The Supreme Court cleared the Trump administration Friday to resume removing illegal immigrants from voter rolls using Social Security data, drawing a sharp dissent from three liberal justices.
The high court ruled that the Department of Homeland Security may restart its expanded Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE, to check citizenship and scrub noncitizens from the rolls. Daily Caller reported the decision lets the administration use Social Security records for those verification checks.
The order overturns a June block from U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, a Biden appointee who argued the tool risked wrongly dropping citizens and violating privacy. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The majority pointed straight to federal law. Under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, DHS can gather citizenship and immigration information from other federal agencies. Section 1373(c) requires the federal government to answer state and local election officials who ask to verify voter citizenship.
The majority put it plainly:
"Under section 1373(c), the Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters. The order below prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,"
Justice Jackson saw the balance differently. She wrote that the risk to even a few lawful voters outweighed any government interest in the program.
"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 Trump administration broadened SAVE in 2025 so agencies could better ensure only U.S. citizens vote. The program started years earlier to stop government benefits from flowing to noncitizens. After the expansion, agencies scanned at least 67 million registrations.
That work now resumes after the district court halt. Election integrity efforts have faced repeated legal fights this cycle, including the high court’s earlier green light on the same citizenship database.
The Associated Press noted the ruling will likely skip major midterm impact. Most states cannot remove voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election.
While the database fight moved through the courts, the Justice Department kept charging cases. On Sept. 18, DOJ announced it charged 16 people in seven states, Massachusetts, Texas, Idaho, Georgia, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Michigan, with illegally voting, registering through false citizenship claims, and related fraud.
ICE made its own move earlier. On Sept. 1 agents arrested Mariana Alexandra Dewey, an illegal immigrant, for allegedly voting in the 2024 presidential election. Those cases show why the administration pushed for better citizenship checks in the first place.
Background on the legal path to this point includes the administration’s earlier request to restore access to the federal voter verification database.
New Jersey offered a concrete example. In August, Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s administration announced that 220 noncitizens had a history of illegally voting in the state. The New Jersey Globe carried that disclosure. A registration “glitch” had left the problem unaddressed for a stretch.
When a blue-state government itself flags hundreds of noncitizen voting histories, the claim that citizenship checks are a solution in search of a problem loses force. Lawful voters and taxpayers carry the cost when rolls stay dirty.
Separate election fights continue on other fronts, such as when Justice Kavanaugh signaled a USPS mail-ballot rule might still survive despite setbacks.
Judge Sooknanan shut down the expanded SAVE use in June. She said it could wrongly remove citizens and invade privacy. The Supreme Court majority rejected that stop-order. It held the 1996 statute gives DHS the authority to pull the needed records and that the federal government must answer election officials who request citizenship checks.
SCOTUS Wire summarized the result the same day: the Court allowed the Trump administration to resume the expanded voter citizenship verification program that lets states use Social Security records to check citizenship, with Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson in dissent.
Other recent emergency appeals show the pattern of election-rule litigation, including the administration’s third request to lift an injunction on mail ballot rules.
SAVE’s original mission was straightforward, keep benefits from going to people who are not entitled to them. The 2025 expansion applied the same logic to the voter rolls. Only citizens vote. The database is a tool to enforce that basic rule.
Further context on the administration’s election-integrity docket includes its earlier push for Supreme Court approval of mail-in voting restrictions aimed at the 2026 elections.
The majority treated the statutory duty as real. Section 1373(c) is not optional. When state and local officials ask for citizenship verification, the federal government must respond, and it may use the program it judges best suited to the job. The June injunction blocked that duty. The Court removed the block.
Jackson’s dissent framed the government interest as “nonexistent” and elevated the risk of burdening lawful voters. The majority read the statute and the obligation differently. That is the split the country now lives with: one side sees citizenship checks as a core election safeguard; the other sees them as a threat to access.
Facts on the ground keep stacking up. Sixty-seven million registrations already scanned. Sixteen federal charges across seven states. An ICE arrest over alleged 2024 illegal voting. Two hundred twenty noncitizen voting histories flagged in New Jersey by a Democratic administration. The rolls are not theoretical.
Americans who follow the law and cast legal ballots should not have their votes diluted by people who never had the right to cast one. The Court just handed the tools back to the officials charged with keeping that from happening.
```
