Trump Administration Sued Over Massive ‘Interagency Database’ of Americans’ Private Information

Advocacy groups are suing to block the Trump administration’s creation of vast, centralized databases of Americans’ personal information for purging voter rolls and launching criminal investigations. 

The groups filed a federal class-action lawsuit Tuesday in Washington D.C. against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the heads of those agencies in their official capacity, alleging violations of federal privacy and regulatory procedure laws. 

“The federal government’s secretive and unlawful collection and consolidation of Americans’ personal data is a clear example of the constitutional crisis we are living through,” Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters (LWV), one of the plaintiffs, said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “Our federal government is abusing its power to access American’s personal information, and several states are using that private data to harm voters and our individual right to privacy.”

The other plaintiffs are LWV’s Virginia and Louisiana chapters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and five individual Americans.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March directing DHS to expand the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’s Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program for use in checking the citizenship of registered voters, incorporate Social Security data, and make it free for state election officials to use. Since then, DOJ has taken voter registration roll data it has collected from some state election officials and shared it with DHS for use with SAVE. [MORE]