EPIC, Women Voters Sue President Trump Over National Data Banks
The Trump administration’s creation of large government databases consolidating the sensitive personal information of millions of Americans in an attempt to purge voter rolls is unlawful, according to a class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), League of Women Voters and others.
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The plaintiffs, which also include five individuals represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sued the government in the U.S. District for the District of Columbia (Case 1:25-cv-03501).
“Americans do not want the government to combine their sensitive personal information into a centralized database,” having “spoken clearly and loudly on this topic through their elected representatives in Congress for decades, resulting in numerous laws requiring that the collection and use of Americans’ personal data be transparent, limited, and rigorously justified,” the complaint said.
In addition, the complaint said the government is "ignoring these laws to create comprehensive databases of American citizens’ data," housed at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and DHS are "working rapidly" to build "precisely the type of ‘national data banks’ the American people and Congress have consistently resisted, and the Privacy Act was designed to prevent.”
In addition to violating the 1974 Privacy Act, the complaint alleges the administration has unlawfully converted DHS’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system into a national citizenship database that pools unreliable Social Security Administration data, which is then used to open criminal investigations and purge voter rolls.
The administration has also illegally built a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “data lake” that combines records from state and federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Department of Labor, and state voter registration databases, the complaint adds. These records contain personally identifiable information (PII) such as Social Security numbers, tax information, medical records and biometric data.
The government's "secretive and unlawful collection and consolidation of Americans’ personal data" illustrates "the constitutional crisis we are living through,” said Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters in a release Tuesday. Several states are using personal information "to harm voters and our individual right to privacy,” Stewart added.
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said that the “administration is playing fast and loose with our personal information” by building “‘Big Brother’ databases,” while Jon Sherman, litigation director of the Fair Elections Center, noted that “relying on outdated and incomplete data to assess voters’ citizenship status in the present day is completely illogical.”
The case, League of Women Voters v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, also claims a violation of the separation of powers.
During an event hosted by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Leadership Conference’s Center for Civil Rights & Technology in June, panelists warned that mass data collection by the federal government poses the potential for misuse (see 2506120055). Another CDT event, in September, noted that there are frameworks to fight federal data collection, but a national comprehensive privacy framework would help even more (see 2509100073).
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's demand for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) data from the states is the subject of litigation from a coalition of states (case 3:25-cv-06310) and EPIC (case 1:25-cv-0165). The states have secured a temporary restraining order from a federal judge, blocking the USDA from collecting SNAP data (see 2509190015 and 2509300048), while EPIC's coalition is seeking to block the release of information (see 2509020057).