The Trump administration is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to step into a legal fight over a federal citizenship database, arguing that lower-court rulings blocking the system could undermine election integrity. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed the emergency request Tuesday, seeking to lift a judge’s order that halted the current version of the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE program, which some states have used to scrub voter rolls ahead of the midterms.
The case stems from a June decision by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who concluded that the administration broke the law by assembling a centralized file of Americans’ personal data. Sooknanan wrote that federal officials had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” and she determined the program ran afoul of federal privacy statutes, the Social Security Act, and administrative-procedure rules. She also pointed out that states had relied on the database to strike U.S. citizens from voting lists based on faulty data.
SAVE emerged from a government-wide effort to uncover noncitizen voting, which research indicates is exceedingly uncommon. The database was reworked after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March directing DHS and the Social Security Administration to build tools that state and local authorities could use to confirm voter citizenship and immigration status. The revamped system now holds records on native-born Americans, provides access to Social Security numbers, and allows for batch queries.
The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued over the changes in federal court in Washington. Following Sooknanan’s ruling, the administration asked the D.C. Circuit to pause it, but a split panel refused and pushed the case onto an expedited track.
In the new filing, Sauer described Sooknanan’s decision as “indefensible” and warned that it “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections.” He accused the judge of overstepping her authority and said the plaintiffs had not shown they were legally harmed. Sauer maintained that SAVE “does not disqualify any voter; instead, it merely notifies the States whether the federal government can confirm citizenship,” adding that any injury to voters would come from state actions, not federal ones.
Sauer further argued that the administration’s approach aligns with federal law, which he said obligates DHS to offer citizenship verification and allows the agency to consult Social Security records. He claimed that statutes bar courts from invoking the Privacy Act or the Social Security Act to block such verification. He also warned that keeping the injunction in place would inflict irreparable damage on the government, forcing it to revert to an older, more unwieldy version of SAVE, and that a reversal later would come too late to affect the 2026 midterms.
This marks the second election-related emergency appeal from the administration in three days. On Sunday, it asked the justices to overturn a Boston federal judge’s ruling that blocked parts of a U.S. Postal Service rule governing mail-in ballots.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles emergency requests from Washington, has ordered the challengers to submit their response by 4 p.m. EDT Tuesday. No additional court action has been reported, and the source account did not include the challengers’ reply.