls.
At least 18 states had already chosen to work with the Justice Department. They were prepared to act on SAVE matches within the 45-day window. Sooknanan’s order swept those agreements aside along with the rest of the policy. A single district judge in Washington, appointed by President Biden, nullified a voluntary federal-state partnership designed to spot noncitizens on the rolls.
That outcome sits uneasily beside the administration’s other efforts to restore basic accountability inside federal agencies, including the White House move to form a panel weighing action against Fed Governor Lisa Cook over mortgage claims.
Common Cause and the four unnamed voter plaintiffs cast the data requests as a power grab. The Justice Department cast them as routine list maintenance backed by an executive order and existing verification systems. The district court sided with the plaintiffs on authority and privacy grounds and elevated the 2006 audit’s error rate as a reason to stop the current program cold.
Personnel shifts inside related probes have been equally abrupt, as when Joe diGenova walked away from a DOJ investigation of prior-era officials. The voter-roll fight follows the same pattern: aggressive lower-court intervention, followed by higher-court correction.
The practical stakes remain straightforward. States that want to confirm citizenship before ballots are cast now have a clearer path at the Supreme Court level, even after a district judge tried to shut the door. The SAVE system is voluntary. Mass removals close to an election stay restricted by statute. What changed is that a nationwide ban on the Justice Department’s collection and sharing policy no longer stands unchallenged.
Clean voter rolls protect lawful voters and lawful residents alike. When a district court blocks even willing states from using federal citizenship data, the Supreme Court’s decision to restore that tool is the correction the system needed.