By Zoe Tillman | Updated on Oct 09, 2026 at 09:20 PM
A US judge blocked a key component of the Justice Department’s efforts under the Trump administration to obtain state voter records as part of a nationwide probe into alleged election fraud by non-US citizens.
In a 78-page opinion on Friday, a federal judge in Washington struck down what she described as the department’s policy of collecting, reviewing and sharing confidential voter data in an effort to identify potentially ineligible individuals and urge states to remove them from their rolls.
US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan delivered a strong rebuke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has led the push, writing that officials “cannot evade” federal privacy laws “by attempting a dragnet investigation of the entire country.”
“DOJ cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people,” the judge said.
Under President Donald Trump’s “election integrity” agenda, he’s directed the Justice Department and other agencies to investigate noncitizen voting and whether states have knowingly allowed ineligible voters to remain on their rolls. Dozens of states refused to comply and judges so far have overwhelmingly tossed out the Justice Department’s lawsuits seeking to compel them to produce the information.
Studies have shown that noncitizen voting is historically rare and hasn’t happened in large enough numbers to influence election results. In recent weeks, the Justice Department has filed dozens of individual prosecutions against noncitizens charged with illegally registering to vote or casting ballots in past elections.
The judge wrote that the department could continue to pursue more targeted investigations into whether state voter rolls are accurate and in compliance with federal laws, “including by acting on specific complaints.”
“The court vacates a policy that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more — a policy that flies in the face of duly enacted laws designed to protect Americans,” Sooknanan wrote.
Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels said in an email that DOJ lawyers are reviewing the decision.
Virginia Kase Solomón , president of Common Cause, one of the organizations that brought the lawsuit, said in a statement that “every voter deserves to know their private data is secure and that they won’t be wrongly denied their freedom to vote. We are proud to win this protection for those whose election officials failed them.”
Over the past year, DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, led by Harmeet Dhillon, has pressed states to turn over their voter rolls, including personal information that isn’t part of datasets that are already publicly available. Dhillon also sent letters warning state and local election officials that they could face criminal investigations if they failed to take enough action to prevent noncitizens from voting.
A central part of the case before Sooknanan involved the Justice Department’s use of the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database to compare voter roll data and search for matches with noncitizens.
The administration’s plan to expand the SAVE database to aid voter eligibility checks was the subject of a separate legal fight. In late September, the US Supreme Court reinstated the expansion.
The court’s conservative majority lifted an order that Sooknanan had issued in that case blocking the move after she found that officials had “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens” and misused Social Security information.
The case is Common Cause v. Department of Justice, 26-cv-1352, US District Court, District of Columbia.