Trump Ordered Voter Citizenship Checks. 578 Flagged Texans Were Cleared as Citizens.

The Order Was Trump's. The Errors Fell on Voters.

Anthony Nel is a U.S. citizen.¹ His Texas voter registration was canceled anyway, after a federal database called SAVE failed to confirm his citizenship, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan found.¹ The same happened to a naturalized citizen, and a third citizen had to supply additional proof of citizenship to avoid it.¹

SAVE can get a citizen wrong because of the records behind it.² Since May 2025 it has checked voters against Social Security files, which record citizenship when a person deals with the agency; no one has to report a later change until seeking a replacement card or claiming a benefit.²³ Someone who received a Social Security number before becoming a citizen can therefore remain classified as a noncitizen.²

President Donald J. Trump set this screening in motion.⁴ On March 25, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14248, directing federal agencies to help identify unqualified voters on state rolls, and within two months his agencies had connected confidential Social Security records to SAVE and opened it to bulk voter checks.⁴²³ Texas later reported that additional review cleared 578 flagged voters as citizens.⁵

The charge is that Trump's program made citizens answer for errors in government records, while his Justice Department collected states' private voter files and pressed states to remove voters using data it knew could misidentify citizens.²¹ On October 9, 2026, Sooknanan set aside the Justice Department's policy as unlawful.¹⁶ The database is a separate case, and there the Supreme Court has allowed SAVE to operate during an appeal.⁷

Trump's responsibility begins with his signature.⁴ His order told Homeland Security to provide free access to citizenship checks, Social Security to open relevant federal databases to election officials, and the Attorney General to act against states over voter-list maintenance.⁴ It told the Attorney General to prioritize election-law enforcement in states that refused information-sharing agreements, and to review those states' Justice Department grants for possible withholding.⁴ It directed Homeland Security and DOGE to review public voter lists alongside federal immigration databases and requested state records, including through subpoenas where necessary and lawful.⁴

The order required compliance with privacy and other applicable laws and did not name SAVE, and his agencies chose the letters, agreements and lawsuits that carried it out.⁴⁸¹ Two of them pointed back to him: the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel described its voter-list plan as a response to the President's order, and USCIS credited Trump's leadership when it announced the rebuilt system.⁹¹⁰

Trump also pressed states in public. His July 16, 2026, address, as the D.C. Circuit recorded it, named neither program and did not call for defying any ruling; in it he directed states to remove all ineligible voters from their rolls immediately.¹¹

Bulk Checks, Built in Two Months

In under two months, Trump's agencies turned an immigration-status checker into a tool that could screen whole voter rolls.³⁴ SAVE had checked immigration status for public benefits since 1986, and before the 2025 changes it generally did not query the records of citizens born in the United States.⁷³²

USCIS dropped its fees for state voter checks in April 2025, added bulk uploads with no size limit on May 1, and connected SAVE to Social Security records on May 16.³¹⁰ No agency published the notice the Privacy Act requires for a new or revised system of personal records before the launch, Sooknanan found; DHS and SSA published theirs in October and November 2025, after challengers sued.¹²²

From January 1, 2025, to April 1, 2026, SAVE processed 59.7 million voter-verification queries, the USCIS official who ran the system declared under penalty of perjury; that counts checks, not people, and the period begins before the rebuild.³

If SAVE cannot confirm citizenship, the state must contact the person for proof to register or remain registered.⁷ From August 15, 2025, USCIS sent every voter query returning a status other than U.S. citizen to manual review before giving a final response.³

The Agencies Knew the Citizenship Data Could Be Wrong

The problem came from using Social Security records for a job they were not designed to do: determining a voter's current citizenship.² SSA itself recognized that its citizenship information was accurate only for its own program purposes.² In 2006, SSA's inspector general found that 7% of the people the agency classified as noncitizens, about 3.3 million, were in fact citizens, Sooknanan wrote in her October 9 opinion.¹

DHS put the warning in writing while SAVE was operating: its internal privacy reviews from July and September 2025 warned that shortcomings in the SSA data could produce incomplete or false results; they also showed, Sooknanan found, that DHS knew the SAVE modification did not comply with the Privacy Act.²

The errors reached real voters. Four Texans, some of them also cited in the October opinion, gave sworn accounts that, the judge found in June 2026, established inaccurate SSA records, threats to their registrations and demands to confirm citizenship.²¹ One woman lost her registration without knowing it; two registrations were still revoked when the declarations were filed.² The government neither disputed that testimony nor challenged its introduction.² The June opinion also described notices to citizens threatening possible criminal sanctions, as well as loss of registration, based on inaccurate disclosures.²

What the Checks Achieved, and What Correcting Them Cost

USCIS presented the expanded tool as an effort to eliminate voter fraud.¹⁰ On September 15, 2026, Texas reported what the tool had found there: the state screened 18 million registered voters and flagged 2,724 potential noncitizens.⁵ Additional review cleared 578 flagged voters as citizens, 506 of them because passport information was added to SAVE after the initial run, and the state advised counties to reinstate their registrations if they had been removed.⁵ The same report records a result in the administration's favor: Texas referred 117 cases to its Attorney General for investigation of potential noncitizen voting.⁵

Nationally, the government told the Supreme Court that SAVE had verified more than 65 million voters as citizens since May 2025 while flagging 28,635 potential noncitizens.¹³ It did not report how many of those flags proved correct, and its figures give no national error rate and no count of voters removed; what those results document is citizenship checks and possible violations to investigate, not a measured reduction in voter fraud.¹³⁵

Local officials had to check the checker. Travis County and its election officials told the Supreme Court on September 15 that, reviewing 97 flagged voters, they had confirmed at least 11 were citizens using proof already provided to the Texas Department of Public Safety, and that they had pressed state officials for additional information for two months.¹⁴

The Administration's Strongest Defense Won a Stay

The strongest defense is that Congress authorized citizenship-data sharing, the states wanted help, and identifying noncitizen voters serves a lawful purpose.¹⁵¹⁶¹¹ Federal law generally criminalizes noncitizen voting in federal elections, subject to specified exceptions.¹⁶ States had used SAVE for voters since 2005, and several sued DHS for better access in late 2024, before Trump's order; their settlement came in November 2025, after the rebuild.³¹¹ The government also argued that SAVE did not definitively declare anyone a noncitizen, that states made removal decisions, and that four injured Texas voters were few beside 59.7 million requests.¹³

On the database, the government won an important ruling.⁷ Sooknanan, who had denied emergency relief in November 2025, held on June 22, 2026, that the rebuilt SAVE system violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, and vacated it, leaving the older SAVE available.²¹⁷⁷ On September 25 the Supreme Court put that ruling on hold: it read an immigration law, 8 U.S.C. § 1373, as likely authorizing DHS to receive citizenship information despite restrictions in other laws, and predicted reversal of all three statutory holdings.⁷

The stay allows the modified SAVE program to operate while the appeal proceeds; it is an interim decision, not a final judgment.⁷ Justice Jackson, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, dissented: she read the statute as preserving explicit confidentiality limits and argued that harm to even a few lawful voters outweighed preventing the government from taking action it likely lacked authority to take.⁷ The Court left for another case whether federal law's ban on systematic removals within 90 days of an election applies to removing noncitizens, while recognizing that the restriction limits its order's pre-election impact and that individualized inquiries can continue.⁷

But the Supreme Court also accepted that a Louisiana voter's SSA record wrongly omitted her naturalized citizenship and that having to prove citizenship would constitute an injury.⁷ The Texas declarations show that errors led to actual cancellations, not just requests for paperwork.²

Forty-Nine States, and Washington, D.C.

To carry out Trump's order, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division began demanding complete, unredacted statewide voter lists in May 2025: names, birth dates, addresses, and driver's license numbers or the last four digits of Social Security numbers.¹ It contacted 49 states and the District of Columbia; North Dakota keeps no statewide voter list.¹ At least 18 states fully cooperated and handed over their unredacted lists, the October 9 court found.¹

The demand sent to Delaware on August 14, 2025, promised to handle the data consistently with the Privacy Act; it did not name DHS or citizenship screening, although it quoted a law permitting disclosure to government agencies.⁸ DOJ had told Georgia more: according to a Georgia official's declaration, recited in a court order, it said on July 9, 2025, that it wanted to run the state's list through SAVE.¹⁸

On May 12, 2026, the department's own legal office put in writing where the lists were meant to go.⁹

Authority to Obtain and Share Statewide Voter Roll Data⁹

In response to the President’s order to identify those who may be voting illegally (whether by reason of alienage or otherwise), the Civil Rights Division (“Division” or “CRT”) proposed to seek statewide voter lists, and then to share the lists with Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”) or another unit within DHS.

Senior DOJ officials represented that they had not intended immigration enforcement when making the requests, though the legal office acknowledged possible incidental immigration consequences.⁹

The proposal became practice: the October court found that DOJ shared the lists it obtained with DHS, which ran the data through SAVE.¹

DOJ's agreements asked states for more than a list: a commitment to remove voters. Under signed agreements with Alaska, Texas and South Carolina, DOJ would identify voters it deemed noncitizens, and states would remove those deemed ineligible within 45 days.¹ The agreements also allowed disclosure to a DOJ contractor needing the data for list-maintenance verification.¹

DOJ sued states that would not accept its demands, and it sued five more on February 26, 2026, after federal courts in California and Oregon had dismissed its suits.^1192021 With a suit against Idaho on April 1, its announced total reached 30 states and the District of Columbia.²² Oklahoma, one of the five sued that February, settled: Oklahoma Voice reported that the state agreed to release voters' names, birth dates, addresses, full driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers in exchange for dismissal of the federal suit.²¹²³

A Judge Set the Whole Policy Aside

On October 9, 2026, Sooknanan set aside DOJ's whole voter-list policy on four grounds: its claimed statutes did not authorize it, it was arbitrary and capricious, and it violated the Privacy Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act.¹⁶ She held that DOJ unlawfully disclosed voter rolls to contractors and other federal agencies, updated its Central Index File, a law-enforcement database, with inaccurate information while taking no steps to ensure its accuracy, and violated the Act's bar on maintaining records of protected First Amendment activity.¹ The contractor disclosures, she held, also violated the disclosure limits of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.¹ Neither side argued that the Supreme Court stay governed the DOJ case.¹

The department had a defense. Its legal office defended sharing state rolls as ordinary list-maintenance enforcement, saying the Privacy Act's law-enforcement and routine-use exceptions could permit it.⁹ OLC said it had informally approved obtaining and sharing the lists in September 2025, before DOJ sought to enforce state compliance; its May 12, 2026 opinion memorialized that advice.⁹ DOJ argued that every registered voter was the subject of its voter-fraud investigation, bringing all their records within an existing records notice.¹ A 1962 Fifth Circuit decision, Kennedy v. Lynd, had read the Attorney General's records-demand power broadly, though the Sixth Circuit majority pointed to later binding precedent allowing judicial review of such demands.²⁴²⁵ In that Sixth Circuit case, which upheld Michigan's dismissal two judges to one, Judge Nalbandian dissented and would have given DOJ the list, and Judge Murphy, concurring when the full court declined rehearing, described the defects as curable procedural problems and proposed a new letter clearly requesting individual voter records.²⁵²⁶

Sooknanan rejected the policy's asserted legal justifications, the Privacy Act exceptions among them.¹ The department, she found, entirely failed to consider the risk of removing eligible citizens even though it knew SAVE could misidentify them.¹

Memorandum Opinion, Common Cause v. U.S. Department of Justice¹

Behind all the window dressing, the challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote. But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.

She was not the first. By her count, at least 25 district courts had dismissed DOJ's enforcement actions and one appellate court had affirmed.¹ The rejections crossed appointment lines: on June 27, 2026, Pennsylvania Chief Judge Cathy Bissoon counted nine district-court rejections and noted that five of those judges were Trump appointees.²⁷

Sooknanan vacated the policy without deciding the constitutional claims or issuing an injunction, and made clear that lawful federal assistance with voter rolls could continue; her order does not direct the return or deletion of lists already collected.¹⁶

Citizens Should Not Pay for the Government's Bad Records

As of October 10, 2026, the government's statutory interpretation has the Supreme Court's provisional support for SAVE, and no court has ruled on Trump's own conduct; that is a serious caution, because a legal disagreement alone is a weak basis for removal.⁷²¹⁶

What Congress has to judge is the use of the power.²⁸ Hamilton described impeachable offenses in Federalist No. 65 as abuses or violations of a public trust.²⁹ Trump launched federal screening with confidential records, his agencies used citizenship data they knew could be wrong, and his Justice Department pressed states to remove voters under a policy a court held unlawful.⁴²¹ Citizens and election officials then had to correct the government's mistakes, and some citizens lost their registrations.¹⁵¹⁴

The charge is abuse of public trust.²⁹ A President is charged with faithfully executing the laws.²⁸ He answers politically for a program, carried out under his order, that puts lawful voters' place on the rolls at risk.²⁸⁴²¹