WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to resume use of an expanded federal database designed to help identify potential noncitizens on voter rolls, overturning a lower-court restriction that had blocked the system.

The justices granted the Justice Department’s emergency request to suspend a ruling that prevented states from using Social Security numbers and other government information to conduct broad citizenship checks against federal records.

The administration has described the system as a tool to prevent noncitizens from voting, while opponents argue that inaccurate government records could result in eligible citizens being improperly removed from voter registration lists.

The Supreme Court currently has a 6-3 conservative majority, and all three liberal justices dissented from Friday’s decision.

The majority indicated that the challengers were unlikely to prevail because federal law specifically permits the Department of Homeland Security to obtain information concerning citizenship and immigration status from other federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration.

The decision comes as the federal government has taken a larger role in election-related matters ahead of the November midterm elections. Republicans are seeking to retain control of Congress, while the Constitution generally gives states primary responsibility for conducting and administering elections.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security revamped the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, known as SAVE. The changes expanded the system’s capabilities, allowing users to conduct searches involving large numbers of records and to use Social Security numbers when checking individual records.

James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, responded on social media Friday to news of the Supreme Court ruling, writing, “Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop ​noncitizens from illegally voting.”

Following the expansion, a number of Republican-controlled states have used the federal database to compare government records with their voter-registration lists. In some cases, individuals identified as possible noncitizens have subsequently had their registrations canceled.

Opponents of the administration’s approach argue that Republican-led election initiatives are motivated not only by concerns about election integrity but also by efforts to reduce the number of eligible voters, potentially affecting voters who tend to support Democrats.

Trump has pursued restrictive immigration policies and has repeatedly made claims about widespread election fraud, including allegations surrounding his 2020 defeat by Democratic President Joe Biden.

Organizations that challenged the revised SAVE database argued that the system has already led to eligible citizens being incorrectly identified as noncitizens and removed from voter rolls. They also contend that the database can contain outdated information, including records involving immigrants who later became naturalized U.S. citizens and therefore have voting eligibility.

The government has not released the overall error rate for the modified system. Both the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department declined to provide that figure when asked.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents the groups challenging the system, criticized Friday’s ruling as “profoundly disappointing,” warning that it places Americans “at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by the Supreme Court’s other two liberal members, dissented from the decision. She wrote that “the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it ​likely lacks the authority to take.”

In filings before the Supreme Court, the challengers pointed to examples they said demonstrated problems with the database. A Travis County, Texas, election official reportedly said that 25% of the system’s matches identifying potential noncitizens involved people who had already established their U.S. citizenship. The groups also cited news reports indicating that at least 81% of the system’s responses involving St. Louis County, Missouri, were inaccurate.

The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed their lawsuit in September 2025. They sought to prevent the Trump administration from using the modified SAVE system, arguing that the changes violated federal privacy protections and other U.S. laws.

In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., blocked the revised database. She concluded that the system had been assembled in a haphazard manner and relied on citizenship information that could not be considered reliable.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

The administration appealed, but on September 4, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit voted 2-1 against putting Sooknanan’s ruling on hold. That decision led the Justice Department to seek emergency intervention from the Supreme Court.

Justice Department attorneys described the lower court’s ruling as “indefensible” in their Supreme Court filing, arguing that it “threatens the integrity” of the upcoming midterm elections.

Texas, which joined the case in support of the administration, has rejected arguments that the federal database is unreliable.

Separately, litigation in Florida has allowed the Trump administration to continue operating the modified SAVE system in Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio, all Republican-led states.