Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters
On an emergency application, the Court lets the Government keep using its expanded SAVE citizenship-verification program, which checks voters against Social Security records, while a privacy-law challenge proceeds, finding that a federal immigration statute likely overrides the disclosure limits the lower court relied on.
Case background
Since 1986, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program has let federal, state, and local agencies verify the citizenship and immigration status of noncitizens applying for public benefits. In March 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14248 directing DHS to let state and local authorities verify the citizenship of registered voters, and directing the Social Security Administration to make its records available for that purpose. DHS then launched a modified SAVE program that checks against SSA records, including Social Security numbers, and allows bulk searches of many individuals at once. The League of Women Voters, its local affiliates, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued, alleging that the modifications violated the Social Security Act’s confidentiality provision, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The District Court for the District of Columbia agreed, vacated the modified program, and denied a stay pending appeal; a divided D.C. Circuit panel also denied a stay, with Judge Katsas dissenting.
Questions Presented
This case came to the Court on the Government’s emergency application to stay the District Court’s order, not on a petition for certiorari, so no question was formally presented.
Holding
The application for a stay is granted. The plaintiff organizations likely have standing, but their claims likely lack merit: 8 U.S.C. § 1373 bars any law or official from restricting the sharing of citizenship information with DHS “notwithstanding any other provision” of law, and requires DHS to answer state and local verification requests, so it likely supersedes the disclosure limits in the Social Security Act and Privacy Act. The Government is likely to suffer irreparable harm because the order below blocks the program it has chosen to answer election officials’ citizenship inquiries ahead of the midterm elections. The District Court’s June 22, 2026 order is stayed pending appeal and any timely petition for certiorari.
The Court
The Court issued its opinion per curiam. Justice Jackson filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan.
What this episode contains
This episode is an AI-narrated reading of the unsigned (per curiam) opinion of the Court in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters. It also includes Justice Jackson’s dissent, read in the same voice.
AI disclosure: The voice in this episode is AI-generated, using a standard synthesized voice that is not modeled on any justice. Tone, inflection, pacing, and emphasis are artifacts of the model and should not be attributed to any member of the Court. The text being read is the Court’s published opinion, lightly adapted to improve readability for the spoken format.