Supreme Court Clears Trump Admin to Use Voter Citizenship Verification

The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way in a 6-3 decision, for the Trump administration to move forward with its plan to use a modified centralized database to verify voters’ citizenship. In a seven-page opinion issued just 39 days before the Nov. 3, 2026, election, the justices paused a ruling by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that had blocked the government from doing so on the ground that it violated (among other things) federal privacy laws,” SCOTUS Blog reports.

The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to resume its expanded voter citizenship verification program, which lets states use Social Security records to check voters’ citizenship.

Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented.

The unsigned emergency stay lifts the lower-court injunction by Biden-appointee, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, which agreed with the challengers that the modified SAVE system violates federal privacy laws, the Social Security Act, and the federal laws governing administrative agencies, and she barred the government from using it.

The Supreme Court has now allowed the Trump administration to proceed with a modified version of the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database for voter citizenship checks.

The majority concluded that a 1996 immigration statute, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, likely authorizes Department of Homeland Security to request and receive citizenship and immigration-status information from other federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration, notwithstanding other privacy restrictions. The Court also held that the district court’s order blocked the federal government from assisting states with “individualized” verification requests in the run-up to the November 3 midterms.

SCOTUS Blog reports:

On Sept. 4, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit turned down the government’s request to pause Sooknanan’s order while its appeal moves forward, but the court fast-tracked the appeal, directing the litigants to quickly propose a briefing schedule. The litigants subsequently agreed to postpone any briefing in that court until the Supreme Court acts on the Trump administration’s emergency appeal.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer went to the Supreme Court on Sept. 8, asking the justices to freeze Sooknanan’s ruling while the litigation continues. Sooknanan’s decision, he wrote, was an “indefensible order that threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by States to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.” Moreover, he argued, Sooknanan did not have the power to enter her order because the challengers do not have a legal right to sue, known as standing. Among other things, he contended, the federal government is not the source of any injury that the challengers and their members might suffer, because the SAVE system “merely notifies the States whether the federal government can confirm citizenship.”

Justices Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissented, arguing that the majority misread the statutes, downplayed privacy and accuracy problems in the expanded database, and undervalued the risk of eligible voters being wrongly flagged or removed.