The Supreme Court on Friday let the Trump administration use its newly-expanded system to verify people’s citizenship status, which the dissenters argue both violates privacy laws and risks disenfranchising voters before the midterms.
The order was unsigned; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
In a March 2025 executive order, President Donald Trump ordered the expansion of the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) system, which was a federal database previously used to determine citizenship status when assessing eligibility for federal benefits. This involved bringing in previously walled off data from the Social Security Administration, and allowing state and local authorities to conduct bulk searches of registered voters and people registering to vote, with the “goal” of purging noncitizens from state voter rolls. The order is part of Trump’s multi-pronged mission to use various executive branch agencies to, nominally, target noncitizen voting (which has never been a significant problem), but which dovetails with his larger anti-immigrant and election denying agendas.
“If the modified SAVE program is unable to confirm that an individual is a citizen, the agency is required to contact the individual and request that he provide proof of citizenship to register or remain registered to vote,” wrote the majority.
The new SAVE system was intended to work alongside another executive order, which would have created DHS-Postal Service citizenship lists to bar alleged noncitizens from receiving absentee ballots, or rejecting many sent in. The Supreme Court blocked that second order earlier this month, to Trump’s dismay.
A similar concern dogged both of the executive orders: that faulty lists, whether from “stale” SSA citizenship records, as Jackson put it, or a hastily cobbled together data from the USPS would prevent legal voters from casting their ballots. Indeed, those worries have already come to fruition in Texas, where one newly naturalized citizen had her voter registration revoked without her knowledge, and two others had to provide proof of citizenship to stay on the rolls because of SAVE system errors.
Of course, seeding doubt in the upcoming elections and disenfranchising legal minority voters who Republicans think will vote against them is the intent, and not a flaw, of these programs’ design.
If there’s a “bright side” to the Friday order, Jackson wrote, it’s that it comes in the 90-day period in which states are prohibited from systematically purging voters from their rolls. She said that “States will at most conduct individualized voter-roll maintenance using the modified SAVE system ahead of the November elections.”
“In my view, however, the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” she concluded.
Read the order here:
That’s the ballgame. They are now guaranteed not to seat Dems.