Swansenreport

A federal judge in Pensacola just handed DHS a headache it can’t fully resolve. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II ordered the Department of Homeland Security to immediately restore bulk-upload and Social Security number search functions in its SAVE database — the tool Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Indiana rely on to check voter citizenship status. The problem: DHS turned those features off nine days earlier to comply with a completely different judge’s order, one issued 800 miles north in Washington.

Two federal courts. Two binding rulings. One agency stuck in the middle, following one order in violation of the other.

Here’s the backstory. SAVE — Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — has existed for years as a low-key USCIS tool for checking immigration status. In 2025, DHS partnered with the Social Security Administration to overhaul it: search by name, birthdate, or Social Security number instead of requiring a DHS-issued ID number, process requests in bulk, and drop the fee for state and local agencies. Republican secretaries of state had been pushing for exactly that, arguing the old single-lookup version couldn’t handle statewide voter-roll audits.

Florida sued when it felt DHS wasn’t delivering fast enough. That case, joined by Ohio, Iowa and Indiana, ended in a December 2025 settlement — approved by Wetherell — locking in the bulk-upload and SSN-search functions along with a 48-hour turnaround requirement.

Then came the other lawsuit. In Washington, D.C., the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center challenged the same SAVE upgrades on privacy grounds. On June 22, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan — a Biden appointee — sided with them in a 75-page ruling, finding the overhaul violated the Privacy Act and the Social Security Act by pooling Americans’ data in ways that risked wrongly flagging naturalized citizens as noncitizens. DHS complied, disabling the very features Florida and the others were counting on.

That put DHS in breach of its own settlement. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier went back to Wetherell’s court and asked him to enforce it. He didn’t hesitate. Wetherell granted the emergency motion, wrote that he’d already implicitly found the SAVE upgrades lawful when he approved the settlement, and rejected Sooknanan’s read of the Social Security Act outright — arguing a separate federal statute, 8 U.S.C. §1373, specifically allows the SSA to share citizenship data for immigration enforcement. The order’s language left no room for slow-walking: DHS must comply by reinstating access to the bulk-upload and SSN-search features, and file a status report proving it by July 14.

DHS didn’t pretend to be conflicted about which order it liked better. General counsel James Percival used a social media post to take a jab at critics of the ruling, and the Justice Department — which has separately appealed Sooknanan’s decision to the D.C. Circuit — said it would keep defending the administration’s use of SAVE.

Worth remembering: noncitizen voting is already a felony under federal law and vanishingly rare in practice. That’s the tension running under all of this. Red states say they need faster tools to catch the handful of cases that do occur; privacy advocates and blue-state election officials counter that the tool itself has a documented habit of misflagging naturalized citizens, and that the fix threatens more voters than it protects.

Nothing here is settled. DHS is now complying with one order while under appeal on the other, and unless one side gets a stay, this heads to the appellate courts. Watch for the July 14 compliance filing — that’s the next real checkpoint.