Judge T. Kent Wetherell II got the SAVE system ruling right, and he got it right for a reason most coverage missed. He didn’t write a new national rule. He enforced a contract.
On July 7, the Florida-based federal judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to restore bulk-upload and Social Security number search features in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, the tool several states use to check citizenship status against voter rolls. The order grew out of a settlement DHS reached with Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana, filed in November 2025 and approved that December. DHS honored the deal for six months, then shut the features off on June 23 after a different judge blew up the policy.
That other judge is the one we should worry about. On June 22, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., issued a 75-page ruling finding the SAVE system’s expanded features violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. DHS complied the next day and pulled the plug nationwide. Here’s what gets lost: an APA vacatur doesn’t just settle a dispute between the parties in court. It erases the rule everywhere, whether a state was party to the case or not. One ruling, and a tool four states relied on for voter roll maintenance went dark overnight.
Wetherell didn’t return the favor. He ruled for the four states in front of him, based on the settlement they had signed, based on the harm each had documented. Florida and Ohio showed they could no longer verify citizenship for registered voters. Iowa showed it could no longer verify citizenship for professional license applicants. Wetherell also disagreed with Sooknanan’s legal analysis, concluding that 8 U.S.C. § 1373(a) expressly overrides the privacy restrictions she relied on, and the Social Security checks fall within the Privacy Act’s routine-use exception. But he reached that conclusion to resolve the case before him, not to bind 46 other states.
DHS had already appealed Sooknanan’s ruling to the D.C. Circuit on June 26 and asked her to pause it. She said no, and her order makes my point better than I can. Sooknanan wrote that the relief Florida and its co-plaintiffs won “governs only the states that are parties in that action,” giving DHS no basis to pause her ruling for any other state using SAVE. Her order binds every state. His binds four. She also faulted Wetherell for reaching SAVE’s legality in one paragraph without adversarial briefing, against her 75 pages. Fair critique. It doesn’t change whose order has the wider footprint.
I’ve spent the better part of a decade sitting across from judges as a retained expert on fiduciary duty in federal and state courts, arbitration and mediation. You develop an instinct for which judges rule on the record in front of them and which reach for something bigger. Antonin Scalia spent a career warning about that impulse: A judiciary that mistakes its own policy preferences for constitutional command stops being a court and starts being a legislature with lifetime tenure. Jonathan Turley has made a similar point about the nationwide injunction, and now the nationwide vacatur, as a shortcut letting one judge set policy for 330 million people while the appellate process laces up its shoes.
MOST OF YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS CAME FROM A COMMUNIST’S PRISON SENTENCE
This isn’t a partisan complaint. Conservatives cheered when judges blocked Obama-era immigration actions nationwide and jeered when other judges did the same to Trump-era policies, and plenty of liberals did the reverse. The tool is the problem, not which team wields it.
States have a sovereign interest in accurate voter rolls and a duty to keep them current. The verification system DHS already agreed, by contract, to provide shouldn’t get switched off nationwide because one judge decided her reading of federal privacy law beats it. The fight heads to the D.C. Circuit now, and probably the 11th behind it. Wetherell showed what judicial restraint looks like in a case with high stakes: rule for the parties, on the record, within your jurisdiction. Sooknanan’s own order proves the contrast. If Americans want fewer headlines about judicial overreach, the fix isn’t picking better outcomes. It’s picking judges who remember where their authority ends.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPenn, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.