A federal court has ordered the Trump administration to dismantle a massive database created to investigate and potentially purge U.S. citizens from voter rolls nationwide.
Maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, the databank was formed by merging sensitive data provided by the Social Security Administration and other federal agencies to comply with President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”
The result was the expansion of a DHS databank intended to track immigration status into a system enabling users to scour the Social Security and other records of native-born citizens.
Sparkle Sooknanan
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., found the database to be illegal for including information about natural-born Americans, providing access to Social Security numbers and for enabling mass searches by government officials.
“This case implicates two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government overreach: The right to privacy and the right to vote,” she wrote.
“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This court cannot stand idly by while that happens,” Sooknanan said in her June 22 opinion.
Her ruling sparked outrage online from conservatives who said judges shouldn’t be able to block presidential orders and foreign-born citizens like Sooknanan should not be allowed to serve as judges. Sooknanan was born in Trinidad and Tobago.
The judgment came in the case of League of Women Voters v. Department of Homeland Security, a class-action lawsuit filed in September challenging the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database expanded in response to Trump’s executive order. The action alleges the system is illegal and already being used by Louisiana, Texas, Virginia and other states to open criminal investigations and purge voter rolls.
Plaintiffs include a coalition of League of Women Voters state chapters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, and five individuals. They are represented by Democracy Forward, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and the Fair Elections Center.
A separate lawsuit filed in April aims to stop the U.S. Department of Justice from demanding states hand over voter registration data that includes driver’s license numbers, dates and places of birth, signatures, home addresses, party affiliation, voting habits and Social Security numbers, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is co-counsel in the action brought by Common Cause and four individuals.
“DOJ’s apparent purpose in collecting this data is to conduct its own state-by-state voter list maintenance operation and compel states to purge eligible voters from their voter rolls as part of the Trump administration’s attempts to take over elections from states and subvert the 2026 midterm elections,” the suit contends.
In the meantime, the administration has filed 31 federal lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to submit voter registration information to the government, according to the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
To date, no court has ruled in the government’s favor.
To date, no court has ruled in the government’s favor, while the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court dismissal of DOJ’s lawsuit against Michigan, while district courts have dismissed the agency’s litigation against Arizona, California, Maine, Maryland, Oregon and Rhode Island.
In her ruling against DHS in League of Women Voters, Sooknanan said the agency violated a range of federal laws governing citizen data, including the Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act, the Privacy Act and the Social Security Act.
“The data at the heart of this lawsuit was unlawfully consolidated in violation of privacy laws intended to protect sensitive personal information,” Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman said.
Marcia Johnson
Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice for the League of Women Voters, proclaimed the ruling as a victory for voters: “Efforts to create a federal voter database to facilitate voter purges threaten the fundamental right at the heart of our democracy.”
Putting a stop to the illegal consolidation of sensitive personal data between federal agencies upholds privacy rights and protects democracy and the right to vote, EPIC Deputy Director John Davisson said. “The ruling underscores that government agencies must follow the law, defend privacy, and remain accountable to the public they serve.”
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Postmaster General David Steiner told a Senate hearing he does not intend to deliver mail-in ballots in states that decline to hand over sensitive data about voters to the federal government.
The proposed new postal rule coincides with another Trump executive order seeking to restrict voting by mail.
Steiner told the Senate Homeland Security Committee the proposed rule would halt delivery of mail-in ballots in states that do not comply with Trump’s demands.
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