By Tierney Sneed

(CNN) — The Trump administration violated federal privacy protections when it overhauled a citizen data program so that it could be used more aggressively to purge voter rolls, a federal judge said Monday.

The ruling from US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan is a major setback for President Donald Trump’s effort to find foreigners on state voter lists — an effort voter advocates and election officials say can wrongly ensnare citizens, risking the disenfranchisement of eligible voters. Sooknanan’s order halts the use of the expanded data system.

“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. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens,” said Sooknanan, an appointee of President Joe Biden.

The case centered on the federal data program known as SAVE — or the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — that has long been used by the government to verify citizenship for public benefits, but has also been offered to election officials to check voter rolls for noncitizens.

In the early months of Trump’s second term, his administration beefed up the program by expanding the types of data fed into the system, adding Social Security data and data from other agency sources.

Sooknanan wrote in her ruling Monday that the administration knew the revamp of SAVE violated privacy protections passed by Congress, but went forward with it anyway as part of a scramble “to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification.”

Since the overhaul, the administration has both encouraged states to use it, and as CNN reported Monday, now seeks to punish states that don’t.

The Justice Department has also gone on an unprecedented campaign to collect each state’s unredacted voter registration file so the federal government can check the rolls against the citizenship data program. A more recent executive order by Trump also instructs the Department of Homeland Security to use SAVE and other federal data sources to assemble lists of voting-age citizens for each state.

It’s unclear how this new ruling will impact those projects on a practical level, but some of those maneuvers were already facing pushback in court in other lawsuits.

DHS General Counsel James Percival panned the ruling.

“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan’s latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing alien voting is just the latest example!” Percival said on X.

The case before Sooknanan was brought by several voter advocacy organizations and a privacy group. The challengers argued that their privacy rights were being harmed and that their members faced the threat of being wrongly identified as noncitizens, because of how the SAVE system can be outdated or inaccurate.

“As the Trump-Vance administration continues its attack on the right to vote, this is an important victory for the American people and our democracy,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which represented the challengers. “The data at the heart of this lawsuit was unlawfully consolidated in violation of privacy laws intended to protect sensitive personal information.”

This story has been updated with additional details.

The-CNN-Wire
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