A federal judge in Florida on Tuesday ordered the Department of Homeland Security to restore key functions of its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system after the agency disabled tools used by states to verify citizenship and immigration status for voter registration in response to an earlier court ruling.
The order comes after a federal judge in Washington, D.C., found that SAVE features violated the Privacy Act and Social Security Act by improperly combining Americans’ personal data.
U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II ruled that DHS breached a settlement agreement with Florida and other states by removing the bulk-upload and Social Security number search features, which the agreement required the system to maintain.
In his order, Wetherell said DHS’s decision to disable the features in response to the D.C. ruling did not excuse its failure to comply with the settlement. He also concluded the Social Security number search function is consistent with 8 U.S.C. § 1373, which governs the sharing of citizenship and immigration status information.
Wetherell ordered DHS to file a status report on its compliance by July 14.
