A Biden-appointed federal judge voided the Justice Department’s nationwide voter-list citizenship checks, blocking even voluntary state cooperation ahead of the midterms in a major setback to election-integrity work.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington issued a 78-page ruling Friday that struck down the Justice Department’s entire voter list maintenance policy and invalidated it across the country. The decision halted a Trump administration effort to collect unredacted state voter registration records, share them with the Department of Homeland Security, and check citizenship status through the federal SAVE database.

The Hill reported that the order reached beyond unwilling states and barred the program from continuing even where states had already agreed to take part. At least 18 states had complied with the DOJ requests under the policy.

The program followed an executive order from President Trump directing federal officials to work with states to identify potential election-law violations. Participating states had agreed to remove voters flagged as ineligible within 45 days of notification. The Justice Department sought names, addresses, and partial Social Security numbers so DHS could run citizenship checks.

Common Cause and four voters sued in April, accusing the administration of building what they called a “sprawling new voter surveillance and purging apparatus” ahead of November’s midterm elections. Sooknanan, appointed by former President Joe Biden, sided with them and vacated the policy nationwide.

Judge says DOJ ran past privacy limits and state authority

Sooknanan held that the Justice Department exceeded its legal authority and violated federal privacy laws by requesting sensitive voter information and sharing it with other agencies to identify citizenship status. She found the department failed to weigh adequately the risk of mistakenly removing eligible voters even while knowing federal citizenship records contain inaccuracies.

She pointed to a 2006 Social Security Administration audit that found approximately 3.3 million U.S. citizens misidentified as noncitizens. In the ruling she wrote that the vacated policy “has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more.”

In another passage she stated:

"DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of American people,"

The New York Post reported that Sooknanan cast the policy as a federal attempt to decide who gets to vote and stressed that Congress left that authority with the states under the Constitution. The same account noted the DOJ has lost 26 of 30 related lawsuits against states that refused to hand over unredacted rolls, without a single win.

Ming Cheung, an ACLU lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the decision shows the administration cannot use the federal government to disrupt elections. The court framed the fight as one over constitutional placement of election authority rather than a narrow records dispute.

That courtroom pattern fits a wider run of fights in which judges have moved quickly against Trump administration priorities, including cases where a federal judge froze border barrier work in Texas.

Expanded SAVE checks swept tens of millions of registrations

Breitbart reported that at least 25 states used the expanded SAVE system since April 2025 and scanned at least 67 million registrations. Sooknanan ruled the revamped tool unlawful for aggregating sensitive personal data in ways that risk wrongly purging voters and barred its use for that purpose.

She wrote that the federal government “has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” and added, “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.” The decision marks a legal setback to the administration’s second election executive order and to efforts aimed at removing noncitizens from the rolls.

SAVE, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, was the vehicle DHS used once DOJ shared the state files. The judge’s order treats the collection, sharing, and matching steps as a single unlawful policy rather than separate technical tasks.

Appellate courts have sometimes restored Trump tools after lower-court blocks, as when the Supreme Court restored the SAVE system so states could verify voter citizenship. This district-court ruling now tees up the next round of that fight.

House Republican moves to impeach over the order

Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ) announced he will introduce articles of impeachment against Sooknanan. The Washington Examiner reported that he called the decision the final straw and described it as an egregious overreach that blocked a common-sense effort to verify the citizenship of people who want to vote.

Hamadeh wrote that the ruling was “a blatant and unlawful subversion of the President’s executive authority and a direct assault on election integrity.” The administration plans to appeal. The impeachment push frames the dispute as more than a technical privacy fight and puts the Biden-appointed judge’s nationwide vacatur squarely in the political crosshairs.

Separate DOJ courtroom battles have cut both ways in recent months. In one matter a federal judge rejected an SPLC bid to dismiss a Trump DOJ fraud case, showing not every bench has closed the door on department enforcement theories.

State rolls, federal matching, and the midterm clock

The practical design was straightforward. DOJ asked states for full registration files. DHS ran those files against SAVE. States that opted in pledged to act within 45 days on voters marked ineligible. The judge’s nationwide vacatur stops that pipeline even in cooperative states and leaves citizenship matching to whatever tools states already had without the federal data share.

Plaintiffs argued eligible Americans faced wrongful removal. The court accepted that risk as decisive, citing the old SSA audit and the known limits of federal citizenship files. The administration’s stated aim was identifying potential election-law violations and keeping noncitizens off the rolls before November voting.

Those two descriptions of the same program now sit in open conflict on the record: one side sees basic list maintenance with federal help; the other sees an unlawful centralization of sensitive data that endangers lawful voters. Sooknanan’s order resolves the conflict, for now, by shutting the federal collection channel down everywhere.

Other Trump-era justice fights have turned on similar questions of who controls charging and personnel decisions, including the episode in which Trump publicly broke with Pirro after DOJ dropped a felony charge. The voter-roll case raises the parallel issue of how far a single district judge can reach when states and the executive branch already agreed to work together.

The ruling does not invent a new right to skip citizenship checks. It holds that this specific federal method of gathering state rolls and running them through SAVE stepped past statutes and privacy limits. Whether appellate judges keep that nationwide remedy in place will decide if cooperative states can restart the matching work before ballots go out.

Clean elections require knowing who is eligible to vote. When a single district judge voids a citizenship-check pipeline that dozens of states already used, voters are left to wonder who benefits from keeping the verification tools offline.