Supreme Court Revives DHS 'SAVE' Voter-Citizenship Database Ruled Unlawful, Weeks Before the Midterms (September 2026)

What Happened

SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) was built to let agencies check an individual immigrant's eligibility for public benefits. Beginning in 2025, DHS rebuilt it into a bulk tool for checking the citizenship of registered voters. The overhaul pulled in Social Security Administration records, including Social Security numbers. States were invited to run entire voter rolls through it. NPR, citing the Solicitor General's Supreme Court filing, reported that since May 2025 the modified system had checked more than 65 million voters across 26 states and flagged 28,635 as potential noncitizens.

The results were unreliable. In Texas, of the 2,724 voters SAVE initially flagged, about 20% were later found to be citizens and reinstated; only 117 cases (4.2%) were referred for investigation. Judge Sooknanan highlighted internal DHS memos warning that naturalized citizens would be at particular risk of having their registrations erroneously cancelled.

The District Court Ruling

A coalition led by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, represented by Democracy Forward, CREW and the Fair Elections Center, sued. On June 22, 2026, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan granted summary judgment. She held that the modified SAVE violated the Social Security Act's prohibition on disclosing Social Security numbers, multiple provisions of the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. She vacated the system and ordered DHS to restore it to its prior state. She wrote: "All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote." She also found that some of the plaintiffs' members had been wrongly identified as noncitizens, "resulting in the cancellation of their voter registrations."

The Supreme Court Stay

A divided D.C. Circuit panel refused to pause the ruling on September 4 but expedited the appeal. Solicitor General D. John Sauer then went to the Supreme Court. On September 25, 2026, in an unsigned order in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters (No. 26A308), the Court granted the stay. It reasoned that a 1996 immigration law expressly authorizes DHS to request citizenship information from other agencies, including Social Security, and that the government would suffer permanent harm if the lower court's order remained in place.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented: "the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences."

Legal Analysis

The timing makes the order consequential. It came inside the National Voter Registration Act's 90-day "quiet period" before the November 3 midterms, the window in which systematic purges of voter rolls are restricted. SCOTUSblog reported that the order allows states to run individualized verifications through the modified database during that period. The Justice Department had separately argued that the quiet period should not stop Georgia from removing voters if DOJ first "alerted" the state (see voter-suppression-election-interference). Reviving a citizenship check that a federal court found unlawful, and that has wrongly flagged citizens in documented cases, close to an election leaves voters with little time to discover and contest an erroneous challenge before they try to vote.

The merits are still pending. The stay does not reverse Judge Sooknanan's findings that the system was assembled in violation of federal privacy law and that eligible citizens lost their registrations as a result.

Classification

This entry is classified as an enabling condition and rated severe. It is not an international crime. It implicates the ICCPR's protections for the right to vote (Article 25), privacy (Article 17) and equal treatment (Article 26), because, as DHS's own memos warned, naturalized citizens are at particular risk of erroneous flags.