Trump's New Voter Surveillance Tool Targets Citizenship Status

With little public oversight, DHS expands SAVE to verify nearly all voters' citizenship — raising fears of surveillance, exclusion, and data misuse.

WASHINGTON — In a development that’s raising alarms among privacy advocates and immigrant communities, the Trump administration has quietly rolled out a powerful new data tool that allows the federal government — and state election officials — to verify the citizenship of virtually every registered voter in America.

The system, as first reported by NPR, is a sweeping expansion of DHS’s SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) program, now integrated with Social Security records to identify whether voters were born in the U.S. or naturalized. For the first time in U.S. history, the federal government has constructed something long seen as politically radioactive: a national citizenship verification infrastructure.

What’s more, the project is being implemented without public debate, legal transparency, or even clear rules for how this new trove of data will be used.