A federal judge in Florida ruled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must allow four Republican-led states to again use a federal database to search for noncitizens on their voter registration rolls.<\/p>\n
The decision conflicts with a previous ruling by a federal judge in Washington, D.C. that blocked<\/a> access to the database. It will likely unspool into a tangle of competing court orders in the coming months.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last month, District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan held that Trump\u2019s March 2025 executive order directing DHS to turn its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system into a deeply defective citizenship checker ignored privacy laws and violated the Constitution. Sooknanan\u2019s order effectively ended the expanded SAVE program, which had already been used to check the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters by Republican election officials.\u00a0<\/p>\n But District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherwell II issued a competing order Tuesday after Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Iowa petitioned for enforcement of a November 2025 settlement with DHS.\u00a0<\/p>\n The states had sued<\/a> DHS in 2024, arguing that the agency wasn\u2019t doing enough to help them uncover noncitizens<\/a> on their voting rolls during President Joe Biden\u2019s administration. After Trump took office, they settled with the government under an agreement providing access to DHS\u2019s SAVE system. The settlement also promised that DHS would implement the kind of upgrades \u2014 like the ability to conduct bulk searches using partial social security numbers (SSN) \u2014 that Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, explicitly enjoined in her decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n Wetherwell, a Trump appointee, ordered DHS to \u201cimmediately comply with the court approved settlement agreement in this case by reinstating Plaintiffs\u2019 access to the bulk-upload and SSN-search features in the SAVE system.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDefendants are plainly in violation of the settlement agreement because it is undisputed that they disabled the bulk-upload and SSN-search features that the agreement expressly required the SAVE system to have,\u201d Wetherwell wrote. \u201cThe fact that Defendants disabled those features to comply with Judge Sooknanan\u2019s order does not change the fact that they violated the agreement.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis Court is not bound by Judge Sooknanan\u2019s order, and with all due respect, the Court disagrees with the conclusions in that order,\u201d Wetherwell added.<\/p>\n The obvious conflict between the two federal court orders will trigger a rash of litigation, as parties try to leverage the two contradictory rulings against each other in a coming series of filings seeking stays, injunctions and appeals.\u00a0<\/p>\n The plaintiffs in the Washington D.C. lawsuit \u2014 the League of Women Voters (LWV) and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) \u2014 filed an amicus brief in the Florida lawsuit and will presumably look to appeal Tuesday\u2019s decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Trump administration appealed Sooknanan\u2019s decision to the D.C. Circuit Court last week, and LWV filed<\/a> its response Tuesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n Federal district court judges are not bound by their peers\u2019 decisions. And even if LWV and EPIC win in the D.C. Circuit Court, that ruling would not bind Wetherwell down in Florida.<\/p>\n