The Department of Homeland Security said it plans to add state driver’s license information to the rapidly expanding federal system as a one-stop shop for verifying citizenship.
The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in the Trump administration’s unprecedented effort to pool sensitive data from a variety of sources, which it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and uncover public interest fraud.
DHS approached Texas officials in June about a pilot program to add the state’s driver’s license data, according to emails obtained by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, but it’s unclear whether the state has participated.
Earlier this year, DHS added social security data for millions of Americans to its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, allowing officials to use the tool to conduct bulk searches of voter rolls for the first time. SAVE was recently expanded to include passport and visa information, according to documents filed Thursday.
Incorporating driver’s license information will allow election administrators whose rolls do not include voters’ social security numbers to perform bulk searches by driver’s license number. Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says the system will eventually link these two key identifiers together for citizenship testing purposes.
“That’s the key to everything,” Morse said.
State driver license databases often contain a variety of sensitive information about drivers, including place of birth, passport number, biometrics, address, email and employment information, said Claire Jeffrey, spokeswoman for the National Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
Besides the privacy concerns this raises, using driver’s license numbers in SAVE could result in citizens being mistakenly reported as non-citizens, said Rachel Ory, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s elections project. Driver’s license numbers may be reused and you may be able to obtain a license in multiple states. Also, if SAVE is not linked to a live version of the state driver’s license database, the information in the system will be outdated.
“If inaccurate data is used to question eligibility or citizenship, it could have far-reaching implications for voter access and public trust,” Oley said.
DHS said in the notice that linking to driver’s license data, the most widely used form of identification, “enables SAVE to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship against other sources, increasing accuracy and efficiency for SAVE user agencies.”
The ministry did not respond to questions about the expansion.
Until this year, SAVE was primarily used by individual immigrants to verify their citizenship status when applying for public benefits. DHS said the purpose of expanding the system is to allow election officials to review voter rolls all at once. But the agency’s data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration and Thursday’s disclosure make clear that DHS and other agencies can use SAVE for other purposes, including immigration investigations.
Information uploaded to the system by state and local election officials and other users will be stored and “may be shared with other DHS components that need to know the information to perform national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence, or other homeland security functions,” the notice explains.
Advocacy groups sued the federal government, saying the pooling of data into SAVE violates privacy laws aimed at preventing the misuse of personal data. The government said in its filing that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly allows for information sharing to confirm citizenship status, making DHS cautious about alerting voters to possible non-citizens.
Some privacy lawyers argued that DHS’s move to add driver’s license information was evidence of federal overreach. “The administration wants to have as much data as possible, whenever possible,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.
The DHS Notice, known as the Record Notice System, allows for public comment on several aspects of SAVE expansions, including those that have already been completed. Typically, such notices are filed when an agency proposes changes to the federal system, and the comments are intended to inform how the agency should proceed. That didn’t happen in this case.
In June, DHS asked the Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues driver’s licenses and ID cards, to partner on a pilot program to add data to SAVE, email records show.
Timothy Bentz of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS branch that oversees SAVE, wrote that the planned expansion is part of SAVE’s “evolution” into “a one-stop shop for all the certification needs of election organizations.”
“This will require cooperation with each state’s DL management agency to query these DL records in order to provide that information to the inquiring election management agency,” Benz wrote.
Rebecca Hibbs, supervisor of the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Driver Licensing Division, responded that DPS is “always willing to support” the SAVE tool and agreed to discuss it with USCIS again.
It’s not clear what happened next. In response to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune, DPS spokeswoman Sheridan Nolen said, “The department has no ongoing project with USCIS related to registered voter driving record information and has never been asked to provide that information.”
He did not respond to questions about whether DPS provided any data to USCIS. DHS did not respond to questions about whether the partnership would move forward.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced on October 20 that the state’s entire state’s voter rolls have been managed through SAVE. Alicia Pierce, Nelson’s spokeswoman, said the check was done using complete Social Security numbers, which her office routinely obtains from the Department of Public Safety to match registered voters.
They found that about 0.015% of Texas voters, or 2,724 people, may be non-citizens.
At least one Texas official is concerned that the initial SAVE results may not be accurate. In a court filing Wednesday as part of the Privacy Act lawsuit, Travis County Voter Registration Director Christopher Davis wrote that state data shows that about 25% of voters SAVE reported as possible noncitizens in the county provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
“I am concerned that the list Travis County received from the Secretary of State is flawed and that voters may be wrongly removed from the voter rolls and, as a result, disenfranchised,” Davis’ filing states.
