The Trump administration is quietly undertaking an effort to expand a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tool used for citizenship verification to include drivers’ license and passport information—personal data it plans to utilize in its voter fraud crusade.
You’ve probably never heard of the DHS system known as SAVE (or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements), which the agency has historically used to confirm individuals are citizens and therefore eligible for government assistance. But if the Trump administration gets its way, SAVE will soon know a lot about you.
Since SAVE’s inception in 1987, government agencies have analyzed immigrants’ citizenship status by plugging immigration identification numbers into the system, which then checked the information against other federal databases. In May, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) added social security numbers as information that SAVE could query. DOGE further boosted SAVE’s capacity by allowing bulk searches, rather than searching individuals one-by-one.
“By sweeping up driver’s license and passport data from across the country,” they’re laying the groundwork for a system that could easily be misused to make it harder for people to exercise their constitutional right to cast a ballot.”
But late last month, DHS indicated in a public notice posted to the federal register that it planned to build out the program even further, by adding the ability to search drivers’ license information from all 50 states. The federal government could accomplish this either by requesting access to the drivers’ license data from each state individually, or perhaps by relying on national data compiled by a private law enforcement nonprofit. DHS says SAVE will soon have access to the US passport database, too.
According to US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), the division of DHS that oversees SAVE, the expansion is an effort to verify voter eligibility more efficiently. Non-citizen voting has been an obsession of Donald Trump’s ever since he falsely claimed that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because three million undocumented immigrants voted in California. “[W]e are reinforcing the principle that America’s elections are reserved exclusively for American citizens,” USCIS spokesperson Matthew J. Tragesser says.
But experts are concerned by SAVE’s expansion from a tool used to ascertain the status of an immigrant applying for public benefits to what is effectively an amalgamated database that can research hundreds of thousands of voters at once. They say it could be used to spread misinformation about the frequency of non-citizen voting, which studies show is incredibly rare, or even to try and remove eligible voters from state voter rolls based on the weaponization of faulty data. Responding to questions from Mother Jones, USCIS rejected the notion that SAVE is a database, though the agency referred to it as one in its own 2025 press release.
Using SAVE in this manner amounts to what Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of American Oversight, a nonprofit government accountability group that files a litany of public records requests, describes as a “vast federal data system of Americans’ most sensitive personal information [created] under the guise of ‘election integrity.’”
“By sweeping up driver’s license and passport data from across the country,” she adds, “they’re laying the groundwork for a system that could easily be misused to make it harder for people to exercise their constitutional right to cast a ballot.”
The administration has been discussing plans to expand SAVE since the first months of Trump’s presidency. In May, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) official Brian Broderick joined a conference call with the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) to explain a new initiative to prevent non-citizen voting.
According to a summary of the conference call American Oversight obtained through public records requests and shared with Mother Jones, Broderick discussed how the Trump administration planned to grow SAVE by connecting “enumerators”—or new ways to verify citizens—to the system.
Suppose a state wanted to check its entire voter roll for non-citizens. It’s unlikely they would find many—if any—actual non-citizens on its roll, given that most states require some type of identification to vote and that non-citizens face steep penalties (deportation, prison time, etc.) for even trying to register. But the expansion of SAVE would allow the secretary of state’s office to check on someone’s citizenship status using just their drivers’ license information. As ProPublica reported last month, this would allow states whose voter rolls don’t include Social Security numbers to use SAVE for voter verification.
For the expansion to be successful, DHS would presumably need access to all 50 states’ drivers license databases, which are controlled separately. Broderick admitted this wouldn’t be easy, saying the process could “take several months to implement,” according to the the summary of the call.
The number of drivers’ license databases isn’t the only hurdle. States compile their drivers’ license data differently, with some collecting more data than others. People also move across state lines and their drivers’ license numbers change. It’s feasible that outdated drivers’ license information in the system could cause a voter to be wrongly flagged as a non-citizen by SAVE.
Both the public notice and the call summary obtained by American Oversight indicate the administration is exploring the possibility of using drivers’ license data collected by the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, which offers law enforcement agencies a centralized system to search drivers’ license data throughout the country. (If you’ve ever been pulled over while on vacation, this information-sharing system is how an out-of-state cop runs your license.)
This approach would spare DHS from negotiating data access with each state—something DHS has already brought up with Texas officials, according to emails between the federal department and the Texas Department of Public Safety reported by ProPublica last month. (A Texas official told DHS that Texas was “always happy” to support the SAVE program.)
While the public notice focuses on how SAVE could be used to verify voter eligibility, it also indicates that the federal government will offer SAVE access to “appropriate federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, foreign, or international government agencies.” DHS would provide state and local agencies access to SAVE for free.
Indeed, the Trump administration tried to share SAVE access with various law enforcement groups in Florida last spring, the documents obtained by American Oversight show. Aram Moghaddassi, a former member of DOGE who is now the chief information officer for the Social Security Administration, reached out to state officials in Florida about the program.
“We’re working on SAVE access for Florida law enforcement now,” Moghaddassi wrote to an aide to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and law enforcement officials in March 2025.
Moghaddassi also requested voter registration data from Florida to check for voter fraud right away. He claimed that ICE “has several leads on non-citizen voting in Florida and would like to work with Florida to investigate and prosecute these cases.” (Documents show Moghaddassi’s contact information was also shared among Texas officials.)
Even in its more limited form, SAVE has previously incorrectly flagged naturalized citizens as non-citizens. Experts worry that adding additional datasets to the system may cause significantly more inaccurate assessments. Some populations may be at heightened risk of coming up in SAVE as potential non-citizens. For example: just-married women who are in the process of changing their last names, or recently naturalized citizens.
Election deniers could then use the inaccurate data to suggest widespread fraud is afoot, as Trump has repeatedly claimed. Worse yet, overzealous election officials could take the names incorrectly flagged by SAVE as gospel and remove those voters from the rolls, imperiling their right to vote.
“There’s no transparency, no clear explanation of how this data will be used, and no apparent safeguards against the inevitable errors and discrimination this kind of effort invites,” says Chukwu.
There’s reason for her to be concerned. In 2012, Florida attempted to remove 2,600 voters (the list originally included 182,000 names)—the majority of whom were people of color—from Florida’s voter rolls, alleging they were noncitizens after comparing the voting rolls to drivers’ license data. Many of those individuals had presented legal, non-citizen immigration documents when first obtaining their licenses, but had since obtained citizenship. The state’s drivers’ license database had outdated information—as is often the case.
Citing multiple people on the Florida list who were indeed citizens, the bipartisan US Commission on Civil Rights would later call the comparison method “extremely faulty.”
The Department of Justice has already sued eight states (seven of which are led by Democrats) to demand access to their full voter rolls to hunt for voter fraud. They want to create the federal government’s first ever national voter database, which could turbocharge the Trump administration’s voter suppression efforts while endangering voter privacy and becoming a prime target for hackers. The documents obtained by American Oversight show just how dangerous the expanded SAVE tool could be when used in conjunction with the voter roll data the Trump administration wants to compile.
“Given this administration’s track record of weaponizing federal agencies to chase baseless voter-fraud conspiracies and challenge voters’ eligibility,” says Chukwu, “the public should be deeply concerned about what’s being built behind closed doors with their tax dollars and the threat it could pose to voters.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.