The Supreme Court, in a late Friday order, allowed the Trump administration to move forward with a “modified system” for verifying voter citizenship aimed at noncitizens — a decision that came through the court’s so-called shadow docket and drew a pointed dissent from three liberal justices.
Ruling on a stay request, a majority of the justices put on hold a lower-court order from U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who was appointed by President Biden. That order had blocked the government from using a recently altered version of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.
The case, brought by the League of Women Voters, had already gone against the administration twice — both the district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the government’s attempt to use the database to screen noncitizens from voter rolls.
Back in June, Judge Sooknanan wrote a 75-page opinion framing the dispute as one touching on core rights to privacy and to vote. She concluded the revamped SAVE system likely ran afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act, criticizing what she described as the government’s push to build “a centralized federal database that contains the private information of United States citizens, including Social Security numbers, citizenship status, and other sensitive data.”
The D.C. Circuit later declined to disturb that summary judgment ruling and refused to grant a stay while the appeal played out, noting that the government had “forfeited arguments” it was now trying to raise.
With no full briefing, no oral argument, and no named author, the Supreme Court’s majority has now handed the administration a win on an issue central to its midterm election strategy.
According to the high court, the spring 2025 changes to the SAVE database fall squarely within what federal law already permits. “The plaintiff organizations claim that the federal defendants violated the Social Security Act, Privacy Act, and APA,” the unsigned order states. “In 1996, Congress, however, separately and expressly authorized DHS to request and receive information relating to citizenship and immigration status from other agencies, including SSA, in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA).”
The justices pointed to that statute alongside a related provision stating that “no person or agency may prohibit, or in any way restrict” the government from “[s]ending such information to, or requesting or receiving such information from, the [DHS].” Taken together, the majority reasoned, these laws bar any interference with disclosing citizenship information to DHS.
“Congress necessarily authorized DHS to request and receive that information,” the per curiam order says. “Otherwise, agencies, entities, and officials could find themselves in [an] impossible predicament” — forced to choose between violating privacy statutes or violating immigration law.
“It is improbable that Congress intended to place officials in such a bind when it passed IIRIRA, so [IIRIRA] likely supersedes restrictions on disclosure elsewhere,” the order continues, describing the revised SAVE program as “an important federal program” and predicting the court will ultimately reverse the district court’s finding that it violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the APA.
“Under [federal law], the Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters,” the order adds. “The order below prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”
The court did note one limit: a federal voting-rights law bars bulk removal of names from voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Still, the order clarifies, the government remains free to “conduct individualized inquiries, which are permitted under federal law during this period.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, criticizing both the process and substance of the ruling. Echoing familiar objections to the court’s use of emergency orders, she noted the decision came “without full briefing or oral argument” and questioned the wisdom of the justices “rendering questionable interim rulings about two statutory provisions it has never before interpreted.”
“The Court also focuses only on the harms the Government will purportedly suffer absent a stay, disregarding the harms that the modified SAVE system has caused, and will likely continue to cause, to lawful voters,” Jackson wrote. “The Court thus misuses its equitable powers.”
She went further on the substance, accusing the majority of offering a “back-of-the-napkin assessment” in concluding that “two IIRIRA provisions that we have never before interpreted” can override an entire body of privacy law.
Jackson closed by arguing that the balance of harms clearly favors voters: “The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.”
