New Docs Show DHS Gathering Driver's License Data in Voter Fraud Crusade [View all]

(Mother Jones) The Trump administration is quietly undertaking an effort to expand a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tool used for citizenship verification to include driver’s license and passport information—personal data it plans to utilize in its voter fraud crusade.

You’ve probably never heard of the DHS system known as SAVE (or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements), which the agency has historically used to confirm individuals are citizens and therefore eligible for government assistance. But if the Trump administration gets its way, SAVE will soon know a lot about you.

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But late last month, DHS indicated in a public notice posted to the federal register that it planned to build out the program even further, by adding the ability to search driver’s license information from all 50 states. The federal government could accomplish this either by requesting access to the driver’s license data from each state individually, or perhaps by relying on national data compiled by a private law enforcement nonprofit. DHS says SAVE will soon have access to the US passport database, too.

According to US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), the division of DHS that oversees SAVE, the expansion is an effort to verify voter eligibility more efficiently. Non-citizen voting has been an obsession of Donald Trump’s ever since he falsely claimed that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because three million undocumented immigrants voted in California. “[W]e are reinforcing the principle that America’s elections are reserved exclusively for American citizens,” USCIS spokesperson Matthew J. Tragesser says. But experts are concerned by SAVE’s expansion from a tool used to ascertain the status of an immigrant applying for public benefits to what is effectively an amalgamated database that can research hundreds of thousands of voters at once. They say it could be used to spread misinformation about the frequency of non-citizen voting, which studies show is incredibly rare, or even to try and remove eligible voters from state voter rolls based on the weaponization of faulty data.

Read more at link: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/dhs-gathering-drivers-license-save-voter-fraud-crusade/