This article is made possible through Spotlight PA’s partnership with NOTUS, a nonpartisan news organization that covers government and politics with the fresh eyes of early career journalists and the expertise of veteran reporters.
Two federal judges have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to do the opposite thing, at the same time. This summer, conflicting court rulings over the use of Social Security numbers in a citizenship database have created an unusual legal dilemma within President Donald Trump’s aggressive push to create a voter verification system.
Last month, a federal judge in Washington sided with voting and privacy groups to halt government changes to the database, including a Social Security number search, ruling it “flunked compliance” with federal Social Security and privacy laws.
Days later, another federal judge in Florida ordered the government to reinstate those very features, when it comes to four states, finding that complying with the Washington ruling violated a settlement agreement in a separate lawsuit.
“The Court understands that this puts Defendants in a bind because they are subject to two contradictory orders,” T. Kent Wetherell, a U.S. district judge in Florida, wrote in a July 7 order. “One of the orders has to give.”
But which one?
DHS now faces a tangled legal process over the fate of an overhaul of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database. It was originally intended to track the status of immigrants in the country but was overhauled after a March 2025 executive order aimed at rooting out potential noncitizen voters.
That push to allow states to pare down voter databases before the midterms is moving forward in two courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. How it plays out will determine whether the administration can make sensitive information public to promote Trump’s sustained efforts to achieve what he calls election integrity, which have included pressure campaigns aimed at the states.
The dueling cases represent the complexities behind implementing the president’s aggressive — and often legislatively fallible — push to cut down on noncitizen voting, which is already an extremely rare occurrence. If the database is definitively shut down by a higher court, it would mark yet another defeat for the Trump administration on that front.
Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University whose work focuses in part on elections, said the conflicting orders are “quite rare for a bunch of reasons.”
“It is rare for the law to purport to require an agency to do something, and also for the law to purport to require an agency to do the opposite thing. It’s also quite rare because courts don’t like issuing inconsistent orders,” Levitt said.
Shut down
DHS updated the SAVE system in April 2025 and formalized the changes months later. The League of Women Voters sued DHS in September 2025, alleging that the SSN search feature constitutes a privacy violation amid broader concerns that the database itself is inaccurate and can lead to American citizens being erroneously flagged as ineligible to vote.
Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia shut down the expanded database in June with a 75-page ruling that determined the government’s disclosure of Social Security Administration records bypassed required procedures and confidentiality protections.DHS disabled a bulk-upload functionality and an SSN-search feature of the SAVE system as a result, according to court records.
But Florida — joined by Iowa, Ohio and Indiana — asked a judge to immediately restore access to those features as part of a settlement agreement reached with DHS in November. Wetherell’s July 7 ruling pointed to the states’ interests in ensuring that noncitizens are not on their voter rolls and that people who are unlawfully present in the U.S. do not receive professional licenses.
“Admittedly, the Court did not undertake an extensive assessment of the legality of the features that the settlement agreement required the SAVE system to include when it approved the agreement,” Wetherell, a Trump appointee, wrote in a footnote of his 10-page order, “but it would not have approved the agreement if it had any concern that those features were unlawful.”
DHS asked Sooknanan to pause her order, arguing in a court filing that the government faces “a significant risk that it would soon be forced into an impossible dilemma, in which compliance with all outstanding court orders is logically impossible.”
Sooknanan, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote a scathing denial of that petition, including the government’s argument related to the Florida case. “But with all due respect, that court, which was no doubt pressed for time with emergency briefing on a motion to enforce the consent decree over a holiday weekend, erred in significant ways,” she wrote.
The government then on July 8 asked the D.C. Circuit to pause Sooknanan’s order, again arguing in part that it “has forced DHS to maintain, at substantial cost, both the legacy SAVE and the upgraded system in parallel.”
Levitt said of the dueling opinions: “Some of this is, seems to me, bad behavior by the litigants, and some of it seems to be some bad behavior by the courts, but it has ended up in a mess.”
The League of Women Voters’ case will collide with Wetherell’s decision as it heads to D.C. Circuit Court sometime soon. It’s further complicated by a question of jurisdiction: The Florida case, if upheld, would only apply to the four states on the suit, while the other has wider national implications by being tried in D.C. and is more likely to prevail on merit, experts say.
David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the administration’s path forward is “not clear exactly.”
“I think [DHS] is in much more peril if it now changed the status quo and reactivated the SAVE system in light of the recent D.C. district court,” Becker told reporters on a Thursday call. “As opposed to if it maintained the status quo, told the courts, ‘Our hands are tied, tell us what to do,’ and took it up at the appellate court level. It’s not an ideal situation.”
DHS did not respond to a request for comment about how the agency will move forward with these conflicting judgments.
But more government directives are piling up in the meantime: Last week, the DOJ sent letters to the chief election officials of every state and D.C. threatening criminal prosecution if they knowingly allow noncitizens to vote.
The back-and-forth is likely headed to a higher court, legal experts said — potentially all the way to the Supreme Court — and it could be a long fight before states can use the overhauled SAVE database again. Meanwhile, states in the Florida case insist the expanded system is vital to election integrity.
“We want to keep that information private, but voting is really, really important. Who we elect is really, really important. Making sure that only American citizens can vote is really, really important,” Florida’s secretary of state, Cord Byrd, told NOTUS. “It’s always a weighing-and-balancing. The opponents of election integrity reform always roll out the list of horribles, and none of them ever come through.”