A federal judge on Monday struck down the Trump administration’s revamped citizenship-verification database — the same system Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales and Attorney General Todd Rokita sued to create and then settled to lock in.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, ruling in Washington, D.C., set aside the 2025 overhaul of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, or SAVE, finding that the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act when they rebuilt the system to verify voters’ citizenship.
“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 in a 75-page opinion. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
POLITICO, which first alerted subscribers to the decision, characterized the ruling as halting “a pillar of Trump’s efforts to overhaul American elections,” several pieces of which courts around the country have already enjoined.
The case was brought by the League of Women Voters, its state affiliates and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. They challenged a March 2025 executive order that directed DHS to give states access to federal databases for voter verification. In response, DHS rebuilt SAVE three ways: it added records on natural-born citizens, plugged in Social Security Administration data including Social Security numbers, and allowed bulk searches of entire voter rolls.
Sooknanan found the agencies launched the new system in May 2025 without the notice-and-comment period the Privacy Act requires, then published the required notices months later while the program was already running. The court also found DHS knew the underlying citizenship data was unreliable — a flaw that has led some naturalized citizens to be wrongly flagged as non-citizens and dropped from the rolls.
The remedy is nationwide. The ruling vacates the modified system and the related notices, reverting SAVE to its pre-2025 functionality.
Indiana is among the most exposed states. Morales and Rokita sued DHS in April 2025 to obtain bulk SAVE access, signed a memorandum of agreement in July, and settled the case in November alongside Florida, Iowa and Ohio. Along the way, Morales’s office uploaded nearly 500,000 Hoosier voter registrations to DHS and turned over the full voter list to the U.S. Department of Justice. The office has said SAVE and a related Bureau of Motor Vehicles crosscheck under House Enrolled Acts 1264 and 1680 identified a small number of non-citizens on the rolls.
The administration urged Sooknanan to defer to the settlements Indiana and the other states reached, arguing a ruling could interfere with them. The judge declined, suggesting the government’s decision to enter those decrees while this litigation was pending raised “clean hands” and “forum shopping” concerns.
The decision does not disturb Indiana’s state statutes, which a separate coalition is challenging in federal court in Indianapolis. The U.S. Justice Department is expected to appeal and seek a stay; no stay had issued as of the ruling.
