Two Federal Judges Issue Contradictory Orders on Immigration Verification System Used for Voter Rolls

Two Courts, One Database, Zero Agreement

The federal judiciary now has two directly contradictory orders governing the same immigration verification system, with no resolution on which one controls.

U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II, of the Northern District of Florida, issued an order on July 7 directing the Department of Homeland Security to immediately restore bulk-upload and Social Security number search capabilities in the SAVE system — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database — used by states to check immigration status. The order came after Florida, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio filed an emergency motion to enforce a November 2025 settlement agreement with DHS.

The problem: U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, of the District of Columbia, had already ordered DHS to shut those exact features down.

How It Got Here

Florida originally sued DHS in October 2024, arguing the SAVE system was inadequate because it required a unique immigration identifier and couldn't run queries using a Social Security number, driver's license number, or other common identifiers. That lawsuit settled in November 2025 with DHS agreeing to integrate the system with the Social Security Administration, enabling partial SSN searches and bulk-upload queries.

DHS fulfilled those obligations from December 2025 through June 2026, according to court records reported by News4JAX. Then, on June 23, 2026, Judge Sooknanan vacated those modifications in the case League of Women Voters v. DHS, ruling they violated the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act. DHS disabled the features the next day.

Sooknanan, appointed by President Biden, wrote in her 75-page ruling that the current administration had "knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote," according to Newsweek. She found that DHS and the Social Security Administration had spent more than a year building what amounted to a centralized citizenship database, doing so over privacy objections.

What Wetherell Ordered

Wetherell, appointed by President Trump, was direct: DHS was "plainly in violation" of the settlement regardless of why it disabled the features. "The fact that Defendants disabled those features to comply with Judge Sooknanan's order does not change the fact that they violated the agreement," he wrote.

He acknowledged the bind DHS is now in. "The Court understands that this puts Defendants in a bind because they are subject to two contradictory orders," Wetherell wrote, per Newsweek. He then said his court was not bound by Sooknanan's ruling and explicitly disagreed with her legal conclusions.

On the states' side, Iowa argued it could no longer comply with a state law requiring citizenship verification for professional license applicants. Florida and Ohio said they were unable to meet state-law requirements for verifying citizenship of registered voters, according to court filings reported by News4JAX. Wetherell wrote those sovereign interests "far outweigh" the privacy arguments raised by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who submitted opposing briefs.

The Case for Privacy Protections

The concerns driving Sooknanan's ruling center on legitimate technical issues. Advocacy groups, including the League of Women Voters and EPIC, argued the SAVE system modifications used Social Security data that is unreliable for citizenship verification. The SSA tracks earnings, not immigration status. Matching errors in large databases can flag naturalized citizens, U.S.-born citizens with foreign-sounding names, or people with data entry mistakes in their records. Democracy Docket reported the expanded system had already been used to check the citizenship status of more than 67 million registered voters. At that scale, even a small error rate generates thousands of wrongful flags.

The question of whether the privacy laws Sooknanan cited actually prohibit this use of SSA data is a real legal dispute that will be decided on appeal, not by either district judge alone.

Where This Goes

According to Democracy Docket, the LWV and EPIC are expected to file for stays, injunctions, and appeals in the coming weeks as parties on both sides try to use the competing rulings against each other. The conflict between two district courts with no circuit-level resolution means DHS is currently operating under incompatible legal obligations depending on which judge's order it follows.

Newsweek reported it contacted DHS for comment on July 8; no response had been published as of this writing.

The unresolved question at the center of this dispute: whether partial Social Security number searches are legally valid tools for immigration status verification, or whether their use converts SSA's earnings database into an immigration enforcement tool in ways Congress never authorized. Neither district court's answer on that point is final.