A legal challenge over the use of an expanded federal immigration-checking system to screen voter rolls has exposed a sharp divide between Texas officials and local authorities in the state.
The system, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, had traditionally been used by local, state and tribal agencies to check the citizenship and immigration status of people applying for certain benefits and licences. Following a directive from Mr Trump, the Department of Homeland Security overhauled it to include Social Security data and other records.
Voting rights groups and others brought legal challenges. In June, a federal judge in Washington blocked the administration from allowing states to use the online system to check their voter lists.
Judge Sparkle L Sooknanan, appointed by President Joseph R Biden Jr, said federal agencies had acted in “scrambling to comply with an executive order aimed at reshaping federal elections”. They had, she found, “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable”.
The dispute has now reached the Supreme Court, with competing arguments over whether the system should remain suspended ahead of the midterm elections. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, told the justices that the state had used it to check more than 18 million voters in what he described as a free and efficient process.
Texas officials said the system identified about 2,700 people as potential non-citizens. A manual review found that 578 had been wrongly flagged and were citizens. On September 15, officials said 117 names would be referred to the attorney general’s office for an “investigation of potential noncitizen voting”.
Officials in Travis County, a Democratic stronghold, urged the justices to keep the system on hold. Celia Israel, the county tax assessor, and Dyana Limon-Mercado, the county clerk, said they had “grave concerns” about its accuracy and warned that flawed data could lead to eligible voters being wrongly removed from the rolls.
