Even before winning reelection, President Donald Trump and his supporters put immigration at the center of their message. In addition to other conspiracy theories, the right wing has gone all in false claim that immigrants are voting illegally in large numbers. The Trump administration has since poured in billion dollars to immigration enforcement, and in March, Trump issued a executive order which requires the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that states have “access to appropriate systems to verify the citizenship or immigration status of individuals who are registered to vote or who are already registered.”

In May, DHS began encouraging states to check their voter rolls against immigration data using the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, operated by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). SAVE now has access to data from across the federal government, not just on immigrants but on citizens as well.

The experts have Warned that the use of different data sources—all collected for different purposes—could lead to errors, including identifying US citizens as non-citizens.

According to the plaintiffs in a new legal complaintseems to have happened.

The complaint, filed against the DHS and the Social Security Administration (SSA) in Washington, DC, District Court of the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), says that the new expansion of SAVE has led to American citizens being removed from state voter rolls and that the creation of a national citizenship data bank is unconstitutional.

“Eligible US citizen voters may be wrongly purged from voter rolls based on inaccurate data from the illegally overhauled SAVE system,” said Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is the plaintiffs’ attorney in the case. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

SAVE was created in 1986 as a way for states to check whether immigrants applying for government services are eligible to receive them, and it does not have access to information on natural-born American citizens. But as the Trump administration seeks to crack down on immigration, DHS is radically expanding its tools.

Last April, WIRED reported that SAVE queries data from the SSA, Internal Revenue Service, and state voter data. On May 22, Notified by DHS a “partnership” with SSA and launched SAVE as a tool for state and local governments to verify voters. The goal, according to USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser, is to “identify and stop aliens from hijacking our elections.” Twenty-two states, including Florida, Texas, and Louisiana, have agreements in place to use SAVE to verify the citizenship of voters through multiple uploads of information from voter rolls and personal identification information, the lawsuit alleges. But in doing so, the complaint argues, some of these states are disenfranchised voters.

In October, Texas secretary of state Jane Nelson Office has partnered that the state has identified 2,724 “potential non-citizens” who are registered to vote. One of them, Anthony Nel, is actually a US citizen. According to the complaint, SAVE identified Nel as a non-citizen “based on outdated data, which resulted in his voter registration being erroneously canceled in December 2025.” In response to a request for comment, Texas assistant secretary of state for communications Alicia Pierce referred to WIRED in October press release where the state communicated the findings from its use of SAVE.

“We’re talking about a known error rate that will result—and has resulted—in many people being left off the voter rolls, going into a critical election,” said John Davisson, EPIC’s director of litigation and senior counsel, who is one of the plaintiffs in the case.