Jen Fifield, Propublica

The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver’s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship.

The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud.

According to emails obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, DHS approached Texas officials in June about a pilot program to add the state’s driver license data, but it’s not clear if the state participated.

Earlier this year, DHS added millions of Americans’ Social Security data to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, allowing officials to use the tool to conduct bulk searches of voter rolls for the first time. According to the document filed Thursday, SAVE also recently expanded to include passport and visa information.

Incorporating driver’s license information would allow election officials whose rolls don’t include voters’ Social Security numbers to conduct bulk searches by driver’s license number. Ultimately, the system would link these two crucial identifiers for the purpose of citizenship checks, said Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It is the key that unlocks everything,” Morse said.

State driver’s license databases often include a variety of sensitive information on drivers, including place of birth, passport number, biometrics, address, email and employment information, said Claire Jeffrey, a spokesperson for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.

Beyond the privacy concerns this creates, using driver’s license numbers in SAVE could lead to citizens being wrongly flagged as noncitizens, said Rachel Orey, director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Driver’s license numbers are sometimes reused and people can have licenses in multiple states. Also, if SAVE isn’t linked to live versions of state driver’s license databases, the information in the system will be outdated.

“This could have far-reaching consequences for voter access and public trust if inaccurate data were used to question eligibility or citizenship,” Orey said.

DHS says in the notice that linking to driver’s license data, which it calls the most widely used form of identification, “will allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship, which will improve accuracy and efficiency for SAVE user agencies.”

The department did not respond to questions about the expansion.

Up until this year, SAVE was mostly used to check individual immigrants’ citizenship status when they applied for public benefits. DHS has said the aim in expanding the system was to enable election officials to check voter rolls en masse. But the agency’s data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration as well as Thursday’s disclosure make clear that DHS and other agencies can use SAVE for other purposes, including for immigration enforcement investigations.

Information uploaded into the system by state and local election officials and other users will be saved and may be “shared with other DHS Components that have a need to know of the information to carry out their national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence, or other homeland security functions,” the notice explains.

Advocacy groups have sued the federal government claiming the pooling of data in SAVE violates the Privacy Act, which is meant to prevent misuse of private data. In filings, the government has said that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that DHS would exercise caution in flagging voters as potential noncitizens.

Some privacy lawyers called DHS’ move to add driver’s license information more evidence of federal overreach. “The administration wants to get as much data as it can, however it can, whenever it can,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

The DHS notice, known as a system of records notice, allows for public comment on several aspects of SAVE’s expansion, including some already completed. Typically, such notices are filed when agencies propose changes to federal systems, and the comments are meant to inform how officials go forward. That didn’t happen in this case.

In June, email records show, DHS asked the Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues driver’s licenses and ID cards, to partner on a pilot program to add its data into SAVE.

Timothy Benz of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE, wrote that the planned expansion was part of the “evolution” of SAVE into a “one-stop shop for all election agency verification needs.”

“That would require collaboration with each states’ DL agency in order for us to query those DL records in order to provide that information to the querying elections agency,” Benz wrote.

Rebekah Hibbs, a supervisor in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s driver’s license division, replied that DPS is “always happy” to support the SAVE tool and agreed to talk again with USCIS.

It’s not clear what happened next. In response to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune, DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said the “department does not have any ongoing projects with USCIS related to driver record information for registered voters, nor have we been asked to provide that information.”

She did not answer questions about whether DPS has given any data to USCIS. DHS did not respond to questions about whether the partnership moved forward.

Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Oct. 20 that her office had run the state’s entire voter roll through SAVE. Alicia Pierce, Nelson’s spokesperson, said the office did the check using full Social Security numbers, which it routinely obtains from the Department of Public Safety to match with registered voters.

The results showed that around 0.015% of Texas voters, or 2,724 people, are potentially noncitizens.

At least one Texas official is concerned that those initial SAVE results may not be accurate. In a court filing submitted Wednesday as part of the Privacy Act litigation, Travis County voter registration director Christopher Davis wrote that state data shows about 25% of the voters that SAVE flagged as potential noncitizens in the county had provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

“I am concerned that the list Travis County received from the Secretary of State is flawed and worry about the potential for voters to be improperly cancelled from the voter rolls and possibly disenfranchised as a result,” Davis’ filing says.

This year, when states began using an expanded Department of Homeland Security system to check their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was supposed to validate the Trump administration’s push to harness data from across federal agencies to expose illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement.

DHS had recently incorporated confidential data from the Social Security Administration on hundreds of millions of additional people into the tool, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. The added information allowed the system to perform bulk searches using Social Security numbers for the first time.

The initial results, however, didn’t exactly back up President Donald Trump’s contention that noncitizen voting is widespread. Texas identified 2,724 “potential noncitizens” on its rolls, about 0.015% of the state’s 18 million registered voters. Louisiana found 390 among 2.8 million registered voters, a rate of about 0.014%.

Instead, experts say, the sweeping data-sharing agreement authorizing DHS to merge Social Security data into SAVE could threaten Americans’ privacy and lead to errors that disenfranchise legitimate voters.

The details of the agreement, which haven’t previously been reported, show it contains alarmingly few guardrails to ensure accuracy and scant specifics on how the data will be kept secure, election and privacy lawyers who have reviewed it say. Further, it explicitly does not bar DHS from deploying the SSA data for other purposes, including immigration enforcement.

Experts have raised similar concerns about other parts of the Trump administration’s data-pooling drive, which has sought to tap all sorts of traditionally tightly controlled federal information, even tax data.

Until this year, SAVE contained information only on immigrants who’d had contact with DHS, such as those with permanent resident status, and had been assigned immigrant identification numbers. State and local officials typically used the system to verify immigrants’ status when they applied for benefits such as SNAP or to check, one by one, whether individuals who were registering to vote were citizens.

Under the May 15 data-sharing agreement, which was posted recently on the Social Security Administration’s website, the system added information, including full Social Security numbers, on millions of Americans not in DHS databases. The combined dataset joins together this information with addresses, birth dates and criminal records, along with immigration histories.

The agreement allows the SSA’s data to be used for searches to check voters’ citizenship, along with “other authorized inquiries from Federal, State, territorial, tribal and local government agencies seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of individuals within their jurisdiction.”

In doing these searches, SAVE stores not only the voter data that election officials upload but also the outcome of their queries, according to the data-sharing agreement and other documents from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE. The documents do not explain who can access this information or how it can be used.

Experts say adding Social Security data to SAVE could help election officials verify, en masse, if voters are U.S. citizens, but it shouldn’t be used to make final determinations that people aren’t citizens.

That’s because multiple audits and analyses have shown that SSA’s citizenship information is often outdated or incomplete, especially for people who became naturalized citizens. With the 2026 midterms about a year away, Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters of the United States, said she fears the expanded use of SAVE will lead to errors.

“The Trump administration is hunting people to try to purge people from the rolls who are lawfully registered, and they are doing it by looking at unreliable, outdated data,” Short said.

Several privacy lawyers said they believe it’s illegal for DHS to expand the use of SAVE without taking steps required in federal law, such as issuing a system of records notice to inform the public how the additional data will be collected, stored and used. Last month, advocacy groups sued the federal government, alleging that its expansion of SAVE and other data consolidation efforts violate the Privacy Act, a federal law that prohibits public agencies from misusing private information.

Officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services declined to answer questions from ProPublica.

In a filing responding to the advocacy groups’ lawsuit, federal officials said that another statute, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that agencies would exercise caution in determining whether voters are noncitizens.

“There is zero basis to assume that State officials have any interest in haphazardly and unlawfully removing large numbers of U.S. citizens from their voter rolls, and no credible evidence that any such thing has happened or is going to happen any time soon” the filing says.

Still, Leland Dudek, acting SSA commissioner until early May, told ProPublica he doesn’t trust that DHS will accurately flag noncitizens as officials try to cross-match data and files from multiple systems.

“They are probably going to make some massive mistakes,” he said.

This summer, the Justice Department started demanding access to state voter registration lists, saying this was necessary to ensure compliance with federal voter roll maintenance laws. The agency has filed lawsuits against a number of states that have refused to comply.

Some of the states that have refused to provide voters’ private information directly to the Justice Department have entered into agreements with DHS under which they upload that same information into the SAVE system.

According to a document obtained by the ACLU, which sued the administration for SAVE-related records, a growing number of states are signing agreements with DHS to use SAVE to vet voter rolls. Ten states had signed such agreements coming into 2025; as of July, another 10 had signed on, the document shows.

As counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit voting rights group, Naomi Gilens specializes in issues related to privacy and technology. Gilens said it’s important for Americans to consider if they want the government — including future administrations, not just this one — to have so much consolidated information on them.

“That is a very invasive picture that starts to be painted, in one place, for every individual who lives here’s private lives,” she said.

As of last month, Homeland Security officials had run more than 33 million voters through SAVE, USCIS told NPR. So far, the agency has declined to say publicly what the outcome of these queries have been.

But the initial results are tucked into another document obtained by the ACLU.

As of late August, about 96.3% of the voters checked in the SAVE system were identified by the system as U.S. citizens. For an additional 3.1% of voters, the system either couldn’t find them or needed more information to determine their citizenship status. About 0.5% of voters checked had died, the system found. And 0.04% showed up as noncitizens.

According to copies of 12 state agreements with DHS obtained by the ACLU and reviewed by ProPublica, election officials are required to take additional steps to verify SAVE results for voters the system identifies as other than U.S. Citizens. Then, if SAVE still can’t verify citizenship, the election officials “must contact the registrant or registered voter to obtain proof of citizenship.”

Dudek and Kathleen Romig, a former Social Security official who now works at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, worry even those steps won’t be enough to prevent mismatches from happening.

People’s names can be misspelled or listed differently in the various datasets. Many states collect partial, not full, Social Security numbers from voters and matches using partial numbers will be even less accurate, since many people share the same names, Dudek and Romig said.

“If there’s Jane Smith that is a citizen, and a Jane Smith that isn’t, you don’t want to disenfranchise the citizen Jane Smith by accident,” Romig said.

Federal officials aren’t done adding data to SAVE. Next up, according to a recent USCIS presentation to election officials shared with ProPublica: passport information from the State Department. (The State Department referred ProPublica’s request for comment to DHS, which did not respond.)