A new complaint says DHS data seizure leads to citizens being kicked off voter rolls

Even before he won re-election, President Donald Trump and His supporters Put immigration at the center of their messages. In addition to other conspiracy theories, the right has gotten into it all False claim That immigrants were voting illegally in large numbers. The Trump administration has since flowed in Billions of dollars In immigration enforcement, in March, Trump issued an order Executive order Requiring DHS to ensure that states have “access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals who are or are already registered to vote.”

In May, DHS began encouraging states to verify voter rolls against immigration data through the Systematic Alien Verification of Entitlements (SAVE) program, administered by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). SAVE now has access to data from across the federal government, not just on immigrants but on citizens as well.

The experts have to caution Using disparate sources of data — all collected for different purposes — can lead to errors, including identifying U.S. citizens as non-citizens.

According to prosecutors in New Legal complaintThis seems to be happening already.

The complaint, filed against the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration (SSA) in Washington, D.C. District Court by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), alleges that the new expansion of SAVE has led to the exclusion of U.S. citizens from state voter rolls and that the creation of what amounts to a national citizenship data bank is unconstitutional.

“Eligible American voters will be wrongly removed from voter rolls based on inaccurate data from the illegally repaired SAVE system,” says Nikhil Sus, deputy senior counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an attorney for the plaintiffs in this case. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

SAVE was created in 1986 as a way for states to check whether immigrants who applied for government services qualified for them and did not have access to information about natural-born U.S. citizens. But as the Trump administration sought to crack down on immigration, the Department of Homeland Security radically expanded the scope of that tool.

last april, WIRED reported That SAVE was querying data from the SSA, the Internal Revenue Service, and state voter data. On May 22, The Department of Homeland Security announced “Partnered” with the SSA and introduced SAVE as a tool that state and local governments can use to verify voters. The goal, according to USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser, was to “identify and prevent foreigners from hijacking our elections.” Twenty-two states, including Florida, Texas, and Louisiana, It has agreements in place To use SAVE to verify voters’ citizenship by bulk downloading information from voter rolls and personal identification information, the lawsuit alleges. But by doing so, the complaint says, some of these states are actually disenfranchising eligible voters.

In October, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson Announce The state identified 2,724 “probable noncitizens” who were registered to vote. One of them, Anthony Neal, is actually an American citizen. According to the complaint, SAVE identified Neal as a noncitizen “based on outdated data, which resulted in his electoral registration being wrongly canceled in December 2025.” In response to a request for comment, Texas Assistant Secretary of State for Communications Alicia Pierce referred WIRED to the October report. press release The country announced the results of its use of SAVE.

“We’re talking about a known error rate that will lead — and has already led — to many people being removed from the voter rolls and going to critical elections,” says John Davison, litigation director and chief counsel at EPIC, one of the plaintiffs in the case.