A federal judge shut down a Trump program Monday. It had been used to check if voters are citizens. The judge said it could wrongly erase real Americans from the voter rolls.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan sided with the groups who sued. She said the government broke the law.
She wrote that the government "knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens." She said it threatens "the sacred right to vote." She added: "This court cannot stand idly by while that happens."
The program is called SAVE. The government built it to keep non-citizens from getting benefits. Trump expanded it when he came back to office. He told states to use it to check voter rolls.
At least 25 states used it. More than 67 million voter records went through it since April 2025.
The judge found the data was not reliable. She said the agencies "haphazardly combined and repurposed" personal information. She said they used "citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable."
Congress had banned the government from building a big central database of personal data. The agencies did it anyway.
Some voters were more at risk than others. People who became citizens through the courts face the biggest danger. A lawyer for the plaintiffs said they are "uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database."
Groups that sued include the League of Women Voters. They called it "an across the board victory."
James Percival, the top lawyer at DHS, fought back on social media. "It's amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist," he said.
In the Rio Grande Valley, this ruling hits home. The region has many naturalized citizens. Many became citizens after years living here legally. Under SAVE, they risked being wiped off voter rolls by mistake.
The Trump administration has not said what comes next.
