The Brief

The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.

The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.

NPR is the first news organization to report the details of the new system.

For decades, voting officials have noted that there was no national citizenship list to compare their state lists to, so to verify citizenship for their voters, they either needed to ask people to provide a birth certificate or a passport — something that could disenfranchise millions — or use a complex patchwork of disparate data sources.

Now, the Department of Homeland Security is offering another way.

DHS, in partnership with the White House's Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) team, has recently rolled out a series of upgrades to a network of federal databases to allow state and county election officials to quickly check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists — both U.S.-born and naturalized citizens — using data from the Social Security Administration as well as immigration databases.

Such integration has never existed before, and experts call it a sea change that inches the U.S. closer to having a roster of citizens — something the country has never embraced. A centralized national database of Americans' personal information has long been considered a third rail — especially to privacy advocates as well as political conservatives, who have traditionally opposed mass data consolidation by the federal government.

Legal experts told NPR they were alarmed that a development of this magnitude was already underway without a transparent and public process.

"That is a debate that needs to play out in a public setting," said John Davisson, the director of litigation at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's one that deserves public scrutiny and sunlight, that deserves the participation of elected representatives, that deserves opportunities for the public to weigh in through public comment and testimony."

When federal agencies plan to collect or use Americans' personal data in new ways, there are procedures they are required to follow beforehand, including giving public notice.

Another privacy expert, University of Virginia School of Law professor Danielle Citron, called this data aggregation effort a "hair on fire" development. She told NPR she has questions if the project itself is lawful.

Many other questions about the new system remain, including which states plan to use it and how, what sort of data security measures are being taken and how trustworthy the data the tool provides will be. It's also unknown what the federal government plans to do with the voter records after they've been run through the system.

The recent history of elections is littered with failed data matching efforts, often driven by false fraud narratives, which have entangled eligible voters. The first Trump administration attempted the beginnings of a similar data project, though the effort shuttered after most states balked at sharing their voter data.

The fact that the development and rollout follow Trump's falsehoods about widespread noncitizen voting makes election experts wary of how this new tool will work.

"We've never had a list of U.S. citizens to compare our voter registration lists to," said Kim Wyman, the former Republican secretary of state of Washington who is now a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "It seems like it takes the federal government more than just [a few] months to be able to make a comprehensive national database of information that's going to be accurate … That's what my concern is, just first and foremost, that the list is accurate."

Potential voters get information at a voter registration event on October 22, 2024 at Cal State Los Angeles in Los Angeles.

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Everyone registering to vote must swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are a U.S. citizen. The consequences for noncitizens who try to vote include fines, prison time and deportation. Officials say that deterrent is why cases of ineligible people casting ballots are incredibly rare — a fact that's become increasingly apparent as more and more states devote resources to uncovering the few people that slip through the cracks every election. Research has also shown that when noncitizens do vote, it's often not to commit fraud but rather because they misunderstood eligibility rules.

President Trump and his allies have continued to emphasize the issue. The Justice Department has prioritized its prosecution and Republican lawmakers are pushing new legislation at both the national and state level to require people show proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.

If this new tool is successful, it could provide local and state governments a powerful method to check the citizenship of almost all Americans without additional documentation requirements.

"Taking that burden of proof, if you will, off the voter … is a good thing," said Wyman, who also worked for the Department of Homeland Security on election security issues in the Biden administration.

But she noted that a national citizenship list and anything resembling a national voter registration list have been controversial ideas for a long time, so the Trump administration is wading into uncharted waters.

"All of us that live in this free country and this free society want to believe that there are some privacy rights that are still being upheld in our lives," Wyman said. "The attention to detail matters here in many, many big ways."

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which is under the Department of Homeland Security, is managing the tool. The agency did not provide more information about how it will work when contacted by NPR. In a statement, spokesman Matthew Tragesser called the development a "game changer" and said the agency looks forward to "implementing more updates."

"USCIS is moving quickly to eliminate benefit and voter fraud among the alien population," Tragesser said.

What SAVE did and what it does now

This new citizenship check capability comes from a massive expansion of a tool voting officials only used sparingly in the past.

The tool, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, is a system of DHS databases that state and federal agencies have queried since the 1980s to check the immigration status of noncitizens living in the U.S. legally. Agencies can then decide if the applicants are eligible for different government benefits.

For roughly the past decade, some voting officials have also used SAVE to check the citizenship of voters on their rolls, usually in instances where department of motor vehicle records indicated a voter is a noncitizen, since those records often aren't updated when a person naturalizes. Election officials could use SAVE to get a more recent immigration snapshot, which would either verify that a person had become a citizen and was indeed eligible to vote, or if no naturalization record was found, indicate to the official that they should reach out to the voter about whether they are a citizen.

But using SAVE for this sort of verification was unwieldy.

Election officials across the political spectrum complained they did not have the specific immigration identification numbers needed to query the system, and in cases where they did, it was expensive and labor intensive to submit one query at a time. Ahead of the 2024 election, some Republican-led states ramped up their complaints about the inadequacies of the tool. Just weeks before the election, Texas, Florida and Ohio sued DHS, arguing the Biden administration was failing to help states verify their voters' citizenship.

USCIS began planning upgrades to the system at the end of the Biden administration, according to a person who attended a briefing where it was discussed but was not authorized to speak to the media. After Trump took office, DHS began a series of regular calls with some state election staffers to talk through potential updates.

A key turning point came in March, when Trump signed an executive order that made sweeping changes to voting and election protocols, including requiring DHS to allow states "access to appropriate systems" for verifying the citizenship of voters on their rolls without a cost, and instructing DOGE to assist the agency in combing voter rolls for noncitizens.

The order also instructed the attorney general to prioritize prosecuting non-citizens who register to vote, whether they actually voted or not, using "databases or information maintained by the Department of Homeland Security."

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Within weeks, USCIS began announcing rolling upgrades to SAVE, crediting DOGE with the changes. On April 22, the agency revealed SAVE was now free for non-federal agencies, and could handle mass checks. Then, a May 22 news release announced SAVE had integrated data from the Social Security Administration so election officials could query it with a nine-digit Social Security Number.

Though the May news release didn't mention it explicitly, the Social Security change meant for the first time SAVE could verify the citizenship of U.S.-born Americans with a valid Social Security number, which nearly every American citizen has.

That development is a major move that turned SAVE from a tool that only responded to queries about foreign-born citizens or noncitizens into something that could comb through entire voter lists. But numerous state voting officials NPR spoke with were not aware that capability was part of the updates.

As recently as late April, a USCIS fact sheet about using SAVE for voting records said the opposite. "SAVE does not verify U.S. born citizens under any circumstances. SAVE does not access databases that contain U.S.-born citizen information," the web page read, according to a snapshot captured by the Internet Archive.

That has now been changed. In a version that was last updated in June, the fact sheet now says that looking up U.S.-born citizens is possible with a Social Security Number. "SAVE is able in many cases to verify U.S.-born U.S. citizens for voter verification purposes, through information accessed through the SSA," it reads. NPR has not yet spoken to a state voting official who has looked up a U.S.-born citizen on the new SAVE platform.

Social Security Administration data systems can show whether an applicant was a citizen or a noncitizen at the time they received their number, said Kathleen Romig, a former SSA official who works at the liberal-leaning policy nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Department of Homeland Security has combined that point-in-time citizenship information, with SAVE's ability to more thoroughly tell whether a person has naturalized, to create a system that voting officials can use to theoretically nail down citizenship status for voters they have Social Security numbers for.

Upon hearing the details, numerous voting data experts told NPR it sounded like a system that could work. The question, they say, is whether quality control systems are in place to catch the inevitable mistakes that will come from comparing hundreds of millions of records, especially when the stakes are as high as questioning someone's citizenship.

There are some known data challenges with SAVE. For instance, there can be a lag time between when a person naturalizes and when that information is entered into the system, which can lead to the initial appearance that a person is a noncitizen on the voter rolls if they registered to vote immediately after naturalizing. SAVE materials also make clear there are some foreign-born citizens who cannot be verified by the system.

New U.S. citizens stand during a naturalization ceremony in Chicago on June 25, 2025. Newly-naturalized citizens may fall through the cracks of the new citizenship verification tool built by the Department of Homeland Security.

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USCIS acknowledges these shortfalls and tells users that if the system returns an answer other than confirming citizenship, then it must also be manually reviewed by USCIS staff, and the elections office must contact the voter to give them a chance to provide proof of citizenship.

It's also unclear how reliable or complete the data coming from the Social Security Administration is, because as MIT election expert Charles Stewart notes, that data as well as the data within SAVE and on the voter rolls was collected independently and without this sort of integration in mind. A report from the Institute for Responsive Government noted recently that the SSA only began adding citizenship tags to records roughly 40 years ago, so the agency's data on natural-born citizens may be incomplete.

"The concern with any of these data-based matching procedures, is that people who don't know much about voter registration datasets just assume that the data are clean on [all] sides," said Stewart.

The most notable election data matching success story, a program called the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), took multiple years to develop and roll out. The system allows its more than two dozen member states to share government data across state lines, to eliminate dead voters from the rolls, find the few people in every federal election who illegally vote twice, and also register eligible voters when they move to a new place.

Nine Republican-led states have since pulled out of the organization due to viral falsehoods that spread on the far-right and general uneasiness about having a third party combing through state voter rolls. At least two of those states, Louisiana and Texas, are early piloters of this new data tool run by the federal government. The states have not disclosed many details and declined NPR's interview requests.

DHS says so far it has run more than 9 million voter records through the upgraded SAVE system, according to a person who attended a briefing about the new capabilities who was not authorized to speak to the media, and that early analysis found those records to contain 99.99% U.S. citizens. That analysis has not been independently verified, and it's not clear if any of the few noncitizens they did find ever actually voted.

"If this rolls out and it turns out that our voter rolls are pretty darn accurate … and it is shouted from the mountaintops and people believe it, then that would be big," said Tammy Patrick, an election expert at the nonprofit Election Center and former Arizona voting official. She noted however that there are large financial incentives, both for candidates and for grassroots election denial groups and influencers, to keep pushing misleading claims about noncitizen voting.

"My concern is that I'm not so sure that there will be those who will believe it, that there will be those who will stop raising donations and campaign funds on the narrative of fear-mongering and the illegitimacy of our systems," Patrick said.

Most states can't use the new SAVE capabilities yet because they don't collect full Social Security numbers as part of the voter registration process.

But the next SAVE upgrade will allow election officials to query with just the last four digits of a Social Security number, in addition to a full name and birthdate, according to two people who were on calls where such plans were discussed but asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plan. Such an expansion will make the citizenship searches available for all voting officials, although there is a wide range across the country when it comes to how much of a state's voter records have even partial Social Security numbers associated with them.

Future plans also include integrating state DMV data, according to the same sources, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is expected to reach out to every state's chief election official soon encouraging them to run their rolls through the system.

Some Republican election officials have been happy that DHS is taking their concerns about SAVE seriously. Idaho's Republican Secretary of State Phil McGrane used SAVE extensively ahead of the 2024 election, but found it difficult to use.

"This wasn't what the database was meant for and we were asking something of it that it really wasn't designed for," McGrane told NPR in early June. "Now there is attention being put to it to make it work that way."

However when NPR reached out more recently to ask about SAVE's new broader citizenship check capabilities, a spokesperson for McGrane's office, Chelsea Carattini, said the secretary had not been briefed or made aware of those changes by the federal government.

Who gets to know what's being built

While USCIS denied NPR's interview request about the changes and has sporadically shared updates with some state voting officials, a DHS staffer gave a full briefing about the tool to an influential group known for pushing false and misleading election fraud narratives.

On June 12, the Election Integrity Network, a grassroots group led by conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell who worked with President Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election, hosted a virtual event with David Jennings, who oversees the SAVE system. Democracy Docket first reported the briefing.

NPR also acquired audio of Mitchell seemingly speaking about Jennings at an earlier Election Integrity Network event in May. The nonprofit investigative group Documented, which often acquires audio of Mitchell's events, provided a recording to NPR.

"He is in charge of the SAVE database that has the citizenship data for, you know, everybody," Mitchell said at the May event. "And he is in the process of reconfiguring the entire [thing] so that we can actually determine who on the voter rolls is and is not a citizen."

Voting experts NPR spoke with expressed concern that the agency overseeing the creation of the voter data tool was sharing details with a group involved with denying the 2020 election results, but not the American public.

"Before the federal government just up and creates a massive data system that purports to be a record on all of us — that's a public conversation that we're owed," said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former Biden White House adviser on voting rights. "And not just as a public policy matter, as a moral matter, as a legal matter."

Under the Privacy Act of 1974, there is a formal process known as a system of records notice, for federal agencies to give public notice about new ways they intend to collect or use Americans' personal information. No such notice appears to have been published for the upgrade to SAVE that integrates Social Security data, and neither USCIS or SSA responded to an NPR inquiry asking if a new one had been issued.

Data Unknowns

The SAVE upgrade is part of a larger trend, led by DOGE, of the Trump administration taking unprecedented steps to amass and connect data across the federal government. The effort has sparked over a dozen lawsuits and cybersecurity concerns.

The public officials condemning the data consolidation have mostly been Democrats however, which is a departure from past privacy debates in American history.

"One thing that's rather striking about these moves around data in the present is that there has been so little outcry actually on the right, who have been sort of the standard bearers of worry about big government and data merging and data collection to begin with," said Sarah Igo, a history professor at Vanderbilt University.

One conservative voice who is expressing such concerns is Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of the nonprofit True the Vote, which has pushed numerous election conspiracy theories over the past decade.

Engelbrecht praised the SAVE effort in a recent newsletter, but expressed discomfort about the administration's efforts to centralize various federal databases and give access to the contractor Palantir.

"Such centralization of data poses a threat to individual freedoms and privacy," she wrote. "Surrendering our data to unchecked power isn't just a technical risk— it's a moral failure."

One of the biggest questions about the new SAVE is what happens to the voter data that states and counties upload to the system, particularly since it is now designed to verify entire state voter rolls.

USCIS specifies that it retains records of SAVE queries for 10 years. The agency did not respond to NPR's questions about whether it will keep copies of state voter rolls uploaded to SAVE, or whether it will use information states provide through the system as a basis for criminal or immigration investigations.

A state election official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the development told NPR they were specifically worried about how the administration would use information provided by states in immigration crackdown efforts. For that reason, the official, who has worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations, said they expected there to be a clear partisan division in which states use it, even if all election officials have the same goal of accurate voter rolls.

"If I believed this database was accurate, and that I was going to get good usable information from it, you're damn right I would use it," the official said. "The question is, is the data usable? And [usable] in a way that I'm not going to jeopardize people who live in my jurisdiction?"

Have information you want to share with NPR? Reach out to these authors through encrypted communication on Signal. Miles Parks is at milesparks.10 and Jude Joffe-Block is at JudeJB.10. Please use a nonwork device.

Copyright 2025 NPR

As Los Angeles homeowners grapple with the expense of rebuilding after last year’s devastating fires, an L.A. City Councilmember is putting forward an idea that could lower some costs.

Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the Pacific Palisades, has introduced a motion to explore waiving part of the city’s portion of the local sales tax for fire victims who purchase rebuilding materials in the city.

The 1% of the local 9.75% sales tax that goes into the city’s general fund would be given back to consumers under the proposal. The waiver could apply to lumber, appliances and other rebuilding goods purchased within the city.

The motion, introduced Friday by Park and seconded by Councilmember John Lee, says: “The City should do everything within its power to alleviate the financial burden for these residents and businesses in order to facilitate their return and stabilize the Pacific Palisades community.”

Would it make much of a difference? 

Economists told LAist the proposal could help many homeowners mitigate the high cost of rebuilding, but likely wouldn’t tip the scales for under-insured, under-resourced property owners.

“It wouldn't hurt if it's very well designed and easy to use,” said Alexander Meeks, a director at the Santa Monica-based Milken Institute. “But I'm not sure if it's really going to tackle the scale of the financial challenge that survivors are facing.”

Meeks noted that the tax waiver wouldn’t lower up-front costs such as environmental testing, architectural design and permitting. And it may not help homeowners sourcing raw materials from outside the city.

Zhiyun Li, a UCLA Anderson School of Management economist, said the waiver could help some homeowners justify the additional cost of rebuilding more fire-safe structures.

“Homeowners must typically pay out of pocket to upgrade to IBHS+ standards, which are more stringent,” Li said. “The tax waiver could encourage upgrading to IBHS+ standards or investing more in mitigation, thereby reducing future risk and improving the likelihood of maintaining insurance coverage.”

What’s next for the proposal? 

The proposed tax relief would not be available to properties that have been sold since the fires started in January 2025.

The motion has been sent to the City Council’s budget and fire recovery committees. If approved by the full council, it would require the city administrative officer, the Office of Finance and the city attorney to report back to the council within 60 days on options for crafting a tax relief plan.

The motion calls for the report to consider factors such as how to minimize the burden of administering the tax relief, what documentation homeowners would have to submit and what it would cost the city to oversee the program.

Senate and House Republican leadership have resurrected a stalled plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security after a record 47-day funding lapse.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said in a joint statement on Wednesday that the House will take up a measure passed by the Senate last week to fund most of DHS except Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through the end of September.

Republicans would then attempt to fund ICE and Border Patrol for three years using a party-line budget reconciliation bill that would not require support from Democrats.

"In following this two-track approach, the Republican Congress will fully reopen the Department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years so that those law-enforcement activities can continue uninhibited," Thune and Johnson wrote.

The agreement comes nearly a week after House Republicans dismissed an identical plan, refusing to take up the Senate-passed measure and instead passing a 60-day short term funding bill for all of DHS that had little chance of overcoming Democratic opposition in the Senate.

Johnson called the agreement a "joke" and President Donald Trump declined to publicly endorse the deal. Trump had previously resisted any package that did not include his push to overhaul federal elections known as the Save America Act.

"I think any deal they make, I'm pretty much not happy with it," Trump told reporters last week.

Democrats welcomed the agreement as in line with their pledge not to give ICE any more money without reforms after immigration enforcement agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. But the deal does not include any of the policy demands Democrats are pressing for, such as a ban on masks for immigration enforcement officers and requiring warrants issued by a judge, not just the agency, to enter homes.

"For days, Republican divisions derailed a bipartisan agreement, making American families pay the price for their dysfunction," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote in a statement Wednesday. "Throughout this fight, Senate Democrats never wavered."

Trump seemed to bless the revived plan earlier Wednesday, writing on social media that he wants a party-line bill to fund immigration enforcement on his desk by June 1.

"We are going to work as fast, and as focused, as possible to replenish funding for our Border and ICE Agents, and the Radical Left Democrats won't be able to stop us," Trump wrote.

Despite the shutdown, ICE has been minimally impacted because Republican lawmakers approved $75 billion for ICE through another party-line budget reconciliation bill last year.

Congress is on a two-week recess, but the Senate and House could move to fund all of DHS except ICE and CBP as early as Thursday using a procedure known as unanimous consent that allows the chambers to circumvent formal voting as long as no member objects.

Even during a recess when most members are not in Washington, this could be unpredictable, especially in the House, where many hard-line conservatives oppose a deal that does not fully fund DHS.

"Let's make this simple: caving to Democrats and not paying CBP and ICE is agreeing to defund Law Enforcement and leaving our borders wide open again," Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., a member of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, wrote on X. "If that's the vote, I'm a NO."

If a member does object, that could require waiting for another vote when all members are back from recess.

Claudia Grisales contributed reporting.
Copyright 2026 NPR

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.