Overview
- The Supreme Court issued a temporary stay on Sept. 25, 2026 that paused a lower-court injunction and permitted the Department of Homeland Security to make its revamped SAVE system available to states while appeals proceed.
- The SAVE system, created to verify immigration status for benefits, was expanded by the Trump administration to add Social Security Administration data, allow searches by Social Security number, include U.S.-born citizens and enable bulk queries.
- The court majority relied on a 1996 immigration law to find DHS has authority to request and share citizenship records with states, but Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan publicly dissented.
- Officials and voting-rights groups warn the expanded system has produced erroneous matches that flagged U.S. citizens as noncitizens — examples cited include Travis County reviews showing roughly 10–25% of examined matches were citizens and reporting that St. Louis County findings showed large error rates — and at least 65–67 million voter records have been scanned through SAVE since the expansion.
- Immediate nationwide purges are constrained because state participation is voluntary and the National Voter Registration Act generally bars systematic roll removals within 90 days of a federal election, but the ruling keeps open the possibility of state-level checks, future removals and further legal rulings on privacy and statutory limits.