Supreme Court greenlights national citizenship database ahead of midterms

The Supreme Court granted an emergency request letting the Trump administration revive a national citizenship-verification database that draws on Social Security numbers, overturning a lower court's block on privacy-law grounds. The modified SAVE system, created under a Trump executive order, now folds in natural-born citizens' records and allows bulk searches, alongside a separate ‘Interagency Data System’ combining Social Security numbers, biometric data, tax records, employment and medical information at USCIS.

The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who sued in September, called it an ‘error-laden master citizenship database’ endangering millions of Americans' privacy and voting rights, comparing it to Orwell's surveillance state in ‘1984.’ The administration countered that SAVE doesn't disqualify any voter itself, merely notifies states, so challengers should sue the states instead.

DHS says the system processes millions of citizenship checks weekly for voter rolls and benefits eligibility, and argued that blocking the upgrade would force it back onto an ‘older, more cumbersome’ version ahead of November's elections.

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