NEWS: DHS Expands Migrant Database to Screen U.S. Citizens
Fair Elections Center filing reveals bulk SSN queries, driver's license plans as 26 states weaponize flawed data against voters.
WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security has secretly transformed a database originally designed to vet immigrant benefit applicants into a sweeping national citizenship verification system that now screens millions of American-born citizens, according to a blistering letter filed December 1 by the Fair Elections Center, a non-partisan think tank focused on ensuring voter access to the polls.
In May 2025, DHS overhauled the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) system months before issuing required public notice. The agency only published the legal paperwork on October 31—after the system was already live with state election officials running voter rolls through it. The omission violates the Privacy Act’s requirement for 30-day advance public comment, advocates say.
The transformation is stunning in its scope. By early November, state voting agencies had already submitted over 46 million voter verification queries, and DHS reports 26 states are using or preparing to use SAVE for voter verification. None of this happened with public knowledge or consent.
How SAVE became a citizen-screening tool
SAVE originally verified immigration status for benefit applicants. Now the system “now operates as a comprehensive citizenship database that screens U.S.-born citizens” alongside immigrants.
The agency expanded SAVE to accept Social Security Number queries that allow state election officials to cross-check millions of Americans against Social Security Administration (SSA) databases and DHS records. DHS also plans to integrate driver’s license databases and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS) “in the foreseeable future,” effectively constructing a centralized national identification surveillance infrastructure.
DHS admitted it failed to consider citizens’ privacy rights
The government’s own analysis reveals the scope of the overreach. In its October 31 Privacy Impact Assessment, DHS acknowledged “there is a risk that the new category [of] individuals covered by this assessment/notice, specifically, United States born citizens[,] do not have the opportunity to individually participate or consent in how the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would collect and maintain their data.”
DHS further confessed: “We assume that each [SAVE] user agency factors in the principles of notice, individual participation, and consent”—essentially punting responsibility to state officials while admitting the federal government never sought Americans’ agreement to repurpose their personal data.
Unreliable for citizenship checks
At the heart of the system’s risk is data quality. SSA citizenship information is not a definitive record of who is a citizen. The agency itself has cautioned that while citizenship data “is accurate for SSA’s program purposes, if used later for other purposes, it may not be current” because “SSA is not the custodian of U.S. citizenship records.”
Consider naturalized citizens. When someone applies for a Social Security number as a permanent resident, SSA records that status. When they later naturalize—gaining citizenship—SSA doesn’t automatically update their records. Unless the person contacts SSA directly (a burdensome process many skip), SSA’s records show them as a noncitizen indefinitely. Nearly 8 million Americans have naturalized in the last decade, yet most have no reason to update SSA records unless they’re claiming benefits.
A 2006 SSA Inspector General audit found the agency “inaccurately identified about 3.3 million U.S. citizens as noncitizens because [they] had become U.S. citizens after obtaining their SSN” and “had not updated their records with SSA.”
For U.S.-born citizens, SSA’s data is also incomplete. The agency didn’t consistently collect citizenship information before 1981. According to SSA’s own assessment, approximately one-quarter of citizenship records lack any citizenship indicator. Older Americans may have no citizenship status recorded at all.
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The search-by-partial-SSN problem
Making matters worse, SAVE now allows searches using only the last four digits of an SSN. Up to 40,000 people can share the same last four digits, creating massive false-match risks. When combined with name and birthdate, this weak identifier has already produced high error rates in similar voting systems.
The Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) system, which uses the same last-four-digit approach, generates what SSA’s Office of Inspector General documented as “high no-match response rate” and “inconsistent verification responses” precisely because the last four digits don’t uniquely identify people.
Eligible voters already being purged based on SAVE flags
The real-world harm is not theoretical. Across multiple states, eligible voters flagged by SAVE have been issued notices demanding they prove citizenship within 30 days or lose voting eligibility:
Texas: Over 2,724 voters flagged by SAVE received notices requiring proof of citizenship within 30 days. Early investigations found roughly 25 percent of those flagged were actually U.S. citizens wrongly identified as noncitizens.
Louisiana: The state removed nearly 400 voters from rolls after SAVE checks, issuing notices with 21-day deadlines.
Tennessee: Dozens of people were referred to the FBI for investigation after SAVE ran 4 million voter records.
Virginia: Between September 2024 and August 2025, 1,644 voter registrations were canceled as a result of SAVE citizenship checks.
Arkansas, Indiana, and Wyoming have launched similar efforts using SAVE data to remove voters or initiate investigations.
The Documentary Proof Burden
These purge attempts have created a de facto national documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement without Congressional action—a backdoor authority DHS lacks. For millions of Americans, proving citizenship is burdensome.
According to the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, over 9 percent of voting-age citizens—nearly 21.3 million people—cannot readily access documents proving citizenship. An estimated 69 million American women who changed their names through marriage lack passports with their current names, making it impossible to prove citizenship using certain documents. Young voters frequently lack current identification entirely.
DHS invokes disproven voter fraud myth
The government’s rationale rests on a fabrication. DHS claims SAVE is necessary to prevent widespread noncitizen voting—a claim contradicted by extensive evidence.
The Heritage Foundation’s nationwide fraud database identifies just 99 cases of suspected noncitizen voting since 2000. A 2024 Georgia audit of 8.2 million voter records found only 20 noncitizens—0.0002 percent. Louisiana’s review of 40 years of voting records identified 390 suspected noncitizen registrants across nearly 2.9 million voters—0.01 percent.
Federal courts have consistently rejected voter fraud mythology. In 2018, a Kansas federal judge found “administrative error, confusion, or mistake” explained the handful of noncitizen registrations discovered and declined to “rely on extrapolated numbers from tiny sample sizes and otherwise flawed data.” A 2014 U.S. Election Assistance Commission memorandum rejected proof-of-citizenship requests by multiple states, noting noncitizen registration is exceedingly rare—the result of ordinary bureaucratic error unavoidable in any large system.
The legal and procedural violations
The Fair Elections Center’s formal challenge identifies multiple violations. DHS implemented SAVE’s expansion in May 2025 but withheld required privacy documentation until October 31—after courts began questioning the delay—and continued operating the system throughout the comment period.
Under the Privacy Act, DHS must provide 30-day advance notice before major system changes. Bulk uploads and access to external SSA databases clearly constitute major changes. The delayed SORN does not cure the violation; millions had already been queried.
The challenge also argues DHS lacks statutory or constitutional authority for this expansion. No law authorizes DHS to collect state voter lists, bulk-match them against SSA and other databases, or conduct interagency data sharing at this scale for election purposes. Constitutional separation of powers limits—Congress and the states, not the Executive, control voter qualification rules.
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LETTER TO YOUR REPS BASED ON THIS ARTICLE:
I am writing to express my profound concern regarding the recent actions taken by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in expanding its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to now include millions of U.S. citizens. This alarming development compromises the privacy and civil liberties of American citizens without their knowledge or consent.
According to a letter from the Fair Elections Center, made public on December 1, 2025, DHS has covertly transformed SAVE from a system originally designed to vet immigrant benefit applications into a sweeping national citizenship verification mechanism. This dramatic alteration allows state election officials to screen U.S. citizens alongside immigrants. Over 46 million voter verification queries have already been submitted, with 26 states actively participating in this unprecedented invasion of privacy.
Lack of Transparency and Consent
DHS has openly admitted that it failed to provide the required 30-day public notice before implementing these changes, violating the Privacy Act. The system is fundamentally flawed; it now integrates Social Security Number (SSN) queries and is poised to incorporate additional databases, further entrenching a centralized identification surveillance infrastructure. This systemic overreach occurs without public knowledge or informed consent from the citizens whose data is being exploited.
Dangerously Inaccurate Data
The reliability of the data being used is equally concerning. The Social Security Administration (SSA) has cautioned that its citizenship data may become outdated and inaccurate over time. Misidentifications have already led to wrongful purging of eligible voters, as evidenced in multiple states such as Texas and Louisiana. Reports indicate that approximately 25% of flagged individuals were U.S. citizens incorrectly identified as noncitizens. The use of partial SSN queries only compounds these inaccuracies, posing high risks for false matches and unjust disenfranchisement.
Burden of Proof and Rationale for Action
DHS's actions create a daunting burden of proof for many Americans. An estimated 21.3 million voting-age citizens may struggle to produce documentation proving their citizenship, disproportionately affecting women and young voters. This system effectively requires citizens to navigate a labyrinth of bureaucratic hurdles to prove their legal status.
The justification provided by DHS—that this initiative is necessary to prevent noncitizen voting—is both misleading and disproven. Extensive audits have consistently revealed that reports of voter fraud are grossly exaggerated. As evidenced by data from the Heritage Foundation, only 99 cases of suspected noncitizen voting have been identified since 2000. This misuse of data to justify invasive monitoring is unacceptable.
Legal Violations and Constitutional Concerns
The Fair Elections Center’s letter highlights several critical violations of law and constitutional authority. The DHS lacks the statutory and constitutional authority to collect voter lists and conduct massive data sharing for electoral purposes. Election qualifications are constitutionally reserved for Congress and the states, not the executive branch.
This troubling transformation of DHS powers represents not only a breach of trust but also a significant threat to our democratic processes. I urge you to take immediate action against this blatant overreach.
Please consider supporting legislation that calls for:
1. A moratorium on the use of the SAVE system for citizen screening until its implications can be thoroughly reviewed and regulated.
2. Stronger guidelines to protect citizens’ privacy rights in relation to government database usage.
3. Greater transparency in any future expansions of governmental data collection practices.
Thank you for your time and attention to this important matter. I look forward to your swift response.
Just amazing how depraved DHS had become.
No, not really, shish.
If you look at a dying tree, they always die from the top down.