(DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA) — U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the Trump administration on June 22, 2026 from maintaining a centralized database of Americans’ private information for voter roll purges, ruling that the effort violated federal privacy and administrative law.

Sooknanan, in a 75-page decision in League of Women Voters v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, set aside the administration’s overhaul of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. She found that the federal government violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

“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 wrote.

The federal judge also said the administration “flunked compliance” by “haphazardly” combining and repurposing private information, including citizenship data it “knew to be unreliable,” to help states remove purported non-citizens from voter rolls.

The ruling halts one of the administration’s most ambitious election measures: a redesign of SAVE, a system long used to verify eligibility for public benefits. Under Executive Order 14248, issued on March 25, 2025, the administration recast that system to allow bulk searches of citizenship and immigration records by state and local election officials.

That redesign moved SAVE beyond its earlier role. Instead of case-by-case verification tied to benefits eligibility, state officials gained a path to run large batches of names against federal records in search of non-citizens on voter rolls.

Plaintiffs said the administration went further still and built a “Data Lake” inside U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. They said it combined records from the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Labor with state voter registration databases, creating a searchable pool that included sensitive biometric and medical data.

Sooknanan’s order prevents further creation and maintenance of that database. Her ruling also rejected the administration’s position that the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department could compile a national voter file or require states to turn over unredacted voter registration data for that purpose.

The decision centered on privacy and accuracy as much as legal authority. Sooknanan said the challenged system fed states inaccurate information that officials then used while “actively” purging records, raising the risk that citizens would be mislabeled as non-citizens because of outdated or mismatched federal files.

That finding cuts at the administration’s central argument. President Trump’s officials cast the initiative as an “election integrity” measure aimed at stopping noncitizen voting, and on March 9, 2026, Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said, “Our elections belong to American citizens, not foreign citizens. Congress must pass the SAVE America Act immediately to secure our elections.”

The judge’s order leaves that political message intact but strips away the data machinery behind it. Millions of Americans’ partial Social Security numbers, addresses, birth dates, and citizenship status can no longer be gathered into a national searchable system for voter roll reviews under the blocked program.

Election officials and voting-rights groups have warned for months that citizenship checks based on old federal files can misfire. Naturalized citizens often appear in government records under prior statuses, and differences in names, dates, or source systems can cause wrongful flags that local officials treat as evidence.

Sooknanan said those errors were not abstract. Her ruling described “haphazard” purges already under way and said the challenged program threatened wrongful disenfranchisement by pushing states toward mass list maintenance on data the government knew was unreliable.

The court also said the database itself could discourage participation. Sooknanan wrote that a centralized federal system of this kind would have a “chilling effect” on voter registration because citizens could fear their personal data would be used for “inappropriate or unlawful purposes.”

The case adds to a growing line of court defeats for the administration’s election agenda. It was the ninth rejection by federal courts in 2026 of administration efforts tied to election integrity, according to the case record summarized in the ruling and related filings.

Another loss came the same day. In United States v. DeMarinis, a federal judge in Maryland rejected a Justice Department attempt to obtain that state’s unredacted voter registration files, another sign that courts have resisted federal efforts to collect broad voter data from the states.

Together, the rulings narrow the administration’s route to a national citizenship-checking system. They also reinforce a basic legal boundary in election administration: states maintain voter rolls, but federal agencies still need clear statutory authority before repurposing benefits, tax, labor, or immigration records into a nationwide voter-screening tool.

The legal issues reached beyond election law. By finding violations of the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act, Sooknanan treated the handling of government records as an independent problem, not merely a dispute over how aggressively officials can police voter rolls.

That matters for immigration agencies because the blocked system sat inside SAVE, a longstanding USCIS program. The case did not challenge SAVE’s original purpose, which remains eligibility verification for public benefits and related uses described in the USCIS SAVE User Guide, updated in January 2026.

Budget and planning documents had already hinted at a broader data architecture. The DHS Agency Financial Report for FY 2025/2026 and the USCIS Congressional Justification for FY 2026 outlined the agency’s systems and funding posture during the period when the challenged changes took shape.

The Justice Department’s legal rationale also entered the court fight. A DOJ Legal Memo on Voter Roll Data, dated May 12, 2026, formed part of the broader backdrop as administration lawyers defended federal access to state registration information and argued for a more expansive role in citizenship verification.

What the court stopped, at least for now, was the fusion of those bureaucratic pieces into one national engine. State election officials can no longer rely on the blocked SAVE overhaul to run bulk citizenship searches through a federal system built for another purpose, and DHS cannot continue assembling the data lake described in the lawsuit.

The opinion also sharpened a divide that has defined this year’s election cases. Administration lawyers framed broad data collection as a way to protect elections from unlawful voting, while challengers argued that the same machinery exposed lawful voters to privacy violations and mistaken removal.

Sooknanan sided with the challengers in unusually blunt terms. Her opinion said the government had not merely stretched existing programs but had “knowingly” used unreliable data in a way that put citizens’ voting rights at risk, language likely to shape any appeal and any future attempt to redesign SAVE again.

By the end of the day, the Trump administration’s push for a federal system to police voter rolls had run into two separate court orders, one in Washington and one in Maryland. Sooknanan’s warning was narrower and sharper: a government that mishandles private records and mislabels citizens cannot keep building a database that touches the right to vote.