The administration of President Donald Trump on Tuesday requested that the United States Supreme Court allow the reactivation of an expanded version of a federal system used to verify the citizenship of individuals registered in the electoral rolls, which has been blocked since June by a federal judge.
The request was submitted to the highest court in an emergency filing by Attorney General D. John Sauer, on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other officials from the Trump administration. The document requests to suspend the order of a federal court in Washington D.C. that blocked the modifications introduced in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system.
The resource arrives less than two months before the midterm elections on November 3, in which control of Congress will be at stake, and after a federal appeals court rejected the government's request last Friday to stay the initial ruling.
SAVE is a service managed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that allows government agencies to verify information regarding citizenship and immigration status. Until 2025, it had significant limitations, including the fact that inquiries typically required an immigration registration number, a detail that U.S. citizens by birth do not possess.
The Trump administration modified the system to allow searches using Social Security numbers and to process applications in bulk. By entering a person's information, SAVE checks records from the Social Security Administration and, when necessary, other federal systems to attempt to confirm their citizenship.
The change was linked to the executive order on electoral integrity signed by Trump on March 25, 2025, which instructed the DHS to ensure that state and local authorities could access mechanisms to verify the citizenship or immigration status of individuals trying to register or already registered to vote.
Trump's order aimed to strengthen controls to prevent non-citizens from participating in federal elections and required voter registration records to be kept up to date.
A judge blocked the system
The League of Women Voters, several of its state organizations, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) brought the SAVE amendments before the courts.
In June, Sooknanan determined that the modified system was illegal because it violated provisions of the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and ordered that both the updated system and the administrative notices related to its implementation be voided.
The judge also stated that some U.S. citizens had been affected by incorrect information. The record indicates that naturalized citizens whose Social Security records did not reflect their citizenship could erroneously appear as non-citizens.
The government, however, maintains that SAVE does not remove anyone from the voter rolls on its own, but rather informs states if the federal government can confirm their citizenship. When the system fails to do so, state authorities must request additional documentation before making a decision.
Government warns of impact on the elections
In his petition to the Supreme Court, Attorney General D. John Sauer described the judge's ruling as an "indefensible" order that, according to the administration, threatens the integrity of the upcoming elections by preventing the government from using Social Security data internally to respond to state requests for citizenship verification.
The government claims that since May 2025, the updated version of SAVE has allowed the verification of over 65 million voters as U.S. citizens in 26 states and has identified 28,635 individuals as potential non-citizens within the voter rolls. These figures are part of the arguments presented by the administration and do not, in themselves, indicate that these individuals have voted illegally.
The administration argues that reverting to the previous version would force the use of a "slower, more cumbersome, and less capable" mechanism and contends that any potential reversal of the ruling after the November elections would come too late to prevent the harm it claims.
The groups that challenged the system argue, on the contrary, that the use of outdated or incorrect information can force legitimate citizens to prove their citizenship again and even lead to the erroneous cancellation of their voter registrations. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government's prior request to lift the injunction on September 4.
The Supreme Court must now decide whether to temporarily suspend Sooknanan's decision and allow the Trump administration to fully utilize the modified SAVE while the litigation continues.
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