Immigrant rights group seeks to block use of federal databases it says
could purge legal voters
[September 03, 2026]
By MICHAEL R. BLOOD
LOS ANGELES (AP) — An immigrant rights group sued the Trump
administration Wednesday to block the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security from using federal databases that it alleged are being used to
target naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington on behalf of the
Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, alleges that DHS and the U.S.
Justice Department are interfering with fair elections by using
inaccurate federal databases in an attempt to buttress allegations of
voter fraud.
The federal government is engaging in an “attack on the freedom to
vote,” Angelica Salas, the coalition’s executive director, said at a
downtown Los Angeles news conference. “This is voter intimidation.”
The lawsuit — filed on behalf of the coalition by the UCLA Voting Rights
Project — becomes part of a swirl of legal moves that states, including
California, have taken to fend off federal actions that threaten to
create confusion during the midterms.
“It's not an accident the federal government is trying to interfere with
the right to vote. ... They believe they can intimidate naturalized U.S.
citizens,” said Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for California
governor who is acting as a senior adviser to the voting project.
Part of a broader effort to search for noncitizens on voter rolls
The lawsuit alleges that the administration might be comparing voter
rolls with undisclosed government databases. Those systems can include
outdated information and be riddled with errors, it said, and could
produce inaccurate results that disproportionately affect naturalized
voters.
“Comparing government databases to try and arrive at a list of
noncitizen registrants has been shown to result in erroneous data,” the
lawsuit said. “Congress has never authorized such activities and in fact
has ... prohibited invasion of voter privacy through government data
matches in this way.”
The Trump administration has been targeting noncitizen voting to allege
it could be a source of significant fraud during the midterm elections,
even though actual voting by people who are not citizens is rare. He is
pushing for the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters
verified as U.S. citizens, and his Justice Department has sued to force
the release of detailed voter data in 30 states and the District of
Columbia, though it has not yet succeeded in those cases.
Asked to respond to the lawsuit, a DHS spokesperson said in an email:
“The department accessed publicly available data from states’ voter
rolls and cross referenced them with known illegal aliens in our
systems. It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our
elections.”
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“DHS is laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote
and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens,” the
statement added.
Judge had previously halted use of a federal citizenship database
In June, a federal judge ruled that a recently revamped version of a
federal tool can no longer be used, which critics had referred to as
an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information.
U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy
groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called
Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated
Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in
voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.
The lawsuit said it isn’t clear if the administration used that
system to generate projections about noncitizens on voting rolls in
the states or if other unknown datasets were involved.
By May, the Trump administration had run millions of voter
registrations through government databases to determine their
eligibility, a process that critics feared could purge valid voters
from the rolls before the November elections. At least 67 million
registrations, primarily from Republican-controlled states, have
gone through a beefed-up verification program, or SAVE, at the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, and tens of thousands of those have
been flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died.
State officials push back against DHS noncitizen claims
Specifically, the lawsuit by the immigrant rights group asks the
court to stop the administration from pursuing a review of
California’s voter list and to rescind the letter sent to the state
requesting voter information. It also asks the court to declare the
administration’s actions unconstitutional.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is claiming without
providing evidence that 250,000 noncitizens might be on the rolls in
just four states, including 190,832 in California.
California’s secretary of state, Democrat Shirley Weber, said in
response, “I have serious doubts about the reliability of your data
and accuracy of your claims, since my office has not shared our
statewide voter registration list with DHS or any other federal
agency or official.”
According to the lawsuit, federal officials have not disclosed
evidence supporting those figures.
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