Even before winning reelection, President Donald Trump and his supporters put immigration at the center of their messaging. In addition to other conspiracy theories, the right-wing went all in on the false claim that immigrants were voting illegally in large numbers. The Trump administration has since poured billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, and in March, Trump issued an executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that states have “access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered.”
In May, DHS began encouraging states to check their voter rolls against immigration data with the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, run 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.
Experts have warned that using disparate sources of data—all collected for different purposes–could lead to errors, including identifying US citizens as noncitizens.
According to the plaintiffs in a new legal complaint, it appears that it’s already happening.
The complaint, filed against DHS and the Social Security Administration (SSA) in the Washington, DC, District Court by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), alleges that the new SAVE expansion has led to American citizens being kicked off state voter rolls and that the creation of what amounts to a national citizenship data bank is unconstitutional.
“Eligible US citizen voters will be wrongfully purged from voter rolls based on inaccurate data from the illegally overhauled SAVE system,” says Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is counsel for the plaintiffs in the case. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
SAVE was created in 1986 as a way for states to check whether immigrants applying for government services were eligible to receive them, and it did not have access to information on natural-born American citizens. But as the Trump administration has sought to crack down on immigration, DHS has radically expanded the tool.
Last April, WIRED reported that SAVE was querying data from the SSA, the Internal Revenue Service, and state voter data. On May 22, DHS announced a “partnership” with the SSA and rolled out SAVE as a tool that state and local governments could use for voter verification. The goal, according to USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser, was to “identify and stop aliens from hijacking our elections.” Twenty-two states, including Florida, Texas, and Louisiana, have agreements in place to use SAVE to verify voters’ citizenship by bulk-uploading information from voter rolls and personal identification information, the suit alleges. But in doing so, the complaint argues, some of these states are already disenfranchising eligible voters.
In October, Texas secretary of state Jane Nelson announced that the state had identified 2,724 “potential noncitizens” who were registered to vote. One of those, Anthony Nel, is, in fact, a US citizen. According to the complaint, SAVE identified Nel as a noncitizen “based on outdated data, leading to his voter registration being wrongfully 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 press release where the state announced the findings from its use of SAVE.
“We’re talking about a known error rate that will result—and already has resulted—in multiple people being kicked off the voter rolls, going into a critical election,” says John Davisson, director of litigation and senior counsel at EPIC, which is one of the plaintiffs in the case.
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