A federal judge has ruled that the U.S. Department of Justice has no legal right to demand voter registration data from the states, delivering what voting-rights lawyers are calling a major setback to a Trump administration effort to compile a nationwide list of alleged noncitizen voters. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s ruling, issued just before Democracy Docket’s Oct. 11, 2026 report on the case, also barred DOJ from continuing to use voter data it had already obtained from 18 cooperating Republican-led states.
The Program the Ruling Targets
At issue is a DOJ initiative to collect voter-roll data from all 50 states, run the records through the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, and flag individuals the program identifies as potential noncitizens for states to remove from their rolls. Sooknanan’s order found the underlying data-collection effort exceeded DOJ’s authority, writing that the court was vacating “a policy that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls” — a direct rebuttal to the administration’s framing of the initiative as narrowly targeted at ineligible registrants. Critically, the ruling does not touch states’ own ability to screen voters through SAVE on a voluntary basis, an approach the U.S. Supreme Court had separately allowed to continue.
Why 18 States Are Affected Differently
The ruling’s bar on DOJ’s continued use of previously collected data applies specifically to information already handed over by 18 Republican-led states that cooperated with the federal request before the litigation was resolved. Those states now face the practical question of whether data already shared can be meaningfully walled off from further federal use, even though the court has ordered DOJ to stop using it. The decision leaves unresolved how DOJ’s separate, broader push for a national citizenship list — the subject of other ongoing litigation — will be affected going forward.
ICE’s Parallel Role Comes Into View
The ruling landed alongside new reporting, based on documents obtained by Democracy Docket and its allied group Democracy Forward, describing a parallel effort by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to amass tens of millions of voter records. Much of that data reportedly flowed through Heather Honey, a longtime election-denial activist who now holds a senior position at the Department of Homeland Security. The documents reportedly show ICE investigated hundreds of voter-registration organizations and attempted to upload voter data into a system operated by Palantir, the data-analytics company founded by Peter Thiel, though a source told reporters that upload never went through. The documents also reportedly discuss the possibility of deporting roughly 400 noncitizens in New Jersey who were mistakenly added to the voter rolls and subsequently cast ballots. Democracy Forward has since filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against ICE seeking additional records on the program.
A Second Front: 1,000 Election Monitors
The same week’s reporting also detailed DOJ plans to deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors nationwide this fall, a scale advocacy groups describe as unprecedented. The NAACP has filed its own lawsuit seeking more information about how the monitor program will operate. Separately, documents reviewed by reporters show DOJ already used criminal prosecutors and an FBI agent in monitoring roles during Arizona’s primaries this year, including David Michael Levin, a DOJ attorney convicted in 2016 of hacking election websites, who was assigned to monitor voting in Minnesota and in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Competing Views on the Ruling
Voting-rights advocates have framed Sooknanan’s decision as confirmation that the administration’s voter-data push exceeded its statutory authority and put eligible citizens at risk of erroneous removal. Administration officials and allied state election officials have defended the SAVE-based screening as a legitimate tool against noncitizen registration, and some Republican secretaries of state continue to use SAVE on a voluntary, state-initiated basis — the piece of the broader program the ruling leaves untouched. That split means the practical fight over noncitizen-voter screening is far from over, even with DOJ’s specific data-demand program now blocked.
What’s Next
The ruling is likely to be appealed, and its interaction with the separate national citizenship list litigation remains unsettled, meaning further court action is likely before the full legal picture is clear. In the meantime, voting-rights groups are watching whether DOJ will comply with the order to stop using data from the 18 states that already shared it, whether ICE’s data-gathering continues despite the new FOIA suit, and how the department’s 1,000-monitor deployment plan takes shape as early voting approaches in several states this fall.
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