Trump's Trials - The Trump administration is building a national citizenship system

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

The Trump administration has built a searchable national citizenship data system. The tool is designed to be used by state and local election officials 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.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Trump's Terms from NPR. I'm Scott Detmer. We're going to be doing all sorts of things nobody ever thought was even possible. President Trump has brought back strength to the White House. We can't just ignore the president's desires. This will be an entirely different country in a short period of time. Every episode of Trump's Terms, we bring you NPR's latest coverage of the 47th president, with a focus on actions and policies he is pursuing on his own terms and in the process, taking the presidency into uncharted territory.

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On the plus side, you get to support something you care about. On the minus side, you like challenges and think this makes it too easy. So why don't you join us on the plus side of things with NPR Plus? Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org. Hi, Michelle Martin. For nearly 250 years, the United States has gone without a list of every one of its citizens. But in less than five months, the Trump administration has built a tool that aims to make one. It was designed in conjunction with the group Elon Musk organized, the Department of Government

Efficiency or DOJ. NPR is the first to report on the details of this new tool. One of the reporters on this story is Miles Parks, and he's here now to tell us more about it. Good morning, Miles. Hey, Michelle. So what is the goal of this new system the administration's rolling out? It's designed to verify that only US citizens

are on voter rolls, and it's a major expansion of a tool that already existed within the Department of Homeland Security's immigration division. It's called SAVE. It's been around for decades, but it was initially designed only to check the status of non-citizens who are in the country legally so local governments could decide whether to offer them benefits.

About a decade ago election officials did start using it as well to verify if someone on the voter rolls who had records indicating they were a non-citizen had actually naturalized and become eligible to vote. But now DHS has expanded this system so it can search for US citizens too which really shocked privacy and election experts that we talked to. Okay so it can search for US citizens too, which really shocked privacy and election experts that we talked to. Okay, so back up just for a minute. I think some people might be surprised to find out that there is not a system up until

now to check if somebody is a US citizen. So could you just talk about that? I mean, there has just been a really long history of people on the left. And then I will say, especially on the right, of people not trusting the federal government with this kind of sensitive data in a centralized place. But what seems to be taking priority here is President Trump's concern about non-citizen voting, which to be clear has never been shown to be a widespread problem in American elections. Every study or effort to uncover it has found that it happens only in tiny microscopic numbers.

And voting officials have said that verifying citizenship in cases where it's unclear is laborious work and they wish they were better systems in place to help, but the fact that this new citizenship verification tool seems driven by misinformation may just cause more problems. How exactly is the system supposed to work? So basically SAVE is a tool that's able to ping a bunch of different immigration databases to get an answer on citizenship status traditionally for legal non-citizens. Now thanks to DOGE, the system can also ping data at the Social Security Administration, which keeps point in time information on US citizens when they get a number. So when you combine those two capabilities, essentially what DHS says is that they should

be able to check the citizenship status of almost any American in the country legally because almost every American in the country legally, because almost every American now has a number. So you've explained why there hasn't been this database before. But given that there has never been a database of US citizens before, is this controversial? I mean, there is an open question as to whether this is legal, Michelle. There are federal laws that govern how new data systems with the personal information of Americans can be created. And legal experts we've talked to seem to doubt that those processes were followed in this

instance. Another big unknown is whether the system even works. I mean, obviously, accuracy is a big deal when you talk about questioning someone's citizenship. And a person who attended a DHS briefing on the system told us, the agency has run more than nine million voter records through the system already, but none of that analysis has been made public so far. Here's Kim Wyman, who's the former Republican Secretary of State of Washington. 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. And then lastly, it's just unclear what DHS is doing with all of this voter data once it has it. I talked to one voting official who said they would be interested in using the tool if it was found to be accurate, but they didn't expect their state to try it because they were worried about what else the federal government might do with that election data. We asked the immigration arm of DHS about all of these questions, but we weren't given any responses.

That is NPR's Miles Parks. Miles, thank you. Thank you. Before we wrap up a reminder, you can find more coverage of the Trump administration on the NPR Politics Podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news with new episodes every weekday afternoon. And thanks as always to our NPR Plus supporters who hear every episode of the show without

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