The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals refused on Friday 4 September, by two votes to one, to revive the Department of Homeland Security's modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database. The SAVE System is a DHS tool built to check immigration status for benefits agencies. It is not the SAVE Act, the citizenship-proof bill that shares the name and is still sitting on Calendar No. 468, and it is not the Justice Department's separate campaign for state voter files. A March 2025 executive order had opened the system to bulk searches of Social Security data by election officials.
A district court held on 22 June that DHS had no statutory authority for the change and had breached the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The panel refused a stay on narrow ground: the government raised its main Social Security Act argument only after judgment. "We decline to overlook the forfeiture," the per curiam order says.1 Judge Gregory Katsas dissented and would have granted the stay.
The database stays disabled nationally, so no state can run a bulk noncitizen check through it before November. Readers should keep this apart from the Justice Department's pursuit of state voter files, which reached a third appellate circuit in July after seventeen dismissals. A government that loses a stay on forfeiture keeps its underlying argument intact, so the eventual appeal is worth watching separately from this order.
