The Supreme Court on Friday, September 25, put the Trump administration's expanded SAVE citizenship database back in states' hands. The unsigned order pauses a June ruling from U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who found the revamp broke the Privacy Act and the Social Security Act. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. SAVE, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, dates to 1986 and originally checked the immigration status of noncitizens applying for public benefits. In May 2025, after a Trump executive order, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) connected it to Social Security records and let states run whole voter rolls through it at once. The government told the Court it has since checked more than 65 million registrations in 26 states and flagged 28,635 people as possible noncitizens. The general election is November 3.

The Majority Says Congress Ordered This Data Shared

The administration and six justices say a 1996 immigration law requires DHS to answer states' citizenship questions, and the lower court blocked the best tool for it.

Congress already settled this, the majority says. The unsigned order points to a 1996 immigration statute that lets DHS request citizenship data from other agencies "notwithstanding" other laws. The justices wrote that under that reading, the Court "is likely to reverse" Judge Sooknanan's finding that the revamp broke the Privacy Act and the Social Security Act.

States are asking, and DHS has to answer. The order says the federal government "has an obligation to respond" to election officials who want to verify a voter's citizenship. The June ruling, it says, stopped DHS from using the program it thinks works best.

A 90-day rule caps what this order can do. Federal law bars systematic voter purges within 90 days of an election, and the majority admits that "limits the potential impact" of its stay. But states can still run one-at-a-time checks in that window, and the justices said the June order kept states from using the revamped SAVE even for those.

Texas wanted this back. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's filing said forcing states to use the old, one-name-at-a-time SAVE "undermines Texas' interest in maintaining accurate, up-to-date voter rolls." DHS General Counsel James Percival called the ruling "a victory for election integrity." U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said it "will allow states to clear the voter rolls of illegal voters."

But the Dissent Says the Tool Keeps Flagging Citizens

Justice Jackson and the voting-rights groups say the Court ruled without hearing full arguments and ignored citizens the database has already wrongly flagged.

This got decided without a hearing. Justice Jackson wrote that the Court granted the stay "without full briefing or oral argument," issuing "questionable interim rulings about two statutory provisions it has never before interpreted."

The majority weighed only one side. Her dissent compares the majority's balancing to "expecting a seesaw with weight applied on only one side to work properly." She says the government could have kept using the pre-2025 version of SAVE the whole time, so it lost almost nothing.

The record already shows harm, Jackson says. Judge Sooknanan found that one member of a group that sued "had her voter registration revoked without her knowledge," and two more had to prove citizenship to stay registered. Even the majority acknowledged that another member, registered in Louisiana, has Social Security records that still fail to show she's now a naturalized citizen.

Jackson says even a few lost voters matter more. She wrote near the end of her dissent: "the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take." The League of Women Voters, which brought the suit, called the ruling "profoundly disappointing" and said it "puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted" weeks before the midterms.

Election Officials Say Every Flag Still Needs Checking

Election administrators in both parties say the database is a starting point with a documented error rate, and the ruling changes nothing for states that opt out.

Roughly one in five voters Texas flagged was a citizen. The Texas secretary of state flagged 2,724 voters as potential noncitizens, and 578 of them, about 21%, later proved citizenship. Only 117 cases, about 4%, went on to investigators.

DHS has had to correct its own results. ProPublica found DHS fixed bad data sent to at least five states. In one Missouri county, more than half the people flagged turned out to be citizens. Denton County's elections administrator Frank Phillips put it this way: "I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database."

Social Security's records are out of date. Many naturalized citizens got a Social Security number before they naturalized, and the Social Security Administration's file never caught up. The verification chief at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which runs SAVE, has said that when the system can't confirm citizenship, the state decides what to do with that person.

A Republican who ran elections says treat it as a lead. Stephen Richer, who ran elections as the Maricopa County, Arizona, recorder, said the ruling could help "if used responsibly." But SAVE "has been shown time after time to be a highly-imperfect tool," he said, so officials "should only use it as a starting point."

States that never signed up don't have to. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who refuses to use SAVE, said the ruling "does not force states to change the way we run our elections." Somewhere between 25 and 28 states, mostly Republican-led, have signed up for it or run rolls through it.

Where This Lands

The administration and six justices say a 1996 immigration law already requires DHS to share citizenship data with states, and a lower court had no business blocking the best tool for it. Justice Jackson and the voting-rights groups say the Court ruled without hearing full arguments and ignored citizens who have already lost their registrations. Election officials in both parties say the flags are wrong often enough that the database can only ever be a starting point. Federal law bars systematic purges until after November 3, and the Court hears a separate case on December 8 about whether that 90-day rule covers noncitizen removals at all.

Sources