The U.S. Supreme Court on September 25 let the Department of Homeland Security restore its expanded citizenship verification system, the tool Texas has used to run its full list of registered voters against federal records. In an unsigned order, the Court stayed a June 22 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that had set aside the modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE, while the government’s appeal goes forward. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
SAVE dates to 1986 and was built to check whether people applying for public benefits were eligible. In May 2025, after an executive order from President Trump, DHS added Social Security Administration records to it and let state and local officials search many people at once. When the system cannot confirm that someone is a citizen, the agency using it must contact that person and ask for proof of citizenship.
The League of Women Voters, including its Texas affiliate, sued along with other groups, arguing that the changes violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The Court’s order found the groups likely had standing but that their claims likely fail. It pointed to a 1996 immigration law, 8 U.S.C. 1373, which says that “notwithstanding any other provision of Federal, State, or local law” no government entity may restrict the sharing of citizenship information with DHS. By that clause, the order said, “Congress necessarily authorized DHS to request and receive that information.”
The State of Texas was in the case on the government’s side. It intervened in the district court and filed a brief through the attorney general’s office supporting the stay. Before the 2025 changes, Texas told the Court, it could not use SAVE because the system required identifiers such as an alien registration number that the Secretary of State does not keep. The state sued DHS in October 2024 to compel faster answers to its citizenship inquiries, and that suit is still pending. After DHS signed an agreement with the Secretary of State in March 2025 and opened the system to Social Security numbers, “Texas was able to run its entire list of 18 million voters through the SAVE program in bulk and for no cost,” the brief said.
Travis County argued the other way. The county, its tax assessor-collector and voter registrar Celia Israel, and County Clerk Dyana Limon-Mercado filed a brief urging the Court to deny the stay. Checking the SAVE results against other sources, they told the Court, the county “verified that at least 10% of the individuals listed as non-citizens were in fact U.S. citizens” and found that another 21 percent were highly likely to be citizens.
Jackson’s dissent said 27 states use SAVE to check voter eligibility. She wrote that the Court ruled on “two statutory provisions it has never before interpreted” without full briefing or oral argument, and that it “misuses its equitable powers.”
The order’s reach before November 3 is limited. Federal law requires states to finish any program that systematically removes ineligible voters from the rolls “not later than 90 days prior to” a federal election, a cutoff that fell on August 5 this year. The Court noted that individual inquiries remain permitted in that window, and that it will decide in a separate case, Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, whether the 90-day rule bars states from removing noncitizens.
Texas keeps its own voter list, as state law requires. Whether the state can check that list for citizenship now depends on a federal agency’s database and on a stay that holds only while the appeal is pending. A federal judge in Washington disabled the tool in June, and the Supreme Court restored it in September. Neither decision was Texas’s to make.
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