Overview
- On June 22, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan vacated the administration’s SAVE modernization nationwide, finding the centralized use of Social Security data and SSN-based searches unlawfully risked privacy and could wrongly flag citizens as noncitizens.
- After Sooknanan’s order, DHS disabled the contested SAVE features nationwide to comply with the vacatur.
- In early July, U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II ruled that DHS breached a consent decree with Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana and ordered the agency to restore bulk-upload and SSN-search functions for those four states.
- Sooknanan refused the government’s request to pause her ruling and criticized Wetherell’s merits analysis, leaving two district courts issuing directly opposing commands that DHS must navigate while appeals and further litigation loom.
- The clash raises a legal fault line between a court-set vacatur under the Administrative Procedure Act and a court-enforced settlement, highlights documented accuracy and privacy risks in SAVE’s records, and has prompted political backlash and likely appeals that will determine how states may use federal citizenship data.