Two federal judges have ordered DHS to both disable and restore the same immigration-verification database

The Department of Homeland Security is under two federal court orders that cannot both be obeyed. One tells the agency to keep parts of a citizenship-verification database shut off. The other tells it to switch those same parts back on.

The database is SAVE, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. It is a separate thing from the SAVE Act, the voter-citizenship bill stalled in the Senate, though the two collided this spring over the same question of who checks a voter's citizenship. After an executive order President Trump signed March 31, DHS rebuilt SAVE to let users run bulk searches using partial Social Security numbers and opened it to state and local election officials to check names against voter rolls.

The first order: turn it off

On June 22, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked those changes in a 75-page ruling. She found that the rebuilt system violated the Social Security Act's bar on disclosing Social Security numbers, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Administrative Procedure Act. Her order directed DHS to disable the SSN-lookup and bulk-upload features.

DHS turned the features off. That included access for states that had earlier settled a separate case with the agency, which sent those states back to court.

The second order: turn it back on

On July 7, Judge T. Kent Wetherell II of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida granted an emergency motion brought by Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana to enforce a 2025 settlement with DHS. He ordered the agency to restore what the states had lost.

Plaintiffs' emergency motion to enforce settlement agreement is GRANTED, and Defendants shall immediately comply ... by reinstating Plaintiffs' access to the bulk-upload and SSN-search features in the SAVE system.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier's office was among those that pressed for the restoration.

Sooknanan declines to step aside

The government asked Sooknanan to pause her order in light of Wetherell's ruling. On July 8 she declined. She wrote that the Florida settlement binds only DHS, not the Social Security Administration, and covers only the four states that signed it, so it did not justify staying an order that applies to the other 46. The features stay off everywhere her ruling reaches.

That leaves DHS with one court requiring the features disabled and another requiring them restored for four states. Both cases can be appealed, to the D.C. Circuit and the Eleventh Circuit, and the split between them can be resolved only higher up.

What SAVE does

SAVE lets government agencies confirm a person's immigration or citizenship status. States use it for voter-roll checks, professional licensing, and public benefits. The dispute is over the March changes: whether DHS could add partial-SSN and bulk-lookup tools and hand them to election officials without breaking the federal laws that limit how Social Security numbers are shared. Sooknanan's court says it could not. Wetherell's court says the four settling states are owed their access regardless.