The Trump administration overhauled the SAVE system last year to link it to Social Security data and allow bulk queries for citizenship data on all Americans.
Posted by The NPR Politics Podcast, Checked
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The NPR Politics PodcastSep 29, 2026
Sources confirm that in 2025 the Trump administration overhauled the SAVE system, linking it to Social Security Administration data and enabling bulk queries that let states check citizenship across the population. The main imprecision is that NPR describes
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What was said
… It was created 40 years ago so state and federal agencies could look up non-citizens' immigration status to find out if they qualified for public benefits. What does this have to do with voting? Well, last year, the Trump administration completely overhauled SAVE, really changed what this program could do. They linked SAVE, for the first time, to Social Security data, um, which meant it could look up citizenship data for all Americans, not just foreign-born Americans, um, and it could do bulk queries. So the Trump administration was encouraging states, um, starting last year, to upload their entire voter rolls to SAVE to check for noncitizens and deceased voters, and several states took …
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Related claims
- In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order requiring the Social Security Administration to provide databases to the Department of Homeland Security to modify the SAVE program.True
- The Social Security Administration database contained 25 million records missing citizenship information.True
- The Trump administration has filed a case with the Supreme Court regarding the SAVE database and its use in elections.True
- The Social Security Administration database is used to verify voter citizenship and identity.True
- The Trump administration provided citizenship data to Texas to ensure illegal immigrants are not on voter rolls.True