In her order, Sooknanan found that the system was implemented "haphazardly," risked Americans' "sacred right to vote," and “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.”
Tuesday's filing from President Donald Trump's DOJ came four days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit refused the same request from a divided panel and ordered the government's underlying appeal expedited, according to the application and to Democracy Docket.
The Justice Department did not wait for that court to rule.
Sauer told the justices the district court had issued an "indefensible" order that "threatens the integrity of upcoming elections." Sooknanan had already turned the government down once, refusing to pause her own ruling on July 8.
SAVE was built to let government agencies check immigration status for people applying for public benefits, and it long required a Department of Homeland Security immigration number that most Americans do not have.
After Trump signed an executive order on elections in March 2025, the agency rebuilt it, Sooknanan found in her June opinion. The new version accepted Social Security numbers instead and let users upload names in bulk.
The government told the justices it cleared more than 65 million voters as citizens and flagged 28,635 as potential noncitizens.
Sooknanan vacated the rebuilt system on June 22, holding that it violated the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The judge, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote that the case was about the unlawful creation of a centralized federal database holding the private information of American citizens.
The accuracy problem starts with how the Social Security Administration records citizenship, because people often receive a Social Security number years before they naturalize.
The agency told the court there is no requirement to report a change in status until someone asks for a replacement card or files for benefits. A naturalized citizen can therefore sit in federal records as a noncitizen indefinitely, Sooknanan found.
DHS knew about that gap before the rebuilt system went live, according to internal privacy reviews from July and September 2025 that said the modification was "not in compliance" with the Privacy Act.
Those same reviews warned that shortfalls in the accuracy of Social Security citizenship data "could cause incomplete or false results," the June opinion said.
"So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable," Sooknanan wrote in the opinion's opening lines. "All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote."
An independent review in Travis County, Texas, found that "twenty-five percent of the non-citizen matches" there were people who had already proven they were citizens, and Texas did not dispute that figure in the litigation, Sooknanan wrote.
Four members of the groups that sued were naturalized citizens whom Texas asked to prove their citizenship after a SAVE check, the judge found. They had 30 days to produce documents or lose their registrations.
One woman's registration was canceled without her knowledge, and two members were still off the rolls when they submitted sworn statements to the court, which the government never disputed.
Federal law bars states from running systematic programs to strike ineligible voters from the rolls in the 90 days before a federal election, a deadline election lawyers call the quiet period. For the Nov. 3 election, that window opened Aug. 5, according to Justice Department guidance on the National Voter Registration Act. Congress wrote it because errors made close to Election Day cannot be fixed in time, and noncitizen voting, which is already a federal crime, is rare.
The appeals court used that deadline against the government, saying the harm from losing SAVE could not be urgent when states cannot legally conduct systematic purges right now anyway, the application said.
Sauer answered that the deadline "does not apply to noncitizens who were never properly registered in the first place." He acknowledged the courts of appeals disagree and called it an open question, one the Supreme Court agreed in June to decide in an Arizona case set for the term that begins in October.
That case will not be resolved before November.
A stay would help states, Sauer wrote, "insofar as they agree with the government's position" on the deadline, and even if systematic purges are frozen, the government says the order still blocks individualized removals "that all agree are not covered by the 90-day provision." Under that reading, each of the 27 states would decide for itself what the law permits, with no court supervising.
Sauer builds the application on two orders the justices issued in the past three weeks, and neither decided whether the government was doing anything lawful.
The latest request comes after the high court has granted the Trump administration and Republicans a windfall of legal midterm advantages.
On Aug. 24, the court let Trump's mail-voting order proceed while focusing on whether the challenging states could sue when they did, NPR reported. Sauer cites that order twice, including for the proposition that reversal "would come too late for the 2026 midterms."
The second order came on Sept. 4, the same day the D.C. Circuit turned the government down. The justices restored discounted television advertising rates for party committees by holding that the appeals court lacked jurisdiction to review the underlying agency guidance, Politico reported. Sauer cites that four-day-old decision for the legal standard governing his own request.
"Needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections" is how Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described the mail-voting order in dissent, NPR reported.
The Supreme Court's other election rulings this year have also heavily favored Republicans.
A Washington Post analysis found the court pared back the Voting Rights Act in April and struck down a majority-Black district in Louisiana, touching off a wave of Republican redistricting across the South, after which the Cook Political Report cut its count of House seats leaning Democratic from 217 to 206 and left Democrats needing 12 of 18 tossups to win the chamber. Election law scholar Richard Hasen told the Post that Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be a justice "in a rush."
The advertising order carries its own imbalance, Politico reported, with the Republican National Committee holding more than $130 million against the Democratic National Committee's $9.5 million and roughly $18 million in debt.
The government told Sooknanan something different last year. In opposing the coalition's early request for relief, the judge wrote in July that state voter roll maintenance in the 90 days before a federal primary or general election would be unlawful, while refusing to pause her order.
