Judge blocks Trump admin’s database of Americans’ Social Security numbers and citizenship status

President Trump had ordered several agencies last year to pool data that states could use to verify citizenship.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.

The ruling halts a key component of Trump's broader effort to increase federal involvement in election oversight.

A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from using a revamped version of an immigration database for checking the accuracy of state voter rolls, dealing a blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to boost the role of the federal government in elections ahead of the midterm elections in November.