Politics

The Department of Homeland Security system links a network of federal immigration databases with Social Security Administration data. That integration means county and state election officials can check the citizenship of not only foreign-born naturalized citizens, but also U.S.-born citizens for the first time.

In Trump's March 25 executive order on voting, he called on DHS to give states "access to appropriate systems" without cost for verifying the citizenship of voters on their rolls. The same order told the attorney general to prioritize prosecuting noncitizens who register or vote.

The Trump administration has been combining and linking government data sets on Americans in unprecedented ways, and there are questions about what the federal government could do with the voter roll data states share.

Legal and privacy experts told NPR last month they were alarmed that the new data system — which is an upgrade to an existing USCIS platform known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE — was being rolled out quickly without a transparent process or the public notices typically required for such projects by federal privacy laws.

The senators wrote they were "gravely concerned" that DHS "has not shared information with lawmakers and the public, but did reportedly provide a private advance briefing about the changes to the database to the Election Integrity Network, an organization founded by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who worked to overturn the results of the 2020 election."