A federal database used by Mississippi for voter citizenship verification is unlawful and cannot be used in its current form due to changes President Donald Trump made, a federal judge ruled on Monday.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan said in an order explaining the decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

What immediate effect that will have for Mississippi is unclear. Earlier this year, Gov. Tate Reeves signed the SHIELD Act into law, allowing the secretary of state to enter the entire state’s voter roll into the SAVE database. Voting applicants who are flagged by the check will receive notice from the State and have 30 days to prove U.S. citizenship in order for their application to be approved. 

The secretary of state is also required by the law to check the voter rolls against the SAVE database no later than 180 days before a regularly scheduled federal election.

The Mississippi Free Press reached out to Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office for comment, but did not receive a response before press time.

Sooknanan said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans’ personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that created the SAVE program “knew that the database violates those statutory protections.”

The decision is a major legal setback for President Donald Trump in his efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the second election executive order the Republican president signed earlier this year. The ruling leaves its future uncertain.

“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said of the ruling in a social media post.

The department referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice did not immediately return a request for comment.

The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. At least 25 states, including Mississippi, have used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.

The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens, had alleged the revamped SAVE program violated Americans’ privacy and voting rights. The groups also alleged the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring transparency requirements about the changes to the system.

“The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” the judge wrote. “So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

Plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus told the court during the October hearing that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of unlawfully being purged from voter rolls.

“They are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database,” said Sus, an attorney for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Sus said Monday he sees Sooknanan’s ruling as an “across the board victory” and noted the plaintiffs were pleased the judge’s ruling reinforced their argument that the federal government doesn’t have implied authority to freely share sensitive data across agencies.

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Mississippi Free Press Assistant Editor Kevin Edwards contributed to this report. Swenson reported from New York.

Assistant Editor Kevin Edwards joins the MFP after spending more than six years in newspapers around Mississippi. A native of El Paso, Texas, Kevin moved to Cleveland in Bolivar County when he was 10 years old and has spent most of his life in the Mississippi Delta. He graduated from Delta State University with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in liberal studies, as well as a master’s in journalism from the University of Memphis. Following his education, he spent a year with the Birmingham, Alabama-based nonprofit Impact America in its Memphis office as an AmeriCorps member, providing free vision screenings to young children and free tax preparation for working families. His time as a reporter includes nearly four years with The Greenwood Commonwealth in Greenwood, as well as The Bolivar Commercial in Cleveland and The Commercial Dispatch in Columbus. Kevin lives in Sidon, just outside Greenwood city limits in Leflore County.

Ali Swenson reports on election-related misinformation, disinformation and extremism for The Associated Press.

Fatima Hussein reports on the U.S. Treasury Department for The Associated Press. She covers tax policy, sanctions and any issue that relates to money.

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