On June 22, 2026, a federal judge handed down a ruling that a recently revamped version of a federal tool that is critical to the Trump administration’s efforts to protect the integrity of the U.S. election system can no longer be used. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled in favor of advocacy groups that say the upgrades made to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, also known as SAVE, could result in voters being wrongly removed from voter rolls.
“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan went on to say in an order explaining the decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.” The judge’s decision is a huge blow to President Donald Trump’s attempts to utilize federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on having noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls.
The newly modified SAVE system, which President Trump’s critics called an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, was a key component of his second election executive order that was signed earlier this year. The ruling now leaves its future up in the air. James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security addressed the ruling in a post on social media.
“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” Percival quipped. DHS then referred to the post as its official comment on the ruling. In an email statement from the DOJ, the department explained that it would “continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship,” according to a report from the Associated Press.
The comments on the AP’s official X post about the ruling were spicy. One individual commented, “‘A federal judge.’ You mean one of the same corrupt radical TDS socialist judges who’s been overturned over and over from issuing unlawful TROs and lawsuits?” Someone else cracked a joke that hits harder than Mike Tyson in his prime.
“What’s the difference between a federal judge and God? God doesn’t think he’s a federal judge,” the person wrote. User Rob referred to Judge Sooknanan as a “foreign mercenary” who was placed on the bench to destroy America. “A foreign mercenary installed as a judge by the Obama complex to further destroy this country. It’s war. War is being waged against the United States and its people by foreign globalists and their treasonous American allies, the Obama complex,” Rob commented.
David Paulides commented on the post, “Wait a minute! That’s what federal databases were designed to do, weed out legal from illegals. Our country will never get back on track deporting these illegals if these radical left judges keep putting up roadblocks. If I was the administrator, I’d say push on people, keep using the database, it’s an illegal ruling by a partisan judge that has no basis in reality.”
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Another individual made an excellent comparison between trusting a database with voter information and the left’s push for Americans to trust Dominion voting machines which are notorious for glitches and other problems. “So using computerized Dominion voting machines is expected to be trustworthy and secure, but using a separate database is insecure and subject to errors? Sure,” the user said.