The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and other sued Thursday to stop a purge of Texas’ voter rolls that the Latino civil rights group and its allies say is discriminatory toward naturalized citizens.
The suit, filed in State District Court in Austin, names Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson as well as Brazoria, Collin, Dallas and Denton counties as defendants. Others joining LULAC as plaintiffs include Texas LULAC, LULAC Council 102 and voting rights group Common Cause.
The groups’ petition asserts that Texas’ reliance on the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to remove potential “noncitizen” voters from the rolls violates the National Voter Registration Act’s prohibition on uniform and non-discriminatory voter list maintenance.
Last year, the state used the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to conduct what LULAC and its co-plaintiffs argue is an illegal voter purge.
“Texas’ decision to rely blindly on stale and unreliable data, without even cross-checking it with their own, puts the voting rights of countless Texans at risk. These actions are not only discriminatory, but a clear violation of the National Voter Registration Act,” LULAC CEO Juan Proaño said in a statement. “To comply with the law and to better serve their citizens, we are calling for an immediate end to this illegal voter purge program.”
Under the direction of President Donald Trump, the Department of Homeland Security shared the SAVE system with states ordering them use it to mass identify noncitizens on their voter rolls. Texas and Missouri were among the first states to implement the augmented tool.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson sent county elections administrators and registrars a mass email last October. In it, she said her office had begun distributing lists of flagged voters to counties statewide, demanding they remove voters from the rolls who don’t respond with proof of citizenship.
However, Alicia Pierce, a spokewoman for the Secretary of State, told the Tribune that the Secretary of State’s office hadn’t reviewed SAVE’s flagged voters for citizenship before distributing the lists because it “isn’t an investigative agency.”
An investigation by the Texas Tribune and ProPublica shows that the system meant to identify noncitizens frequently flags foreign-born U.S. citizens in error.
According to the news outlets’ investigation, errors in the experimental implementation have been widespread, involving at least 87 voters across 29 Texas counties — and local officials suspect there are more.
“I really find no merit in any of this,” Bobby Gonzalez, the elections administrator in Duval County, told the Tribune. SAVE flagged three voters in Gonzalez’s South Texas county, all of whom turned out to be citizens.
Studies have consistently shown that noncitizens rarely register to vote and make up less than 0.01% of registered voters. Nonetheless, Trump and other right-wing allies have peddled a narrative that Democrats have allowed “millions” of illegal immigrants into the country so they can bolster their voting base.
The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law maintains that conspiracy theories of noncitizen voters have the potential to do real harm by jeopardizing the voting rights of eligible voters.
The SAVE System at the heart of LULAC’s lawsuit isn’t to be confused with the SAVE Act, a bill currently making its way through Congress. However, both seek to demand proof of citizenship as a voting requirement — something voting-rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers argue is a move designed to disenfranchise large swaths of the eligible voting population.
Trump has named the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act as a top legislative priority. If passed, it could jeopardize the voting rights of up to 20 million U.S. citizens, according to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY.
Like the increasing scope of the SAVE System, the impetus behind the SAVE Act is the conservative conspiracy theory of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens, a familiar fight for LULAC.
In 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ordered raids of the homes of multiple members of LULAC in San Antonio as part of investigations of alleged “vote harvesting.”
“Every Texas voter deserves to cast a ballot without fear of being wrongly targeted or removed from the rolls,” said Anthony Gutierrez, Common Cause Texas executive director, in a statement regarding the joint suit with LULAC. “When naturalized citizens are singled out, it not only creates barriers, but puts people’s voices at risk, both of which threaten trust in our system. No one should have to fear discrimination when they show up to vote, not in Texas, not anywhere in the U.S.”
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