Washington, Sep 26 (IANS) The US Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to resume expanding a federal immigration database into a nationwide system for checking voter eligibility, setting aside a lower court order that cited privacy and accuracy concerns.
The unsigned order permits the Department of Homeland Security to expand its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE, with Social Security and other government information covering American citizens.
The ruling allows the database to be used for voter-eligibility checks ahead of the November midterm elections.
The court said the lower court’s injunction prevented the federal government from using the system it considered best suited to verifying voter information.
“The order below prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,” the Supreme Court said.
The decision is an interim order rather than a final ruling on the legality of the administration’s programme. It lifts restrictions imposed while the wider legal dispute continues.
The court said federal law limits large-scale changes to voter-registration lists shortly before an election. That restriction, it said, “limits the potential impact” of the expanded database during this year’s midterm elections.
States may still conduct individual searches using the system.
The ruling could affect naturalised American citizens, including Indian-origin voters, if their records are checked against immigration and Social Security information. Critics contend that inaccurate or incomplete data could wrongly identify eligible citizens as noncitizens.
The administration’s initiative stems from Trump’s March 2025 executive order titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”
SAVE was created to verify the immigration and citizenship status of people applying for certain public benefits. It previously contained information mainly about immigrants and naturalised citizens.
The Trump administration sought to combine that material with other federal records. The changes would also allow officials to conduct searches involving large numbers of people rather than checking one record at a time.
A federal appeals court in Washington had stopped the expansion. It found that the proposed changes were likely to violate federal privacy and administrative laws and raised questions about the accuracy of the data.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority set aside that decision.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined her.
Jackson said the lower court had correctly concluded that changing the system would probably violate federal law. She warned that allowing mass searches increased the risk that naturalised citizens could lose their voting rights because of errors.
“In my view, however, the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote.
Other elements of Trump’s March 2025 election order remain blocked by lower courts. They include a nationwide requirement that people provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
The database case is separate from another Trump executive order issued in March 2026. That order sought additional citizenship-verification measures and changes affecting federal elections.
Earlier in September, the Supreme Court blocked a US Postal Service rule arising from that later order that would have restricted mail voting. The court’s decisions mean that the administration may proceed with the SAVE database expansion but cannot implement the separate postal restrictions for the midterm elections.
–IANS
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