Trump administration sued over ‘Orwellian’ national citizenship database

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a Nashville press conference on July 18, 2025, to discuss arrests of immigrants during recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps. (John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

By Ryan Knappenberger

Courthouse News Service/States Newsroom

A coalition of voting rights groups filed a class action against the Trump administration Tuesday over its creation of a searchable national citizenship database, likening it to the dossiers the fictional Oceania kept on citizens in George Orwell’s “1984.”

The League of Women Voters — joined by chapters in Virginia and Louisiana as well as the Electronic Privacy Information Center — argue in the suit that the expansion of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements tool into a national data pool violates the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Constitution.

The coalition is urging a federal judge to declare the government’s actions unlawful, block administration officials from continuing to operate the database, order the erasure of all misappropriated data and publish notices in the Federal Register disclosing details of the illegal data collection.

According to the plaintiffs in their 66-page lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Government Efficiency have engaged in a months-long process to “access, collect and consolidate” troves of personal data on millions of U.S. citizens and residents.

Such data was held by agencies like USCIS, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, the IRS, the Department of Labor and several states’ election databases.

DOGE’s efforts to access the data troves were quickly challenged in court early in the Trump administration, and while several federal judges expressed concern regarding the data’s potential use, they ultimately denied requests to block DOGE’s access.

“Defendants’ goal is to create a web of linked data systems that allow centralized queries and analyses of millions of Americans’ most sensitive information,” the coalition wrote. “Defendants seek to unify data across the government to advance Trump administration priorities, including making it harder to vote, and ensuring that every contact between immigrants (regardless of their legal status) and government databases can be leveraged to support the administration’s agenda.”

The USCIS tool, also known as SAVE, was created in 1986 to allow federal, state, local or tribal governments to search an individual’s immigration and nationality status to determine their eligibility for a public benefit, a license or grant, a government credential, or to assist in a background check.

The coalition says that the administration transformed the SAVE tool by drawing on the Social Security Administration’s system of records and DHS systems of records the SAVE tool had previously accessed. In its overhauled form, over 1,200 agencies can find the citizenship or immigration status of an individual by searching their Social Security number.

Another concern is the fact that the Social Security Administration has admitted that its citizenship data — particularly for naturalized citizens and U.S.-born citizens born before 1981 — is incomplete, unreliable and not “definitive.”

The coalition argues that the Trump administration has encouraged states to use the unreliable data to begin purging voter rolls before the looming midterm elections this November, and to open criminal investigations of purported noncitizen voting.

“States such as Virginia, Louisiana and Texas are doing exactly that, imperiling the right to vote of naturalized citizens and others for whom SSA maintains outdated and inaccurate citizenship data,” the coalition says.

In addition to the SAVE tool, the Trump administration created another “Interagency Data System” that consolidates other governmental data sources that may have information concerning immigrants into a centralized “data lake” at USCIS, which includes millions of Americans’ Social Security numbers, biometric data, tax information, employment and medical records, among others.

Beyond potentially violating Americans’ privacy rights, the coalition argues, the data pools also create significant cybersecurity risks by “draw[ing] a bullseye for hackers” to target individuals’ previously protected sensitive information.

The lawsuit includes five pseudonymous plaintiffs who have been incorporated into the databases — including J. Doe 1, a university professor in Texas and a naturalized citizen, has had their Social Security information incorporated into the SAVE system despite inaccurately stating they are not a U.S. citizen.

The coalition is seeking a wider class of millions of citizens and permanent residents whose records have been “unlawfully pooled into new or revised centralized records systems at DHS,” as well as organizations whose members have had their data collected.

Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters slammed the data collection as an effort to illegally abuse historically disenfranchised communities in a statement announcing the suit.

“The federal government’s secretive and unlawful collection and consolidation of Americans’ personal data is a clear example of the constitutional crisis we are living through,” Stewart said. “Our federal government is abusing its power to access American’s personal information, and several states are using that private data to harm voters and our individual right to privacy.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

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