Trump Admin Accused of Violating Voters’ Privacy in Search for Immigrants

OTI Senior Policy Analyst Sydney Saubestre was quoted in a Newsweek piece on the expansion of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program—a move that has been called out as a violation of privacy.

“The SAVE expansion isn’t about election integrity; it’s about expanding surveillance under the guise of voter verification,” Sydney Saubestre, a senior policy analyst at New America's Open Technology Institute, told Newsweek. “If the government can’t be trusted to respect the limits on how it uses our data, it can’t be trusted to protect our democracy.”

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Sydney Saubestre, a senior policy analyst at New America's Open Technology Institute, told Newsweek: “This is part of a broader pattern of data overreach that should alarm everyone. We’ve seen this playbook before—from the failed Presidential Election Integrity Commission’s sweeping request for state voter data to efforts by the Trump administration to broker data-sharing agreements between the IRS and DHS that would have given immigration authorities access to taxpayer information.

“These attempts have repeatedly pushed the limits of what’s legal and ethical, blurring the boundaries that protect Americans’ most sensitive data. What’s happening with the SAVE program now fits that same mold. Systems that were never designed for bulk searches are being repurposed with little oversight.”