DHS Sued Over Pooling of Citizens’ Data to Promote Trump Agenda

The League of Women Voters filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration aiming to prevent the Department of Homeland Security from creating a centralized record system on US citizens and residents, which they allege could be used for monitoring and harassing Americans.

Congress passed the Privacy Act in 1974 to prevent the government from consolidating the personal information of Americans stored in separate agencies, but DHS and the Department of Government Efficiency are now creating a web of linked data systems to allow centralized queries and analyses of this sensitive data, according to a complaint filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The goal of the initiative is to advance Trump administration priorities, including making it harder to vote, and ensuring that contacts between immigrants and government agencies can be “leveraged to support the administration’s agenda,” the plaintiffs said.

The League is joined in the lawsuit by several state affiliates and the Electronic Information Privacy Center.

Re-affirming the objective of preventing the government from consolidating citizens’ personal information, Congress in 1988 amended the Privacy Act to prohibit computer programs that compare data across agencies unless the agencies disclose their data-sharing agreements—both to Congress and the public, the plaintiffs said.

But DHS and DOGE are now attempting to pool DHS’s data with that of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Labor, and several state election databases, the complaint said.

The defendants have also linked the USCIS’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements tool with data from the Social Security Administration, turning the SAVE tool into a searchable national data system that allows its 1,200 user agencies to query the US citizenship or immigration status of anyone, including US citizens, it said.

Several states, including Virginia, Louisiana, and Texas, have begun using the SAVE system to purge voter rolls ahead of the November elections and to open criminal investigations of alleged non-citizen voting, the groups said.

The defendants have also created a “data lake” at USCIS for immigration enforcement purposes that contains “extraordinarily sensitive” information from data sources across the government, including Social Security numbers, biometric data, tax information, wage and employment records, medical and disability records, case files involving child abuse, and others, it said.

The plaintiffs claim violations of the Privacy Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the separation of powers.

They are seeking an injunction prohibiting the defendants from pooling data without statutory authority and requiring them to restore the data systems to their prior state, as well as to publish notices in the Federal Register disclosing what data has been pooled.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Democracy Forward Foundation, Fair Elections Center, and EPIC represent the plaintiffs.

The case is League of Women Voters v. US Dept. of Homeland Sec., D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-03501, complaint filed 9/30/25.