US judge blocks Trump administration's database of Americans' private information

A US federal judge has struck down a Trump administration database containing US citizens' private information, ruling it unlawful after several states used it to mistakenly purge eligible citizens from voter rolls.

Image: Photo by Kent NISHIMURA / AFP

A US federal judge has struck down a Trump administration database containing US citizens' private information, ruling it unlawful after several states used it to mistakenly purge eligible citizens from voter rolls.

"The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens," Judge Sparkle Sooknanan from the US District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in a ruling.

Federal agencies were scrambling to comply with an executive order aimed at reshaping federal elections, so they "haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable," Sooknanan said.

"Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information," she continued.

"This case implicates two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government overreach: the right to privacy and the right to vote," according to the U.S. district judge.

The latest ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed in September by a coalition of voting-rights and privacy advocates, led by the League of Women Voters, challenging changes to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, a system maintained by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to verify citizenship and immigration status.

In March 2025, Trump signed a sweeping executive order to overhaul US elections that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, claiming that the United States has not adequately enforced federal election requirements.

Executive Order 14248 instructed certain federal agencies, including the DHS and the Social Security Administration, to put systems in place for state and local authorities to verify the citizenship or immigration status of registered voters or individuals registering to vote, according to the ruling.

In a statement, the League of Women Voters said that "a Trump-Vance administration attempt to unlawfully meddle in elections was struck down today, as a federal judge ordered the administration to end and disentangle a massive government database."

The database "consolidates millions of Americans' sensitive and legally protected personal information, leaving them vulnerable to baseless investigations and being unlawfully purged from voter rolls," the statement said.

Xinhua

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