The Supreme Court’s Republican appointed majority granted an emergency request from the Trump administration allowing the government to use a disputed citizenship database. The court’s Democratic appointees dissented, accusing the majority of prioritizing nonexistent government harms over documented threats to lawful voters.

The administration sought emergency relief after U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked use of the “modified SAVE” database in a June 22 order. She said the government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

SAVE refers to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. Its purpose is to verify citizenship and immigration status.

The administration overhauled the program in 2025 with three major changes. The modified system incorporated records of natural born citizens, accessed Social Security records and allowed SAVE users to conduct bulk searches of records.

In an opinion issued Friday, the Supreme Court majority said Sooknanan’s order “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.” The three Democratic appointees said the administration had not earned such extraordinary relief.

The majority concluded that the federal government would probably suffer irreparable harm if the lower court order remained in place. It said the government “has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.”

According to the majority, the district court’s order prevented the government “from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.” That conclusion put the administration’s preferred system ahead of the privacy and voting concerns identified by the challengers and lower court.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent on behalf of the court’s Democratic appointees. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined her.

Jackson said the majority had misused its authority by concentrating on supposed injuries to the government while “disregarding the harms that the modified SAVE system has caused, and will likely continue to cause, to lawful voters.”

She argued that burdening or disenfranchising even a small number of 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.”

The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center challenged the overhaul. Their lawsuit led Sooknanan to find that the government’s conduct was “unlawful in several respects,” including through the illegal disclosure of Social Security numbers and related records.

A divided federal appellate panel in Washington also rejected the administration’s position, with a Trump appointee dissenting. The administration then asked the Supreme Court to intervene and called the district judge’s order “indefensible.”

Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices that leaving the order intact would “irreparably harm the federal government, the States, and the public by depriving the government of an effective tool to verify the eligibility of registered voters and benefits applicants under various state and federal programs.”

The voting and privacy groups countered that the government “recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights.” They said officials built it despite knowing it was illegal and “risked misidentifying eligible voters as non-citizens.”

The groups also said their members included American citizens whose privacy and voting rights had already been violated. Lifting Sooknanan’s order, they warned, would place those rights in jeopardy again.

With the November elections “already underway,” the challengers said reviving the program “would needlessly introduce confusion and administrative burdens amid an ongoing election cycle.” The timing sharpened their warning about potential consequences for eligible voters.

In its unsigned per curiam opinion, the majority noted that federal law prohibits state and local election officials from systematically purging voter rolls during the weeks before federal elections. It said that restriction limits the immediate impact of lifting Sooknanan’s order.

The majority maintained that the district judge had wrongly blocked individualized inquiries that federal law permits. Jackson said the ruling’s only “bright side” was that narrow short term effect, allowing individualized inquiries rather than sweeping voter purges before the November elections.