Trump thwarted in hunt for rare noncitizen voters as midterms near

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that states can use Homeland Security's SAVE system to check voter citizenship, but the decision lands during the federal 90-day quiet period that bars most mass voter roll purges before an election. That leaves election officials able to check only individual names, not run the sweeping scans Homeland Security has advertised.

Even the court's conservative majority acknowledged the ruling's 'limited immediate impact,' while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent argued that disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs any government interest in speed. A separate district court judge on Monday also blocked the administration's attempt to tie SAVE use to FEMA disaster grants, ruling the agency overstepped its authority.

Critics, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, say SAVE relies on outdated data prone to false matches, citing Texas cases where naturalized citizens' registrations were threatened over bad Social Security records. The White House, meanwhile, blamed Democrats for not passing a bill requiring proof-of-citizenship documents, a measure that remains stalled in the Senate.

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