Biden-Appointed Judge Blocks Trump Effort to Help States Verify Voter Citizenship

A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from allowing states to use a centralized federal citizenship database to help screen voter rolls, handing left-wing voting groups a victory in their fight against federal efforts to verify election eligibility.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, appointed by former President Joe Biden, ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop giving states access to a database combining immigration records with Social Security Administration information. The administration had sought to use the system to help states identify noncitizens on voter rolls and prevent ineligible individuals from voting, explained The New York Times.

The case centered on the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE. The program was originally created to verify immigration status for government benefit programs. President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to pool records so states could check the citizenship status of registered voters and new applicants.

But Sooknanan ruled that using the system for voter screening violated privacy laws and risked flagging eligible voters, including naturalized citizens, because of outdated or incomplete records. She wrote that the federal government had created a broad repository of sensitive information, including Social Security numbers and citizenship status.

“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 wrote. “This court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

The ruling marks a reversal from Sooknanan’s earlier decision in November 2025, when she declined to issue a preliminary injunction. This time, she found that states including Texas and Louisiana had already begun using the system and had identified eligible voters for potential removal from the rolls.

The lawsuit was brought by the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and individual plaintiffs. Democracy Forward, a left-leaning legal group, represented the plaintiffs and celebrated the decision as a blow against the Trump administration’s election-integrity agenda.

“As the Trump-Vance administration continues its attack on the right to vote, this is an important victory for the American people and our democracy,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward.

DHS pushed back sharply. James Percival, general counsel for the department, described the ruling on social media as the “latest example” of “how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist.”

The decision comes as the Trump administration has moved to expand federal involvement in the wake of repeated election-integrity problems in blue states, including noncitizens wrongly placed on voter rolls in Oregon, illegal voting charges in Michigan and New Jersey, and absentee-ballot scandals in Connecticut.

Those cases do not prove that every election is riddled with fraud. But they do prove something Democrats are often desperate to deny: the problem is real, and states need reliable tools to catch it before ineligible votes are cast.

That is what makes the ruling so revealing. The left insists illegal voting is too rare to worry about, then fights to block the very checks that could prove whether that claim is true. It warns about threats to democracy, then treats voter-roll maintenance as if it were an attack on voting itself.

States can still maintain their own voter rolls and use other lawful methods to verify eligibility. But the ruling bars the federal government from providing access to the combined SAVE and Social Security database for voter-screening purposes.

In other words, the administration tried to give states a tool to help enforce a basic rule of American elections: only citizens may vote. A Biden-appointed judge just took that tool away.

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