\n<\/p>\n
The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver\u2019s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship.<\/p>\n
The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud.<\/p>\n
According to emails obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, DHS approached Texas officials in June about a pilot program to add the state\u2019s driver license data, but it\u2019s not clear if the state participated.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, DHS added millions of Americans\u2019 Social Security data to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, allowing officials to use the tool to conduct bulk searches of voter rolls for the first time. According to the document filed Thursday, SAVE also recently expanded to include passport and visa information.<\/p>\n
Incorporating driver\u2019s license information would allow election officials whose rolls don\u2019t include voters\u2019 Social Security numbers to conduct bulk searches by driver\u2019s license number. Ultimately, the system would link these two crucial identifiers for the purpose of citizenship checks, said Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is the key that unlocks everything,\u201d Morse said.<\/p>\n
State driver\u2019s license databases often include a variety of sensitive information on drivers, including place of birth, passport number, biometrics, address, email and employment information, said Claire Jeffrey, a spokesperson for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.<\/p>\n
Beyond the privacy concerns this creates, using driver\u2019s license numbers in SAVE could lead to citizens being wrongly flagged as noncitizens, said Rachel Orey, director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Driver\u2019s license numbers are sometimes reused and people can have licenses in multiple states. Also, if SAVE isn\u2019t linked to live versions of state driver\u2019s license databases, the information in the system will be outdated.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis could have far-reaching consequences for voter access and public trust if inaccurate data were used to question eligibility or citizenship,\u201d Orey said.<\/p>\n
DHS says in the notice that linking to driver\u2019s license data, which it calls the most widely used form of identification, \u201cwill allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship, which will improve accuracy and efficiency for SAVE user agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n
The department did not respond to questions about the expansion.<\/p>\n
Up until this year, SAVE was mostly used to check individual immigrants\u2019 citizenship status when they applied for public benefits. DHS has said the aim in expanding the system was to enable election officials to check voter rolls en masse. But the agency\u2019s data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration as well as Thursday\u2019s disclosure make clear that DHS and other agencies can use SAVE for other purposes, including for immigration enforcement investigations.<\/p>\n
Information uploaded into the system by state and local election officials and other users will be saved and may be \u201cshared with other DHS Components that have a need to know of the information to carry out their national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence, or other homeland security functions,\u201d the notice explains.<\/p>\n
Advocacy groups have sued the federal government claiming the pooling of data in SAVE violates the Privacy Act, which is meant to prevent misuse of private data. In filings, the government has said that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that DHS would exercise caution in flagging voters as potential noncitizens.<\/p>\n
Some privacy lawyers called DHS\u2019 move to add driver\u2019s license information more evidence of federal overreach. \u201cThe administration wants to get as much data as it can, however it can, whenever it can,\u201d said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.<\/p>\n
The DHS notice, known as a system of records notice, allows for public comment on several aspects of SAVE\u2019s expansion, including some already completed. Typically, such notices are filed when agencies propose changes to federal systems, and the comments are meant to inform how officials go forward. That didn\u2019t happen in this case.<\/p>\n
In June, email records show, DHS asked the Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues driver\u2019s licenses and ID cards, to partner on a pilot program to add its data into SAVE.<\/p>\n
Timothy Benz of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE, wrote that the planned expansion was part of the \u201cevolution\u201d of SAVE into a \u201cone-stop shop for all election agency verification needs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat would require collaboration with each states\u2019 DL agency in order for us to query those DL records in order to provide that information to the querying elections agency,\u201d Benz wrote.<\/p>\n
Rebekah Hibbs, a supervisor in the Texas Department of Public Safety\u2019s driver\u2019s license division, replied that DPS is \u201calways happy\u201d to support the SAVE tool and agreed to talk again with USCIS.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not clear what happened next. In response to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune, DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said the \u201cdepartment does not have any ongoing projects with USCIS related to driver record information for registered voters, nor have we been asked to provide that information.\u201d<\/p>\n
She did not answer questions about whether DPS has given any data to USCIS. DHS did not respond to questions about whether the partnership moved forward.<\/p>\n
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Oct. 20 that her office had run the state\u2019s entire voter roll through SAVE. Alicia Pierce, Nelson\u2019s spokesperson, said the office did the check using full Social Security numbers, which it routinely obtains from the Department of Public Safety to match with registered voters.<\/p>\n
The results showed that around 0.015% of Texas voters, or 2,724 people, are potentially noncitizens.<\/p>\n
At least one Texas official is concerned that those initial SAVE results may not be accurate. In a court filing submitted Wednesday as part of the Privacy Act litigation, Travis County voter registration director Christopher Davis wrote that state data shows about 25% of the voters that SAVE flagged as potential noncitizens in the county had provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am concerned that the list Travis County received from the Secretary of State is flawed and worry about the potential for voters to be improperly cancelled from the voter rolls and possibly disenfranchised as a result,\u201d Davis\u2019 filing says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver\u2019s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship. The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[5728,2436,18317,1111,2167,8758,6111,480,247,199],"class_list":{"0":"post-31824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-checks","9":"tag-citizenship","10":"tag-collect","11":"tag-data","12":"tag-dhs","13":"tag-drivers","14":"tag-license","15":"tag-plans","16":"tag-propublica","17":"tag-state"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}