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

Introduction: On June 22, 2026, a Judge Hits the Emergency Brake

A 75-Page Ruling That Lands Like a Thunderclap

On June 22, 2026, Federal Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, a Biden appointee sitting in Washington, D.C., issued a 75-page ruling that immediately suspended the Trump administration's revamped SAVE program. Her verdict is unambiguous: the federal government deliberately trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. Those words do not belong to a left-wing editorial writer — they belong to a United States federal court, engraved in a legally binding decision.

The program in question, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), had existed since 1986. Its original role was modest and legitimate: allowing federal, state, and local agencies to verify the immigration status of individuals applying for government benefits, to ensure those benefits were not paid out to non-citizens. But under pressure from the Trump administration, through an executive order signed on March 25, 2025, the program underwent a radical transformation — one that, according to the court, violates at least three major federal laws.

From Immigration Tool to Electoral Data Monster

What was once a database containing the immigration status of roughly 26.5 million people was transformed into a citizenship-verification system enabling bulk searches via partial Social Security numbers, expanded to include Social Security Administration data, and made freely available to state and local election officials. In plain terms: the Trump administration built, without explicit legislative authorization from Congress, a centralized federal database containing private information on nearly all Americans — for electoral purposes.

Since April 2025, at least 25 states have used this revamped system to review their voter rolls. The result: more than 67 million voter registrations were checked through SAVE. Thousands of voters were flagged as potentially non-citizens — but subsequent investigations showed that many of them were, in fact, eligible American citizens. One of them, Anthony Nel, a registered voter in Texas, had his registration canceled before being reinstated after presenting his renewed passport to county election officials.

The March 2025 Executive Order: Where It All Began

A Presidential Order With a Vastly Expanded Scope

Everything traces back to the executive order of March 25, 2025, signed by President Donald Trump. That document ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to completely overhaul the SAVE system to allow state and local officials to verify the citizenship or immigration status of registered voters. The stated objective: ensure that only American citizens appear on voter rolls. The real objective, according to the plaintiff organizations and ultimately the court, was something else entirely: build a federal mechanism for mass purging of voter rolls.

A second executive order, dated March 31, went even further, directing DHS to use SAVE and other federal data to compile a list of American citizen-voters, state by state. That second order immediately ran into judicial obstacles, with several federal judges already suspending certain of its provisions. On June 22, 2026, the core of the apparatus — the revamped SAVE system itself — was struck down in its entirety by Judge Sooknanan.

DHS and the SSA: Partners in an Illegal Data Merger

To implement the executive order, DHS and the Social Security Administration (SSA) merged their databases without following the legally required procedures. The Privacy Act of 1974 mandates that any substantial modification to a public records system be subject to an official notice. Those notices were either not published within the required time frames, or were published in a superficial manner. Judge Sooknanan concluded that the federal agencies "rushed to comply with an executive order designed to reshape federal elections," carelessly incorporating citizenship data that they themselves acknowledged was unreliable.

Internal DHS memorandums that emerged during the proceedings explicitly warned that naturalized citizens would be particularly exposed to classification errors — those individuals being more likely to appear in immigration databases without their subsequent citizenship being correctly reflected. The administration knew about the risks. It chose to proceed anyway. The judge was careful to note that fact.

Three Laws Violated, According to the Court

The Social Security Act: A Fundamental Protection Ignored

The first violation identified by Judge Sooknanan concerns the Social Security Act, which expressly prohibits disclosing Social Security numbers for purposes other than those specifically authorized by law. By connecting SAVE to SSA data and enabling bulk searches via partial Social Security numbers, DHS crossed that fundamental prohibition. The judge concluded that the federal agencies lacked the legal authority to make those changes, and that their decision to do so anyway was "arbitrary and capricious."

The scope of that violation is considerable. Social Security numbers are among the most sensitive information the U.S. government holds. Their compromise — even partial, even for ostensibly legitimate purposes — opens doors to cascading abuses. The court expressly noted that Congress had put those protections in place decades ago precisely to prevent the creation of this type of centralized database. What the Trump administration did in 2025 is exactly what Congress had sought to prevent.

The Privacy Act of 1974 and the APA: Procedural Rights Trampled

The second violation concerns the Privacy Act of 1974, a bipartisan law passed in the aftermath of Watergate specifically to prevent the federal government from building centralized files on its citizens. That law requires that any new "system of records" be publicly announced through a System of Records Notice (SORN), allowing citizens to comment and challenge. The administration did publish SORNs, but according to the judge, it did so hastily, incompletely, and after already beginning to deploy the system — a deliberate inversion of the democratic regulatory process.

The third violation — that of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) — flows directly from the first two. The APA requires that federal agencies act within their legal authority, in a non-arbitrary manner, and in compliance with required procedures. Judge Sooknanan concluded that the revamped SAVE system was "contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and adopted without following required procedures." The court's order invalidates and nullifies the entire modified SAVE system along with the associated system of records notices, and directs DHS to revert to the state that existed before those changes.

The Plaintiffs: Who Dared to Sue the Federal Government?

The League of Women Voters Leading the Charge

The lawsuit that produced this landmark ruling was brought by a group of plaintiffs that included voting rights and privacy advocacy organizations, along with five American citizens whose names were not made public. Leading the coalition was the League of Women Voters — one of the oldest and most respected nonpartisan suffrage organizations in the United States, founded in 1920. They were joined by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which specializes in personal data protection.

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

Real Victims, Real Names, Real 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 documented cases: his voter registration was canceled after Texas ran its voter rolls through SAVE. He was ultimately reinstated after presenting his renewed passport to county election officials, and was able to participate in the Texas primary elections and runoffs that spring. But how many other citizens in his situation lacked the tenacity or the means to fight back?

The judge noted that several members of the plaintiff organizations had been wrongly labeled as non-citizens by SAVE, leading 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 for identifying non-citizen voters was at least 14 percent — an astronomical figure for a tool supposedly designed to protect electoral integrity. Of the roughly 21,000 voters flagged as potentially non-citizens out of 60 million checked, a significant proportion turned out to be fully legitimate American citizens.

Political Reactions: A Predictable Fracture

Democracy Defenders Celebrate, Republicans Rage

Judge Sooknanan's ruling immediately triggered an avalanche of political reactions. On the Democratic side, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the judgment a "great victory for free and fair elections," declaring he had been calling out for months what he described as "one of Trump's most sinister strategies to torpedo our elections in November." He recalled that Democrats had blocked the SAVE America Act in the Senate — a legislative bill separate from the SAVE program, bearing a similar acronym and aimed at requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote — and that they would continue to do so.

On the Republican and Trump administration side, the reaction was of a disarming predictability. The DHS general counsel, identified as Percival, wrote on X: "It is stunning how hard the left fights against our efforts to solve problems it claims don't exist." That formulation — rhetorically elegant, intellectually hollow — is the archetype of denial politics: 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 Counterattacks, the Right Digs In

Conservative media were quick to frame the ruling in the opposite direction. The Daily Wire headlined: "Biden Judge Blocks Common Sense Election Security Measure," choosing to highlight the judge's political affiliation rather than the legal substance of her ruling — a discrediting tactic now well-honed in the American right's arsenal. This strategy consists of delegitimizing the judiciary by linking every unfavorable decision to the partisan identity of the judge who renders it, rather than to its legal merit.

It is nonetheless notable that Judge Sooknanan's ruling does not rest on political considerations but on a precise legal analysis of three federal laws. She does not say that verifying voters' citizenship is inherently a bad idea — she says that the method used is illegal, that required procedures were not followed, and that the concrete result was the unjust suppression of legitimate voters. It is a distinction that conservative rhetoric takes care to systematically erase.

The 2026 Midterms: An Election Under Judicial Supervision

An Electoral Context of Extreme Tension

The June 22, 2026 ruling comes against an electoral backdrop of extreme tension. The November 2026 midterm elections are looming, and with them, the question of control of the United States Congress. The Trump administration has multiplied since 2025 its initiatives to change the rules of the electoral game ahead of those elections — initiatives that, according to court monitoring, have been rejected by federal courts nine times since the start of 2026. The June 22 ruling constitutes that ninth judicial defeat.

For voter registration, the concrete consequences are immediate: the 25 states that were using SAVE to verify their voter rolls can no longer do so in its revamped version. DHS is required to revert to the system that existed before the 2025 changes. Registrations that were canceled on the basis of erroneous flags from the revamped SAVE system now raise complex legal questions: must those cancellations be reviewed? Should the affected voters be automatically reinstated? The ruling does not directly resolve those questions, but it creates the legal terrain on which those battles will be fought in the coming months.

The Specter of Voter Purges in American History

American history offers no shortage of examples of voter purges — mass initiatives that, under the guise of "cleaning up voter rolls," resulted in the exclusion of legitimate voters, often disproportionately in certain communities. North Carolina had seen more than 100,000 valid voters removed in such a purge — American citizens, long-time residents, some of whom had participated in every election for decades. One of the most striking testimonies published on social media following the June 22 ruling concerns the brother of a North Carolina voter, removed in a prior purge while fully eligible.

It is in that historical context that Judge Sooknanan's ruling must be read. It does not fall into a political vacuum — it inscribes itself within a long and painful tradition of struggles for universal suffrage in the United States. The judge herself made this clear: "This case involves two fundamental rights that protect Americans from the abuse of government power: the right to privacy and the right to vote."

The Legislative SAVE Act: Confusion of Acronyms in Service of an Agenda

Two "SAVEs" for One Strategy

It is essential to distinguish between two initiatives sharing the same SAVE acronym — a confusion that certain political actors seem in no hurry to dispel. On one side, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program — the DHS administrative tool that has existed since 1986 and that is at the heart of the June 22 judicial ruling. On the other, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, also known by the acronym SAVE Act, an as-yet-unadopted legislative bill that would require proof of citizenship to register on federal voter rolls.

This second SAVE Act, championed notably by Republican Representative Chip Roy of Texas and actively pushed by Donald Trump, would require voters to prove their American citizenship with a federal photo ID — 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, approximately 21 million Americans would have difficulty obtaining the necessary documents to vote if the bill were passed. The administration defended it as a means of eliminating electoral fraud by non-citizens — fraud that, according to the available data, is virtually nonexistent at scale.

A Two-Track Strategy: Legislative and Administrative

What the June 22 ruling reveals is that the Trump administration pursued a two-track strategy: on one side, pushing the legislative SAVE Act through Congress; on the other, using the administrative SAVE program to achieve, by executive order, the same results without waiting for legislative approval. Senate Democrats blocked the legislative SAVE Act on multiple occasions. The administration responded by accelerating the deployment of the revamped administrative SAVE — bypassing the normal democratic process in favor of a presidential decree.

Judge Sooknanan explicitly noted this logic in her ruling: "The agencies rushed to comply with an executive order designed to reshape federal elections." In other words, the executive branch attempted to do by decree what the legislative branch had refused to grant it. It is that transgression of institutional checks and balances — beyond even the violation of specific laws — that perhaps constitutes the deepest issue in this case.

How the Revamped SAVE System Actually Worked

A Bulk-Search Tool With Troubling Capabilities

Before it was blocked, the revamped SAVE system worked as follows: state and local election officials could submit their voter rolls to the system, which cross-referenced them against DHS data (immigration status) and SSA data (Social Security numbers, citizenship). The system enabled bulk searches via partial Social Security numbers, making it far less precise than its proponents let on. Any approximate match between a registered voter and an entry in the immigration databases could trigger a flag as a "potential non-citizen."

The fundamental problem — identified both by independent experts and by DHS internal memorandums — is that immigration databases do not always reflect individuals' current situations. A person who held a visa twenty years ago and has been a naturalized American 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 can flag them erroneously. Naturalized citizens, often from immigrant communities, are thus systematically overexposed to the risk of false positives.

IRS Data, Biometric Data: An Ever-Expanding Perimeter

According to testimony gathered during the legal proceedings and investigative reporting, the revamped SAVE system was not limited to DHS and SSA data. It also incorporated data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Labor, and even biometric data. What court documentation of the case describes as a "data lake" constitutes, in practice, one of the largest concentrations of sensitive personal information ever assembled by the federal government — and this without explicit legislative authorization from Congress.

Judge Sooknanan ordered that not only be the revamped SAVE system invalidated, but also that the associated System of Records Notices (SORNs) be annulled and that the program be returned to its pre-2025 state. This means, concretely, that the centralized database built by the Trump administration must be dismantled — an administrative undertaking of enormous scope whose practical modalities remain to be defined.

The Administration Can Appeal: What Are the Odds?

The Road 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 lawyers can request a stay of execution — a temporary suspension of the order while the appeal is pending. If that request were granted, the revamped SAVE system could theoretically continue operating for several additional months.

However, obtaining a stay on a ruling this solidly argued — 75 pages, three distinct legal violations, evidence of deliberate negligence — is far from guaranteed. The appeals court would need to assess the likelihood of success on the merits, and the legal picture is far from favorable to the administration. Were the appeal to reach the Supreme Court of the United States, that court's current configuration — with a conservative majority — could theoretically overturn the ruling, but the legal rigor of the Sooknanan decision makes that scenario uncertain even in that context.

Nine Judicial Defeats and a Strategy Running Dry

The fact that the June 22 ruling is the ninth judicial rejection of the Trump administration's electoral initiatives since the beginning of 2026 is not insignificant. It paints the picture of an administration whose methods — presidential decrees bypassing Congress, administrative changes without adequate notification, rushed deployments of defective systems — systematically collide with the institutional safeguards that previous generations took care to erect. Each judicial defeat delays the administration's electoral agenda, and as November 2026 approaches, the window for circumventing those obstacles is shrinking.

On that same June 22, a Maryland court also refused a Department of Justice request to obtain unredacted voter files — yet another illustration of coordinated judicial resistance to the administration's federal electoral reconfiguration project. This is no coincidence of timing: cases initiated in 2025 are now reaching their resolution, and the tally is heavy for the executive branch.

What This Changes for Registered Voters — and Those Not Yet Enrolled

Immediate Protections for Current Voters

For voters already registered in the 25 states that were using the revamped SAVE, the June 22 ruling provides immediate protection: those states can no longer use that tool to flag their registered voters as potential non-citizens, and therefore can no longer proceed with deregistrations on that basis. This does not mean that all deregistrations already carried out are automatically reversed — each state has its own challenge and reinstatement procedures — but it cuts off the flow of new SAVE-based purges.

For individuals already deregistered on the basis of SAVE false positives, the situation is more complex. Some of them, like Anthony Nel in Texas, were able to be reinstated by presenting documentary evidence. Others may not have known about their deregistration until it was too late to participate in an election. Judge Sooknanan implicitly acknowledges this problem when she notes that members of the plaintiff organizations did in fact have their registrations canceled — but her order provides no automatic reinstatement mechanism for those past victims.

Voter Registration Before November 2026: A Window of Uncertainty

For new voters seeking to register before the November 2026 midterms, the ruling creates a degree of relative clarity: the revamped SAVE cannot be used to block or flag their registrations. But other verification mechanisms — those existing before the 2025 modifications — remain legally operational. Moreover, the legislative SAVE Act, were it to be adopted by Congress before November — which seems unlikely given Democratic blockades in the Senate — could create new registration obstacles independent of the June 22 judicial ruling.

The Brennan Center for Justice had estimated that if the legislative SAVE Act were adopted in its current form, some 21 million Americans would have difficulty producing the necessary documents to vote — passport or birth certificate. Those 21 million people are overwhelmingly among the poorest, the oldest, those living in the most remote rural areas, and those from historically marginalized communities. That is not a demographic coincidence.

Voting Rights Organizations: On the Front Line

The League of Women Voters: A Century of Fighting

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 suffrage organization in the United States. Its involvement in this lawsuit is not incidental: it embodies the continuity of a century of struggles to ensure that every eligible citizen can exercise their right to vote without artificial obstacles. The organization's national president, Marcia Johnson, said after the ruling that the decision was "a significant triumph for voters" and that attempts to create a centralized federal voter database threatened the fundamental right that lies at the heart of democracy.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), co-plaintiff in this case, brings a complementary dimension: that of personal data protection in the digital age. EPIC has long documented the systemic risks linked to the centralization of government data, and this lawsuit against the revamped SAVE fits within a broader vision of defending civil liberties in the age of mass digital surveillance. The convergence between the right to vote and the right to privacy — which Judge Sooknanan herself highlighted in her ruling — is precisely the battleground these organizations had identified as central.

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

Alongside these historic organizations, more recent actors played a crucial role in building the legal case. Democracy Forward, founded in 2017, has specialized in judicially challenging abuses of executive power. 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 obstacles to voter registration and voting. Together, these organizations built a legal record solid enough to convince the judge on three distinct legal violations — an undertaking requiring as much discipline as it does resources.

What these organizations represent collectively is American civil society in action — that fabric of non-governmental organizations that, in the United States more than in any other Western democracy, plays the role of institutional counterweight against abuses of power. Europe has stronger state mechanisms for these functions; America relies on this private civic infrastructure. The quality of this judicial ruling owes them a great deal.

The Core Question: Do Non-Citizens Actually Vote?

Non-Citizen Electoral Fraud: Myth or Reality?

It is impossible to analyze this case honestly without addressing the central question the Trump administration invokes to justify its entire apparatus: do non-citizens vote illegally on a large scale in the United States? The answer, based on the available data, is unequivocal: no. Every serious study on the subject — conducted by academic researchers, nonpartisan organizations like the Brennan Center, or even government commissions — converges on the same finding: electoral fraud in the United States is extremely rare, and documented cases of non-citizens voting are marginal relative to the total number of ballots cast.

A presidential advisory commission on electoral integrity, created by Trump himself after his 2016 election, was dissolved in 2018 after being unable to produce significant evidence of large-scale fraud. DHS data itself, before the 2025 modifications, did not support the thesis of massive non-citizen voting. Yet the administration used that unsubstantiated argument to justify building a centralized database covering 67 million voters. Judge Sooknanan did not need to settle that political question — she simply found that the method was illegal, regardless of the merit of the stated objective.

The Real Democratic Risk: Voter Deterrence

Beyond the direct purging of voters — already documented and concerning — the revamped SAVE system created a second risk, perhaps more insidious: voter deterrence. Voters who learn that their personal data has been compiled into a federal database, cross-referenced with immigration and Social Security files, and potentially examined by state authorities may choose not to register or not to vote out of fear of drawing attention to themselves. This phenomenon — what legal scholars call the "chilling effect" — disproportionately affects communities from legal immigration backgrounds, including naturalized citizens who are fully eligible.

Judge Sooknanan explicitly mentioned this in her ruling: the use of unreliable data could "chill" the legitimate exercise of the right to register to vote. That deterrence risk is structurally anti-democratic, because it reduces participation without leaving any formal trace — no one officially prevented those citizens from voting, they simply self-censored in the face of an intimidating atmosphere.

Perspectives: Europe Watches, Democracy Takes Note

A Mirror for Western Democracies

What has been happening in the United States since 2025 around voting rights is not without relevance for European and liberal democracies more broadly. The sequence is now well known: an administration exploiting executive control to modify electoral rules without going through the legislature, a judiciary that resists but is systematically attacked in its legitimacy, and a civil society playing the role of last institutional bulwark. This pattern is not exclusively American — variants of it can be seen in Hungary, Poland, Turkey. The difference is that the United States still has a robust and independent judiciary.

Judge Sooknanan's ruling is, from that perspective, a confirmation of American institutional resilience. It does not resolve the structural problem — a determined administration will find other vectors — but it demonstrates that the safeguards exist and that they work, at least partially. For European observers accustomed to relying on independent data protection agencies and more explicit constitutional provisions on these matters, the American judicial battle may seem exhausting and uncertain. It is. But it produces results.

Trump: Necessary Evil or Systemic Threat?

The revamped SAVE system affair illustrates once again the fundamental tension that Donald Trump represents for the West. On firmness against geopolitical adversaries — China, Russia, Iran — Trump deploys an energy that his European allies often struggle to match. On domestic democratic institutions — separation of powers, judicial independence, protection of civil rights — he constitutes an erosive force that his own courts must restrain nine times in six months. Whether this tension is manageable — whether the "necessary evil" does not become a systemic one — remains an open question. What June 22, 2026 showed is that American institutions are still holding. But they will not hold indefinitely without citizens, elected officials, and civic organizations continuing to fight.

Conclusion: The Right to Vote Is Not a Variable to Be Adjusted

When a Court Says What Politicians Refuse to Hear

Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan's June 22, 2026 ruling is remarkable on several counts. First, for its clarity: in 75 pages, it methodically demonstrates that the revamped SAVE system violates three distinct federal laws, that it caused documented harm to real voters, and that its continuation would pose a danger to the right to vote. Next, for its reach: by ordering the dismantling of the system and a return to its prior state, it does not merely grant a stay — it imposes a structural correction. Finally, for its political message, even if its author would deny it: this ruling 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 roughly 67 million voters whose data was illegally run through that system, the ruling arrives with a mixture of relief and bitterness. Relief that the machine has been stopped. Bitterness that the damage — unjust deregistrations, exposed data, eroded trust in the electoral system — is already there, in some cases difficult to repair before November 2026. Democracy wins judicial battles. It also loses voters along the way.

What the Future Demands We Choose

The months ahead until the November 2026 midterms will be decisive. The Trump administration can appeal, seek new legal pathways, or attempt to obtain from Congress the legislative authorization that the courts refused to grant it by executive order. The legislative SAVE Act remains on the table. Other verification mechanisms, less centralized and more carefully legally framed, could be developed. And in the meantime, every eligible American citizen who does not register to vote 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 requiring constant vigilance — from the judiciary, from civil society, from the media, and from citizens themselves. Judge Sooknanan has done her part. The League of Women Voters has done theirs. The five anonymous plaintiffs who dared to challenge the federal government have done theirs. The question is whether, collectively, American society will do its own — at the polls, in November 2026, despite all the obstacles.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Sources

Primary Sources

Associated Press — Judge blocks use of federal database to check citizenship, saying it could wrongly purge voters — June 22, 2026

Democracy Docket — In blow to Trump, federal judge blocks DHS from using citizenship database to purge voters — June 22, 2026

NPR — A federal judge finds a Trump data system to verify voters is unlawful — June 22, 2026

Secondary Sources

Politico — Judge blocks Trump admin's database of Americans' Social Security numbers and citizenship status — June 22, 2026

NBC News — Judge blocks Trump administration's revamped SAVE program use for voter rolls — June 22, 2026

The New York Times — Federal Citizenship Data Tool Cannot Be Used to Screen Voters — June 22, 2026

El País — Trump insists on pushing through his controversial voting overhaul — June 18, 2026

U.S. News & World Report / Reuters — Judge blocks Trump's use of revamped immigration database for voter checks — June 22, 2026