The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for states to use the federal government’s overhauled immigration database to purge noncitizens from voter rolls ahead of the midterms.
The unsigned decision sided with the Department of Homeland Security, which sought to revive the modified system — which contained Social Security information and other individual data — after U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ordered it shut down in June. Three justices dissented from the decision.
While the court acknowledged arguments that the updated database violated privacy laws, it said Congress had already authorized DHS to request and receive citizenship information from other agencies like the Social Security Administration in a 1996 immigration law provision.
Blocking the modified database would put other agencies in an “impossible predicament” of having different laws requiring different disclosures, the order says.
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“It is improbable that Congress intended to place officials in such a bind when it passed the IIRIRA,” the justices wrote, referencing the 1996 law that reshaped immigration proceedings.
One section of that law, signed under President Bill Clinton, “appears to contemplate an information-sharing regime like the modified SAVE program,” the decision says.
DHS had updated its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database — meant to track the status of immigrants in the country — after President Donald Trump issued a March 2025 executive order aimed at rooting out potential noncitizen voters.
Expanding the database by adding personal data and new features prompted a lawsuit over concerns that the Social Security number search feature constituted a privacy violation — amid broader concerns that the database could have inaccuracies that would lead to American citizens being erroneously flagged as ineligible to vote.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, wrote that the majority opinion “focuses only on the harms the Government will purportedly suffer absent a stay, disregarding the harms that the modified SAVE system has caused, and will likely continue to cause, to lawful voters.”
The legal battle over the modified database exemplified the complexities behind implementing Trump’s aggressive — and often legislatively fallible — push to cut down on noncitizen voting, which is already an extremely rare occurrence.
A federal appeals court ruled against the government on Sept. 4, citing DHS’s forfeited arguments rather than weighing in on whether the department had violated the Social Security Act. The updated database remained disabled following the 2-1 decision.
In its request for the Supreme Court to revive the database, DHS argued that the plaintiffs, a group that includes several states and the League of Women Voters, could not show they were directly harmed by SAVE rather than decisions made by individual states.
The older system undermines the goal of voter-roll maintenance and works too slowly for use during the midterms, government lawyers argued, also knocking down arguments that the addition of SSNs violated privacy laws.
The League of Women Voters argued in a response brief filed Tuesday that it is too late to redeploy a modified system that several Democratic states have characterized as unreliable and inaccurate, citing the National Voter Registration Act’s “quiet period” that mandates a 90-day limit on systematic purging before federal elections.
In its Friday decision, the court’s majority said performing “individualized inquiries” using the modified database is permissible within the 90-day limits, and that the district court’s earlier decision “inhibits” the federal government’s efforts to assist local agencies in administering midterm elections.
Sooknanan’s ruling had coincided with another federal judge’s order to revive the system in a separate case involving four states that sued DHS to get the department to reinstate the updated features for their use.
The Supreme Court also recently halted the U.S. Postal Service from proceeding with a rule to tamp down mail-in voting ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms, and Trump administration lawyers have also faced a so-far-unsuccessful attempt to obtain copies of states’ voter rolls.
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