Trump creates unprecedented national database tracking citizenship status

For the first time in U.S. history, the Trump administration has created a searchable national citizenship database that links Social Security, immigration, and voter-registration records to verify the status of almost all Americans.

Americans—across the political spectrum and including privacy advocates and many conservatives—have traditionally opposed centralized federal citizen registries as a threat to constitutional privacy protections.

The database was built by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in partnership with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), without a public rule-making process or explicit congressional authorization.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has acknowledged that newly naturalized citizens can “fall through the cracks,” and the Social Security Administration’s citizenship tags date back only about 40 years, creating gaps in the data.

A Trump executive order titled “Stopping Waste, Fraud and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos” provided the legal basis for broad interagency data sharing, including immigration enforcement access to IRS and HUD records.

The U.S. Supreme Court stayed a lower court injunction that had blocked DOGE’s access to Social Security data, effectively removing that judicial privacy safeguard.

Civil-rights and constitutional experts have raised Fourth Amendment and due-process concerns about mass surveillance and potential voter disenfranchisement under this system.