In an apparent admission of defeat, the Trump administration is dismantling the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, a controversial tool at the Department of Homeland Security to verify people’s citizenship that they had been hoping to run every registered voter in the country through.
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The news was broken on X by ProPublica reporter Jen Fifield on Tuesday.
It comes after U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a judge in Washington, D.C., who has shut down a number of President Donald Trump’s extralegal schemes, issued an order further prohibiting the use of SAVE as a violation of data privacy laws.
“The revamped tool allowed officials to check entire voter rolls for noncitizens, using partial or full Social Security numbers,” wrote Fifield, noting that prior reporting from ProPublica and the Texas Tribune “revealed that DHS had rushed it into use before it could discern voters’ most up-to-date citizenship information,” with the result that “hundreds of voters had been falsely flagged as potential noncitizens.”
This system was integral to the SAVE America Act, the controversial legislation pushed by Trump and Republican hardliners in Congress to curtail voting rights. Among much else, the law would have required all voter rolls in the country to be checked through the SAVE database.
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“It’s unclear if that provision will survive now,” wrote Fifield.
In a further indignity, she noted, even with all of the false positives being flagged by the system, SAVE “hasn’t validated President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that millions of noncitizens are registered to vote” for the time it was in use.
All of this comes as the SAVE America Act itself hit yet another dead end in Congress, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) failing in his attempt to pass a rule tying it to the national defense budget bill and leaving the House floor paralyzed.
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