By Tierney Sneed

(CNN) — In a major win for President Donald Trump’s efforts to find non-citizen voters, the Supreme Court on Friday said states can use a controversial citizenship data collection tool for reviewing voter rolls.

The court’s unsigned opinion rejected arguments that the administration broke the law by making it easier for officials to use the data system to vet voters’ citizenship status.

But the opinion emphasized the use of the program for “individualized” checks of a voter’s citizenship as the election approaches, while suggesting federal law prohibits mass purges close to Election Day.

The order reverses a ruling that had blocked the use of the program known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements or SAVE. US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had previously concluded that the administration violated federal privacy law in how it overhauled the data program so it could be used for sweeping reviews of state voter rolls.

Under federal law, the majority wrote, “the federal government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.” The lower court order, the Supreme Court said, “prevents the federal government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”

The three liberal justices dissented from the ruling.

“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The majority opinion referenced prohibitions in the National Voter Registration Act that ban “systematic” removals of voters within 90 days of an election and said the immediate impact of reviving the program was limited because of that “moratorium.”

However, the Trump administration has also argued that so-called 90-day ban on mass removals does not apply to purges targeting non-citizens, and in the coming months, the Supreme Court will review a case considering those arguments. A footnote in Friday’s opinion noted the case and said the court “did not need to decide” the question “here.”

It’s a win for Republicans on the high court’s emergency docket after two significant defeats in recent days: the court’s rejection of new mail ballot rules, and an effort by the GOP in Missouri to target a Kansas City-based House district currently held by a Democrat.

State and local election officials have long used SAVE to verify the citizenship status of their voters on a case-by-case basis. But the administration’s expansion of the program invited legal challenges because the data tool can produce flawed results that wrongfully identify eligible voters as non-citizens, raising the risk of disenfranchisement for those whose registrations are cancelled because of the SAVE review. DHS, which runs the program, has acknowledged that its results are not always accurate.

The legal challengers – voter advocacy groups, a data privacy group, and individual voters – put the blame on the federal government for “recklessly” creating “an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights.”

Still, the administration argued in its emergency appeal to the Supreme Court that states that are the ones at fault if voters are wrongfully removed when election officials use the program, especially since DHS urges states to conduct additional investigation of the matches.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.