The Trump Administration’s Latest Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Voting Rights Action

We have all seen footage of ICE agents grabbing people off the street, separating parents from children, and using force against both the people they are detaining and bystanders. Simultaneously, and harder to see, the federal government is also working in quieter ways so that many immigrants, including naturalized citizens, could end up with fewer rights and protections. This is a major concern, and there’s a way the general public can issue dissent over the next couple of weeks.

Earlier this year, the Trump Administration announced that it was changing the terms of a program that’s used to verify immigration status called SAVE (which stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, a horrible name). The SAVE Program has existed since the 1980s and has grown over the years. Until now, it has shared some information about immigrants between the federal government’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and participating states and municipalities, which have used that information to determine who is eligible for various state and local programs.

Now, the Trump Administration has dramatically expanded the confidential information that the SAVE system uses, building a massive database full of peoples’ sensitive information. According to the public advocacy organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), DHS recently added the ability to conduct bulk searches of anyone in the Social Security Administration database, including U.S.-born citizens. And, the Trump Administration is now working with 26 states to use the system to determine who is eligible to vote. This may seem like bureaucratic minutia, but it’s not.

“The Trump Administration is encouraging states to run their entire voter rolls through the new system, and the system is providing states lists of individuals who DHS believes may be non-citizen voters,” CREW explains. According to CREW, which has sued DHS over SAVE’s expansion, states have already started purging voters and are seeking to open criminal investigations based on information in the SAVE system. In other words, the expanded use of the SAVE system is already targeting naturalized citizens, and the federal government could be poised to purge many of those naturalized citizens, and potentially other Americans, from the voter rolls.

This all tracks with the Trump Administration’s long-term goals, because there’s another very visible form of authoritarianism that we have all witnessed: The federal government, Republican officials, conservative judges, and rightwing activists have been aggressively suppressing the right to vote and the right to fair representation, especially for racial minorities.

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Just a few examples: Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Republican state lawmakers heeded President Trump’s call to gerrymander their state’s Congressional districts with the expressed intent of diminishing Democratic representation, which voting rights advocates say depresses Black and Latino representation (a federal court agreed and just blocked the new map). At least 16 states have enacted over 29 voting restrictions just this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Over the past 15 or so years, many states have ramped up their onerous voting laws, and reams of research has shown those laws disproportionately limit minority voters’ access to the ballot. Sometimes the laws explicitly focus on limiting immigrant civic participation. One 2023 Florida omnibus law imposed numerous restrictions on voter registration drives, including levying up to $250,000 in penalties for community groups who had non-citizen staff or volunteers help with voter registration efforts (that provision was thrown out by the court, though other restrictions remain). Over the next six months, the Supreme Court, with its billionaire-funded conservative super-majority, is considering one case that could limit when mail-in ballots are counted and another that could gut what remains of the landmark Civil Rights Era achievement, the Voting Rights Act.

At the same time, the Trump Administration expanding the SAVE system fits into a much broader, multi-pronged strategy to surveil and marginalize immigrants, communities of color, and those associated with them – including citizens. Given that the Trump administration has contracted out the construction of a mass surveillance apparatus, the expansion of the SAVE system can also be seen as yet another canary of what’s to come for both naturalized and U.S.-born citizens’ privacy and security.

Earlier this year, DHS added millions of Americans’ Social Security data to the SAVE system. Then, DHS expanded its passport, driver’s license, and visa information. The Trump Administration is running names through the system en masse, allegedly trying to root out voter fraud. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had run more than 33 million voters through SAVE as of mid-September, the agency told NPR. According to ProPublica, documents obtained by the ACLU, which sued over the SAVE Program, showed that as of this August, about 96.3% of the voters checked via the SAVE Program were identified as U.S. citizens.

There’s a lot of room for error when the government runs names through the SAVE system, according to reporting from ProPublica. Information can be mismatched across different government systems for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with fraud. A driver’s license can list a former address in another state; someone could have changed their last name. Multiple analyses of the Social Security Administration’s citizenship data has shown that information in the system is often outdated or incomplete.

Naturalized citizens are most likely to have inconsistent information across systems, for totally legitimate reasons. Now that the Trump Administration is giving states the green light to purge voters because of those inconsistencies and elections officials will have discretion over whether to purge those people from the voting rolls en masse. In multiple states, election officials promote Trump’s false claims that voting fraud is a rampant problem. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, in just one example, has been very loud about his office investigating and seeking prosecution for alleged voting fraud specifically related to non-citizens. So, as the government expands its use of the SAVE system, it’s reasonable to assume that there will be naturalized citizens who will be denied the ability to vote.

“The Trump Administration is hunting people to try to purge people from the rolls who are lawfully registered, and they are doing it by looking at unreliable, outdated data,” Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters of the United States, told ProPublica.

The League of Women voters was among the organizations that sued the government over its new uses for the SAVE system. As a result of that lawsuit, the government was required to hear public comments over the expanded SAVE system.

The general public can file a comment before the deadline of midnight December 1, 2025. Federal agencies are required to consider all substantial comments when moving forward with their rule change. Given the reality of the Trump Administration, does that mean that the federal government will genuinely consider arguments about why expanding the SAVE system is a threat to privacy, security, and voting rights? Maybe not.

But it’s critical not to give up in advance. As dark money expert Connor Gibson told Democracy News, that you can’t control everything doesn’t mean that you can’t influence some things, especially collectively. We still live in a country where we have the opportunity to make our voices heard. Just like marching in a protest, submitting a public comment is a way to issue dissent.

You can submit a comment in opposition to the Trump Administration expanding the SAVE system here.