Here We Go Again: Rogue Judges Block Election Safeguard to Stop Illegal Voting

Here we go again.

A federal appeals court has refused to allow the Trump administration to restart an expanded citizenship verification system that states want to use to check their voter rolls for potential noncitizens, leaving one of the administration's major election-integrity initiatives blocked as the midterms approach.

In a 2-1 decision Friday, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the government's request to stay a lower-court ruling against the expanded Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, commonly known as SAVE.

The decision means the expanded version of SAVE will generally remain blocked while the administration appeals U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan's June ruling against the program.

🚨 In a 2-1 vote, the D.C. Circuit refused to let the federal government restart its expanded SAVE citizenship-verification system while it appeals Judge Sparkle Sooknanan's ruling that blocked the program nationwide. Judge Katsas dissented. pic.twitter.com/LDYxmjiAM2

— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) September 5, 2026

Judge Gregory Katsas dissented.

SAVE isn't a voting system. It is a federal database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security that government agencies can use to verify an individual's citizenship or immigration status.

Until recently, however, it had some major limitations. SAVE couldn't verify people born in the United States, couldn't search Social Security Administration records using Social Security numbers, and generally required officials to submit verification requests individually.

The Trump administration expanded the system to allow searches using Social Security numbers and bulk verification requests. That made SAVE considerably more useful for states attempting to compare large voter-registration databases against federal citizenship records.

The changes followed a March 2025 executive order directing DHS to provide state and local election officials with access to federal systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of people registering to vote or already appearing on voter rolls.

Then the lawsuits began. The League of Women Voters and other plaintiffs challenged the expanded system in Washington, arguing that the federal government had improperly created what amounted to a centralized database containing sensitive information about American citizens.

Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, sided with the challengers in June and set aside the expanded SAVE system. She concluded that the modifications violated provisions of the Social Security Act and Privacy Act, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.

The administration appealed and asked the D.C. Circuit to put Sooknanan's order on hold in the meantime. On Friday, two members of the three-judge panel denied it. 

In Katsas’ dissent, he counter-argued that the relevant Social Security Administration records are maintained under laws predating the 1990 confidentiality provision relied upon by the challengers, meaning the restriction doesn't apply in the manner claimed.

Katsas also emphasized the practical consequences of keeping SAVE's expanded features offline.  Without bulk searches and Social Security number verification, states have fewer tools to verify citizenship for government benefits, licenses, and voter eligibility. Before the expansion, SAVE could not even determine the citizenship of someone born in the United States unless the system had access to another qualifying federal identifier.

After Sooknanan blocked those very features, a federal judge in Florida ordered DHS to restore them for the four states, finding that the department was required to comply with its settlement agreement.

So the federal government is now navigating competing court orders while the broader appeal continues.

This is all a bit strange. The federal government is arguing with the judiciary about whether the federal government is allowed to cooperate with the state government to fulfill its legal obligation to secure our elections from illegal voting.

Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections. States therefore have an obligation to maintain voter rolls containing eligible voters, while simultaneously protecting lawful voters, including naturalized citizens, from erroneous removal.

Expanded SAVE offers states a way to ask the federal government whether people appearing in government databases are actually U.S. citizens before states register them as eligible voters.

That doesn’t have to be the end of the voter registration process; however, it does provide states with a useful “red flag.”

But apparently, activist judges believe that flagging non-citizens cannot only render them without the ability to vote, but also liable to lose welfare benefits and to be deported.

And that runs contrary to everything the modern Democrat Party stands for.

Editor’s Note: Republicans are fighting for election integrity by requiring proper identification to vote. It's common sense, yet Democrats are spreading lies about the impact of such a measure. 

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