Two Biden-appointed federal judges blocked Trump administration election integrity measures this week — on consecutive days, on separate legal grounds — and the Left immediately declared victory. It shouldn’t. The rulings identified real statutory and constitutional problems. They also handed Republicans the clearest possible argument for why the SAVE America Act needs to pass the Senate before the midterm elections.
Here’s what happened. The Department of Homeland Security, working with the Department of Government Efficiency, overhauled its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database — originally built to check public benefits eligibility — into a citizenship checker for voter rolls, integrated with Social Security Administration data. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan found the overhaul violated the Social Security Act’s prohibition on disclosing Social Security numbers across agency lines, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Administrative Procedure Act. Congress wrote specific prohibitions against consolidating personal data across federal agencies without statutory authorization. The administration walked into those prohibitions without a statute.
The fix is straightforward: pass the SAVE America Act, which has cleared the House and is sitting in the Senate. That gives DHS the explicit authority the court said was missing. The ruling becomes irrelevant.
The second ruling landed the next day. Judge Denise Jefferson Casper in Boston permanently blocked Trump’s March executive order requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote — converting a preliminary injunction she issued last year into a permanent ban. Casper is the third federal judge to block this EO. Her grounds are different from Sooknanan’s and more constitutionally direct: the president simply has no authority over federal elections. “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” she wrote, citing the elections clause, which gives states and Congress — not the executive — primary authority over how federal elections are conducted. She also rejected the administration’s evidence of widespread noncitizen voting as unsupported. That last point is worth noting: the administration’s factual record didn’t carry the burden. The prosecutions below explain why that record needs to be built, not abandoned. Democrats will tell you noncitizen voting is “virtually nonexistent.” Tell that to the prosecutors.
In New Jersey, two Bergen County men — neither a citizen — were charged with voting by an alien in a federal election and making false statements in connection with naturalization proceedings, which carries up to 10 years. In Saratoga County, New York, a 45-year-old Iraqi national faces charges for illegally voting in the 2020 election. In Pinellas County, Florida, a 32-year-old Uzbekistan national was charged with conspiring to submit more than 100 fraudulent voter registration applications. Two Ukrainian women on nonimmigrant visas were charged in Florida for unlawfully voting in the 2024 presidential election. An illegal immigrant in Alabama who assumed a false identity in 2011 faces nine counts for voting in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. A noncitizen in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was charged with unauthorized voting and perjury — a felony — for attempting to cast a ballot. These aren’t abstractions. They’re indictments. Multiple states, multiple election cycles, multiple nationalities.
Congress has also asked whether the Justice Department is fully investigating cases in Georgia and Ohio where noncitizens were caught registering or voting, given what critics describe as a low prosecution rate relative to the registration irregularities identified. The question answers itself: if the system that would produce that verification data is blocked in court for lack of statutory authority, the DOJ can’t investigate what it can’t find.
Now factor in the census. Every person in the country — citizen or not — is counted for congressional apportionment and Electoral College votes. California, New York, and Illinois absorbed the largest shares of the 10-plus million who crossed illegally during Former President Joe Biden’s four years. Those bodies count toward House seats. Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo admitted under oath to Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) that higher illegal immigrant populations equal more congressional seats for states that harbor them. California holds House seats today that its citizen population doesn’t justify. Senate Democrats blocked the Equal Representation Act — which would have required citizenship questions on the census and excluded noncitizens from apportionment — twice, unanimously. During a 2021 hearing on Haitian migrants, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) said she needed “more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.” That’s the quiet part said out loud.
Then there’s welfare. The Biden-era border didn’t just move people — it moved them into benefit programs the system wasn’t built to absorb. Cleaning up those rolls is precisely what SAVE was originally designed to do. Democrats called eligibility verification anti-immigrant harassment. I’ve spent 30 years advising institutions on their fiduciary obligations to beneficiaries. A trustee who pays benefits to ineligible recipients isn’t compassionate. They’re in breach.
TRUMP TELLS HOUSE GOP HARD-LINERS TO END BLOCKADE OVER FLAGSHIP VOTER ID BILL
Residents of high-tax blue states watching their neighbors move to Texas and Florida understand the incentive structure. Businesses and taxpayers are leaving California fast enough to threaten its congressional delegation at the next reapportionment. The replacement strategy: maximize the resident headcount through open borders, blocking every verification mechanism, and counting everyone in the census regardless of status. You don’t have to attribute malice to see the math.
The court’s ruling is both appealable and legislatively fixable — today, this week, if the Senate moves. The 15th Amendment guarantees that the right to vote shall not be denied on account of race. It says nothing about noncitizens having that right. Protecting the franchise means accurate rolls. The court said the current mechanism is illegal. Build a legal one. The prosecutions listed above are proof that the problem exists. The SAVE America Act is proof that a solution does too.
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 Bachelor of Science from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.