Chalk this ruling up as one of the most bizarre – and frustrating – regarding left-wing rogue judicial efforts to bar President Trump’s administration from making our elections more security.
A federal appeals court has told the Department of Homeland Security that it may not fully use its own citizenship database to help states confirm that the people on their voter rolls are actually citizens. Not that noncitizens may vote — everyone agrees they may not. Just that the government can’t efficiently check.
Here’s the ruling. On Friday, a divided three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit voted 2-1 to deny the administration’s request to restart the expanded version of SAVE — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system — while it appeals a June decision by Biden DEI appointment U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan (yes, that’s really her name) who blocked the program nationwide.
It helps to understand what SAVE actually is, because the phrase “election safeguard” oversells it. SAVE isn’t a voting system; it’s a DHS database that agencies use to verify someone’s citizenship or immigration status. In its old form it was nearly useless for this purpose — it couldn’t verify people born in the United States, couldn’t search by Social Security number, and generally forced officials to submit requests one at a time. The administration’s expansion, following a March 2025 executive order from President Trump, added bulk searches and Social Security number lookups, which is what finally made it practical for a state to compare a large voter file against federal citizenship records. That’s the capability now frozen.
? 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
The legal fight is narrower than the politics around it, and honesty requires saying so. The plaintiffs — the League of Women Voters and others — argue the expanded system created what amounts to a centralized federal database of sensitive citizen data in violation of the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. Those aren’t frivolous statutes, and privacy concerns about a big federal identity database are the kind of thing that ought to worry people across the spectrum. This isn’t a case where one side has no argument.
DC U.S. District Judge Gregory Katsas, a 2017 Trump appointee, dissented fromt he two-judge majority. Katsas’ dissent is the part worth weighing, because it goes to the merits rather than the vibes. He argued the relevant Social Security records are governed by laws predating the 1990 confidentiality provision the challengers lean on, so the restriction doesn’t apply the way they claim. And he stressed the practical cost: without bulk verification, states lose their most efficient tool for confirming citizenship not just for voter rolls but for benefits and licenses too. Meanwhile a federal court in Florida court has ordered DHS to restore those same features for four states under a settlement — so the department is now trapped between contradictory orders while the appeal grinds on.
The bottom line survives all the procedural fog. Federal law bars noncitizens from voting and obligates states to keep clean rolls. A tool that lets them verify citizenship against federal records before registering someone is not voter suppression — it’s basic administrative competence. A court has now put that tool on ice two months before an election. Insane.
