Obama-appointed Judges Sri Srinivasan (L) and Robert Wilkins (R) rejected the government’s request for a stay.Two Obama-appointed judges on the D.C. Circuit just slammed the door on President Trump’s effort to give states a working tool to check voter rolls for non-citizens.In a 2-1 vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit refused to allow the federal government to restart its expanded Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system while the Trump Administration appeals a lower court’s nationwide ruling.The Gateway Pundit reported in July that a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida smashed Sooknanan’s ruling for Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana, states covered by a December 2025 settlement that required DHS to keep those SAVE features online. Judge T. Kent Wetherell II ordered the system restored for those states and rejected Sooknanan’s claim that the upgrades violated the Social Security Act or the Privacy Act.The Gateway Pundit later reported on the separate Florida decision directing DHS to restore the system’s expanded search capabilities for four states.We also reported that 26 states were using SAVE for voter registration or list maintenance, that the system processed roughly 198 million cases in 2025, and that 24 states, most of them blue, still refuse to use it. New Jersey jumped into ERIC instead, a system that does not even flag non-citizens. Then the illegal-alien voter scandals started piling up.On Friday, Obama-appointed Judges Sri Srinivasan and Robert Wilkins rejected the government’s request for a stay. Trump-appointed Judge Gregory Katsas dissented.The majority called a stay “extraordinary relief” and said the government had not made a “strong showing” it would win on the merits.They leaned hard on a procedural claim that the Justice Department forfeited its central arguments under the Social Security Act’s confidentiality rules by raising them too late. They refused to consider those arguments even for purposes of an interim stay.Judge Katsas was having none of it.Katsas laid out the history the majority buried.SAVE exists because Congress said so, first in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, then in the 1996 illegal-immigration law that requires DHS to answer state inquiries about citizenship and immigration status.For years the old system was nearly useless for elections. States could not check U.S.-born citizens. They could not search by Social Security number. They could not upload voter lists in bulk.That is why Florida sued. That is why a settlement required the upgrades. That is why Trump’s March 2025 election-integrity executive order directed DHS and the Social Security Administration to make the tool work.Katsas noted that 27 states now use SAVE for voter verification and that those states made some 60 million voter-verification queries between January 1, 2025, and April 1, 2026. Nationwide, more than 1,300 government agencies use SAVE. It processed about 25 million queries in FY 2024 and 200 million in FY 2025.His core legal point: the Social Security Act’s confidentiality rule does not ban what modified SAVE actually does. SSA citizenship records rest on statutes that long predate the 1990 cutoff the district court waved around. The upgraded system returns a citizenship or death indicator. It does not dump Americans’ Social Security numbers onto county clerks.“The government is likely to succeed in showing that modified SAVE does not violate the Social Security Act’s prohibition on disclosure of SSNs or related records,” Katsas wrote.He also said the government will suffer irreparable harm if the stay is denied, DHS cannot carry out duties Congress imposed, states cannot maintain clean rolls, and the government is trapped between Sooknanan’s nationwide vacatur and the Florida court’s order to restore the same features for four states.That last point is the circus the Left created. One Biden judge in Washington shuts the system down for the whole country. One Trump judge in Florida orders it turned back on for four states. Two Obama judges in the D.C. Circuit just refused to pause the Washington order.The post Obama Judges Refuse to Revive Trump’s SAVE Citizenship-Verification System Ahead of Midterms — Trump-Appointed Judge Katsas Dissents appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.