Exclusive: The Trump Administration Is Building A National Citizenship Data System

Summary

The Trump Administration Is Building A National Citizenship Data System

NPR Politics Podcast – Released June 30, 2025

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Introduction

In this exclusive episode of The NPR Politics Podcast, hosts Deepa Shivaram, Miles Parks, and Jude Joffe Black delve into a significant development from the Trump administration: the creation of the first nationwide, searchable citizenship data system. This tool is designed to help states verify the citizenship status of individuals to prevent non-citizens from voting in federal elections.

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Understanding the Scale of Non-Citizen Voting

Miles Parks initiates the discussion by addressing the prevalence of non-citizen voting in federal elections. He emphasizes that despite extensive efforts, non-citizen voting remains virtually non-existent:

"It is not. It has never been found to be a widespread problem in American elections." [01:24]

He further explains the challenges election officials face in verifying citizenship, highlighting the laborious nature of cross-referencing multiple data sources and outdated records that can mistakenly flag eligible voters as non-citizens.

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Introducing the National Citizenship Data System

The conversation shifts to the new tool, an expansion of the existing Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. Miles Parks describes how the Trump administration has repurposed SAVE to create a comprehensive database that can verify the citizenship status of nearly every American:

"Our reporting found that the Department of Homeland Security... is being expanded far beyond that small universe of non citizens to be able to check the citizenship status of almost every American." [02:45]

This expansion represents a significant shift from SAVE's original purpose, which was primarily focused on verifying eligibility for public benefits.

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Public Concerns and Lack of Transparency

Jude Joffe Black voices concerns about the absence of public discourse surrounding this monumental change. Referencing John Davison of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, she underscores the need for public engagement and transparency:

"To have something this monumental of a change, you really need to have a public conversation about it." [02:57]

This sentiment is echoed by Miles Parks, who points out that while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) briefed election denial groups about the system, many state election officials were left unaware of its existence or impending rollout:

"A staffer at the Department of Homeland Security... briefed a prominent election denial group... while having not briefed many state election officials who told us they did not know this capability existed or was coming." [03:58]

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Implementation Challenges and Accuracy Concerns

Post-break, the hosts discuss the operational aspects of the new system. Jude Joffe Black raises critical questions about the tool's effectiveness:

"There's a lot of issues that go into data matching and voter data... whether US Citizens who are eligible to vote could be ensnared into being labeled potentially as ineligible." [06:34]

Miles Parks adds that the rapid development of the system—completed in just a few months—raises flags about its accuracy and reliability:

"It takes the federal government more than just four months to be able to make a comprehensive national database of information that's going to be accurate." [07:17]

He further elaborates on the complexities of data integration, highlighting uncertainties about the cleanliness of the Social Security Administration data and its compatibility with voter roll data.

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Privacy and Future Implications

Jude Joffe Black discusses the unprecedented nature of the federal government's efforts to link diverse data sets, which historically have been maintained separately by states. She points out the potential for misuse and the absence of established legal frameworks to govern such extensive data consolidation:

"We're seeing a new reach into states with the federal government trying to get access to personal information on Americans that have historically been held by states." [09:12]

Miles Parks addresses the potential for the federal government to repurpose the data beyond its intended use. While federal law restricts misuse, he notes that DHS may not have fully adhered to privacy laws during the tool's creation:

"It doesn't seem necessarily like DHS has followed all of those relevant privacy laws with the creation of this tool." [10:05]

This skepticism is shared by voting officials who fear that erroneous data could jeopardize eligible voters' ability to participate in elections.

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Partisan Divides and Future Outlook

The discussion highlights potential partisan divides concerning the adoption and utilization of the system. Miles Parks references past resistance from states during similar efforts in the first Trump administration, suggesting that current political dynamics might influence states' willingness to embrace the new tool:

"More than 40 states just said, no, thank you." [08:05]

He anticipates that Republican-controlled states might be more receptive to sharing election data, while others may resist, leading to a fragmented national approach.

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Legal and Ethical Considerations

Jude Joffe Black emphasizes the ongoing legal battles surrounding the data system, noting over a dozen lawsuits that challenge the federal government's authority to centralize such personal information:

"There are more than a dozen lawsuits that address this. And so it's kind of an unsettled issue right now." [09:43]

She also references the Trump administration's executive orders prioritizing the identification and prosecution of non-citizens involved in voting, raising ethical questions about surveillance and civil liberties.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with the hosts reiterating the gravity of the Trump administration's efforts to centralize citizenship data. They underscore the need for vigilance, public discourse, and legal scrutiny to ensure that the system protects eligible voters and upholds democratic principles without infringing on individual rights.

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Key Takeaways

• Minimal Impact of Non-Citizen Voting: Despite heightened efforts, instances of non-citizen voting remain exceedingly rare.
• Expansion of SAVE Program: The Trump administration has repurposed an existing tool to create a national citizenship verification system.
• Lack of Transparency: The rollout has been handled with limited public consultation and transparency, raising concerns among state officials and privacy advocates.
• Accuracy and Reliability Issues: Rapid development and data integration challenges pose risks of inaccuracies, potentially disenfranchising eligible voters.
• Privacy and Legal Concerns: The consolidation of personal data into a federal system without robust legal frameworks raises significant privacy and ethical issues.
• Potential Partisan Divides: Political affiliations may influence states' acceptance and implementation of the new system, leading to inconsistent nationwide practices.
• Ongoing Legal Battles: Numerous lawsuits are challenging the federal government's authority and the system's constitutional implications.

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Notable Quotes

• Miles Parks [01:24]: "It is not. It has never been found to be a widespread problem in American elections."
• Jude Joffe Black [02:57]: "To have something this monumental of a change, you really need to have a public conversation about it."
• Miles Parks [07:17]: "It takes the federal government more than just four months to be able to make a comprehensive national database of information that's going to be accurate."
• Jude Joffe Black [09:12]: "We're seeing a new reach into states with the federal government trying to get access to personal information on Americans that have historically been held by states."

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This episode provides an in-depth analysis of the Trump administration's initiative to build a national citizenship data system, highlighting its potential impact on voting integrity, privacy, and the delicate balance between security and civil liberties.

Transcript

[Melissa]

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[Melissa]

Discover [e-mail] NPR hi, this is Melissa from Kannapolis, North Carolina, and I just stopped by my local farmers market to purchase some fresh peaches and cantaloupe. This podcast was recorded at 1:19pm on.

[Deepa Shivaram]

Monday, June 30, 2025.

[Melissa]

Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I will be enjoying some yummy fresh local produce. Okay, enjoy the show.

[Deepa Shivaram]

I had a peach this morning, but I bet hers is better.

[Miles Parks]

I feel like I love peaches, but I'm very intimidated by the mess. I feel like I always end up with just like goop all over the place.

[Deepa Shivaram]

That's so good. I don't know how to cut a peach. I will admit that at this stage in my life, I just, it doesn't.

[Miles Parks]

Make sense to me.

[Deepa Shivaram]

Just you gotta bite straight in right? Hey there. It's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House.

[Miles Parks]

I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

[Jude Joffe Black]

And I'm Jude Joffe Black. I'm on the Power and Influence team.

[Deepa Shivaram]

And today on the show, an NPR exclusive. The Trump administration has built the first searchable data system that can check whether a person is a US Citizen. It's being rolled out now to help states ensure non citizens don't vote in federal elections. So, Miles, let's start with this. How big of a problem is non citizen voting in federal elections?

[Miles Parks]

We've talked about this a lot over the last year or two, right? It is not. It has never been found to be a widespread problem in American elections. And I will say people, states, government entities are devoting more resources than ever to try to find root out this quote, unquote problem. And it has still just never been found to be anything but microscopic numbers. But I will say that for the kind of small number of people who are on voter rolls, when election officials do have a question about their citizenship, that has an issue, election officials find it pretty tough. It's laborious work has traditionally taken a number of different data sources to try to nail down people's citizenship. In cases specifically where you can imagine somebody with a green card who registered voted at a dmv, the DMV record's outdated. So it might look like to the election official that you're a non citizen. Which leads us to the tool that we're talking about today, which is Called save, it's an acronym for the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program at dhs. And it's traditionally was used to look in a bunch of different immigration databases and allow officials across many local governments to be able to check the immigration status of people. Now we found that this tool, at least for voting officials, is being expanded far beyond that small universe of non citizens to be able to check the citizenship status of almost every American.

[Deepa Shivaram]

Yeah, well, Jude, let me bring you in here because that's kind of what I'm curious about. I feel like a lot of people might assume that the federal government already had a list like this or a system like this of, of tracking all citizens, but that's not the case. This is new. That's right.

[Jude Joffe Black]

You know, and a lot of countries do have those kinds of lists, and they have national IDs and federally run elections, but it's a whole different system. In our history there, you know, there's been vocal opposition from both sides of the aisle, and I'll say, especially from political conservatives about the idea of the government consolidating data on Americans. And so we wound up with like a federal government with a lot of data silos by design. So we spoke to John Davison about this. He's the director of litigation at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center. I mean, and he says, you know, to, to have something this monumental of a change, you really need to have a public conversation about it. There needs to be opportunity for the public to weigh in, to give comment and, and even for elected officials to weigh in as well.

[Deepa Shivaram]

Yeah. I feel like when the federal government is rolling out any kind of new policy or new rules, they have to go through this waiting period to collect public comment to, to go through this process usually a lot longer. So, Miles, who is pushing for this then? Is this something that state election officials have been asking for?

[Miles Parks]

So election officials had been pushing for improvements to the old save, the version that just searched within this kind of network of immigration databases. But this massive expansion went way beyond what any of the voting officials I've spoken to were kind of dreaming of when they talked about improving this SAVE system. And then what's also interesting here is that our reporting found that the Department of Homeland Security, a staffer at the Department of Homeland Security, actually briefed a prominent election denial group on the updates to the system, while at the same time having not briefed many state election officials who told us they did not know this capability existed or was coming. And so you've kind of got this clear message of priorities in terms of as this new tool is being developed. Who is kind of the first person to hear about it?

[Deepa Shivaram]

Okay, we're going to take a quick break and more in a moment.

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[Deepa Shivaram]

And we're back. So, Jude, I know that there have been a lot of efforts to use data to improve elections in the past, but they haven't always gone well. So do you actually know anything about how well this new tool works?

[Jude Joffe Black]

We don't. And that's a big concern. I mean, there's a lot of issues that go into data matching and voter data. And, you know, experts say this can be a very messy process. So that's one of the big questions here, whether US Citizens who are eligible to vote could be ensnared into being labeled potentially as ineligible. That's something that's been a big problem in the past. And so we'll have to see how this tool is actually working to know whether this is going to have the same problem.

[Miles Parks]

I do think that the quick development, I mean, this seems to have been developed in just the last couple months is something that a number of experts we talked to noted. I mean, Kim Wyman, who's the former Republican Secretary of State of Washington, said this.

[Terry Gross]

Up until this point, we've never had A list of U.S. citizens to compare our voter registration list to. And it seems like it takes the federal government more than just four months to be able to make a comprehensive national database of information that's going to be accurate.

[Deepa Shivaram]

Yeah. So there's definitely concerns here about accuracy and then also potential things that could very much go wrong.

[Miles Parks]

Yeah. And I mean, data matching in elections sounds really easy, but it's actually very difficult, especially when you talk to people who focus on this stuff. People think that the data, data is just clean on all the different sides, when in reality it's unclear whether the Social Security Administration data that this tool is relying on is clean. It's unclear how that's going to integrate with the voter roll data that they're trying to kind of connect to it. And then there's these separate immigration databases that they're also trying to ping.

[Deepa Shivaram]

So with states having this tool, I mean, is it possible for states to say, you know, we don't want this, we're opting out?

[Miles Parks]

Oh, absolutely. One thing I should also note is that we talked to multiple secretaries of state who didn't even know this existed. Oh, wow. And so it's a little unclear how the broader voting community is going to respond to this, but I think election officials are very risk averse people. And so a lot of these questions I would assume would need to be answered before many of them just kind of hand over all of their election data to the federal government. I will also note, in the first Trump administration, there was a kind of similar effort to try to get a lot of this voter data. And more than 40 states just said, no, thank you. And so it will be really interesting to see whether this becomes a real partisan divide on if Republican controlled states are maybe more willing to give their election data over for this sort of analysis.

[Deepa Shivaram]

Yeah, I'm very curious to see how, you know, especially that partisan divide that you mentioned, how people will react, the federal government collecting all of this data. I mean, it's just one aspect of how the Trump administration has been gathering information, gathering data about US Citizens. Because the thing I'm thinking of is Doge, right?

[Jude Joffe Black]

Yeah. I mean, we're seeing across the federal government this effort that's really kind of unprecedented to link data sets in ways that haven't been done before. We're also seeing a new reach into states with the federal government trying to get access to personal information on Americans and American residents that have historically been held by states and that haven't gone to the federal government before. So this is a big theme. There's more than a dozen lawsuits that address this. And so it's kind of an unsettled issue right now.

[Deepa Shivaram]

Okay. So some of these states and these secretaries of States are saying, you know, we don't really want this data. We don't want to use this tool. But they're still giving up, you know, the information about citizenship status to the federal government. So is it possible that the federal government can use this data for things that have nothing to do with voter rolls?

[Miles Parks]

I would say no, in the sense that federal law definitely dictates that the federal government is not supposed to use data in ways that are outside of the bounds of what the government has permission to use that data for. That said, we're kind of in uncharted territory because it doesn't seem necessarily like DHS has followed all of those relevant privacy laws with the creation of this tool. And so I think that has a lot of voting officials spooked. I talked to one voting official who said, basically, if this thing actually worked the way they say it's going to work, I, I would be kind of interested in that because it could make some of my systems more efficient, but I don't trust that it's not going to put people in my jurisdiction in danger.

[Jude Joffe Black]

Yeah, that's one of the big questions here. What else can all of this voter data being uploaded into this system be used for in the future? We know from Trump's executive order on voting that he has directed federal agencies to prioritize identifying and prosecuting noncitizens who are on voter rolls and who vote, but also those who are just registered to vote, regardless of whether they voted. So that does seem to be a priority for this administration. We've seen a few of those prosecutions so far already in this administration.

[Deepa Shivaram]

All right, we're going to leave it there for today. I'm Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House.

[Miles Parks]

I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

[Jude Joffe Black]

I'm Jude Joffe Block. I'm on the Power and Influence Team.

[Deepa Shivaram]

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics podcast.

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