On Friday, September 25, the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a tool it has been using to hunt for noncitizen voters, over a lower court's finding that the tool breaks federal privacy law and flags real citizens.

In an unsigned order, the court's six Republican-appointed justices paused a ruling that had blocked the administration from using its rebuilt SAVE database. The three Democratic appointees dissented.

What SAVE is, and what Trump did to it

SAVE is a Homeland Security database. It was built in 1986 to check whether immigrants applying for government benefits were eligible. It was never designed to check American voters.

After a March 2025 executive order from Trump, the administration rebuilt it. It added information on people born in the U.S., and Elon Musk's DOGE team loaded in full Social Security numbers and let state officials upload hundreds of thousands of voters at once to check them in bulk.

The problem is that SAVE gets things wrong, especially about naturalized citizens, people who changed their last name when they married, and people whose names don't match exactly across documents.

How wrong it gets things

Mother Jones collected the cases:

• Missouri. The Republican secretary of state ran the state's voter list through SAVE in November 2025. In St. Louis County, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as noncitizens. The county quickly found 35% of them were naturalized citizens. After checking passport records, the list shrank to 133, meaning at least 81% of SAVE's "noncitizens" were wrong. Seventy Missouri county clerks, Republicans and Democrats, warned state lawmakers that SAVE keeps flagging "individuals we know to be US citizens — our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies."
• Texas. In Denton County, SAVE flagged 84 supposed noncitizens. Twelve sent in proof they were citizens. Those who didn't respond were removed from the rolls, even though the county's elections chief believed most were eligible voters. "My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not," he told ProPublica.

We've seen this in Texas before. Greg Abbott claimed Texas had caught 6,500 noncitizens on its voter rolls when his own office had confirmed 581.

What the court ignored

In June, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the rebuilt database. "The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote," she wrote. A divided appeals court panel refused to put her ruling on hold.

The majority said the lower court's order "inhibits the Federal Government's efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent that the majority never accounted for the harm to voters. "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," she wrote. She pointed to what the lower court found had already happened in Texas: one voter "had her voter registration revoked without her knowledge," and two more "had to provide proof of citizenship to maintain registered voter status."

When Judge Sooknanan ruled, Republicans came after her instead of the database. We reported how Abe Hamadeh tried to have her removed from the bench.

The same day: your passport file

The same day the Court ruled, Bloomberg News reported that the State Department had proposed opening Americans' passport records to federal and local election officials, and to unnamed nonprofits, for "voter eligibility" checks. That records system holds passport applications, birth certificates, copies of driver's licenses and medical and financial information. The proposal doesn't say which nonprofits would get access, or which records.

It's all part of the same push. Homeland Security has hundreds of agents hunting for noncitizen voting, which studies show is extremely rare. A whistleblower says the department had officers pose as voters to search state voting records, even as its own training video warned "there will be U.S. citizens" on the list.

What it means for November

There's one limit. Federal law bars states from systematically purging voters in the last 90 days before a federal election, and Election Day is November 3. (The Court has said it will decide, in a separate case, whether that bar even covers removing alleged noncitizens.) As Justice Jackson wrote, it's "too late for States to use SAVE for systematic voter-list maintenance in advance of the 2026 elections." States can still use it to check voters one by one.

After November, that limit is gone.

Adding it up

On September 25, the Supreme Court's six Republican appointees let the Trump administration go back to using a rebuilt citizenship database that a federal judge found violated Americans' privacy rights. In St. Louis County, at least 81% of the "noncitizens" it flagged were wrong, and in Texas, one voter has already lost her registration and two more were forced to prove citizenship. The same day, Bloomberg reported a State Department proposal to open Americans' passport files for voter checks.

Source

Supreme Court Allows Trump to Use Flawed Database to Vet Voter Citizenship — Mother Jones. Image: Mother Jones illustration; Getty; Unsplash.