Legal ruling blocking Trump hunt for noncitizen voters may not help those already flagged
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
By Dion Nissenbaum, Votebeat
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A few days ago, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s use of a revamped immigration database to identify noncitizens who have registered to vote across the country.
The pointed 75-page ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said the federal government’s actions threatened Americans’ privacy and voting rights.
But what does it mean for the estimated 24,000 registered voters that the Department of Homeland Security said it has already identified for further investigation using the revamped system that’s now been deemed a threat to Americans’ privacy?
Sooknanan’s ruling doesn’t put a halt to any of the investigations that have been carried out in more than two dozen states that used the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, better known as SAVE, over the past year to identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls.
“The ruling turns the spigot off of a broken system, but it doesn’t go backwards in time,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “The reality is that the thousands of people that are caught up now in the system are still at risk.”
Texas, for example, flagged more than 2,700 people as potential noncitizens using the SAVE database. Last fall, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office said it had sent lists to county elections officials and asked them to investigate. As Votebeat previously reported, hundreds of the voters flagged for investigation had likely already proven their citizenship when registering to vote.
Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said most Texas counties had already completed their investigations. County officials sent out letters to those on the list and gave people 30 days to provide proof they were eligible to vote.
“Most of our jurisdictions went through the process and, I hate to say, kind of wiped their hands of it,” McGinn said. “As far as the counties are concerned, they completed their part of the process.”
While the exact number of people removed from voter rolls because of the check has not been made public, McGinn estimated that 75% to 80% of those in smaller counties have already been taken off the lists because they did not respond within the 30 days.
“Candidly, I think it was more political than practical in Texas,” he said. “You have 19 million registered voters in Texas and 2,700 is a small percentage. We still can’t consistently find evidence that ineligible voters are having an impact on elections, which speaks to how secure our elections process is.”
Dan Vicuña, the senior policy director for voting and fair representation at Common Cause, which filed a legal brief in support of the League of Women Voters’ lawsuit, said the judge’s ruling would at least give people who had been improperly removed from voter registration lists because of states’ use of SAVE a chance to challenge the decisions.
“It will provide some strong avenues for people who have been tossed to challenge that,” he said. “Obviously it would have been better if they had never had to deal with it in the first place.”
Vicuña said other lawsuits could provide more help to individual voters. Common Cause is currently suing several Texas counties that removed voters from their rolls based on the revamped SAVE system.
Other states using SAVE so far have flagged much smaller numbers of potential noncitizens registered. Louisiana said it identified about 400 potential noncitizen voters on its rolls (out of nearly 3 million registered voters) and found 83 who had voted in at least one election since the 1980s. In 2024, Georgia identified 20 potential noncitizen voters on its rolls (out of more than 8 million registered voters).
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger said in a statement that he was disappointed with the judge’s ruling and said he was still proceeding with a new check of its voter rolls to ensure no noncitizens were on the lists.
A top election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, recently referred more than 200 cases of potential noncitizen voters to the state and local prosecutors for potential prosecution.
Initially, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap said in February that his office had used SAVE to identify 137 potential noncitizens on the rolls and found 60 of those had voted in prior elections. That’s about 0.2% of the 60,000 voters it ran through the system, and a tiny fraction of the county’s total 2.5 million voters. Heap’s office and the state attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment on how the legal ruling might impact ongoing investigations.
Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.
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