A federal judge who admitted she would only renounce her foreign citizenship “if required by law” has now blocked the Trump administration from verifying whether voters are actually American citizens.
D.C. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who became a U.S. citizen in 2009, issued the ruling Monday. She seemingly still retains citizenship in her home country, raising serious questions about whether foreign nationals should hold positions of power in American courts.
The ruling prevents the federal government from using an updated database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system. The database was designed to ensure only American citizens cast ballots in American elections.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) didn’t mince words about the conflict. “If judges can stop Presidents, they should not also be citizens of foreign nations,” he said.
Sooknanan’s reasoning centered on the possibility that the database might contain outdated information. In some cases, a person who recently obtained citizenship might not appear in the system immediately. Based on this, the judge concluded the entire effort to verify voter citizenship should be stopped.
“The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” Sooknanan wrote in her decision. “So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
The judge claimed states “are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller responded with pointed sarcasm. “Judge Sparkle decrees that America belongs to any random alien on planet earth, just like our founders intended,” he said.
Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival highlighted the contradiction in the left’s position. “It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” he noted.
Democrats and their media allies have long claimed noncitizen voting is virtually nonexistent. Yet they fight tooth and nail against any measure designed to prevent it. The Associated Press coverage of Monday’s ruling included an entire section titled “Voting by noncitizens was already rare.”
This isn’t Sooknanan’s first ruling that critics say puts foreign interests above American ones. Before taking the federal bench, she served as a key Biden Justice Department official. In that role, she pushed to target parents the Biden administration labeled “domestic terrorists” for speaking out about their children’s education in public schools.
Greg Bovino, former commander-at-large of the U.S. Border Patrol, offered a blunt assessment of the situation. “Import third-world people, put them in power, watch your country start resembling their homelands,” Bovino said. “Mass deportations now, before the next 100 million illegals we have here have anchor babies lock it in.”
The ruling represents another chapter in what critics describe as an ongoing judicial assault on the Trump administration’s efforts to secure American elections. Federal judges, many appointed by previous administrations, have repeatedly blocked executive actions aimed at enforcing immigration law and protecting election integrity.
