U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a Federal agency whose mandate is to administer naturalization and derivative citizenship for those not born as U.S. citizens, has been trying — without the public notice required by law for such a database — to construct a national ID registry of all U.S. citizens including natural-born U.S. citizens.

This process began in April and May of 2025 with a ten-fold expansion of the USCIS “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program” (SAVE) database to add records about hundreds of millions of native-born U.S. citizens to those already in the system about tens of millions of naturalized citizens and immigrants.

Information about a new category of individuals (native-born U.S. citizens) was added to SAVE from new sources including Social Security and state drivers’ license records.

The Privacy Act requires prior notice in the Federal Register of the categories of individuals, information, and sources of personal data in Federal databases. To deter Federal officials or employees form keeping secret databases about the citizenry, the Privacy Act makes the maintenance of such a database of personal information without proper notice a crime on the part of the responsible Federal officials and employees.

USCIS converted the SAVE database about immigration and naturalization into a comprehensive  database about all U.S. citizens without the required notice.

Six months later, in response to a lawsuit led by the League of Women Voters, USCIS published a notice of the changes to the SAVE system, with the notice to take effect today unless the changes are rescinded in response to public comments. But USCIS has kept the the revised SAVE system in operation, illegally, during the comment period.

In our comments submitted today to USCIS, the Identity Project points out that the ongoing maintenance of the revised SAVE system without proper notice has been a crime on the part of the responsible Federal officials and employees.

We also argue that “the revisions to the SAVE system of records exceed the statutory authority of USCIS and violate multiple provisions of the Privacy Act.”

According to our comments:

The statutory mandate of USCIS is to carry out various functions with respect to naturalization and derivative citizenship. No statute requires USCIS to carry out any function whatsoever with respect to natural-born U.S. citizens, or to collect information about them. Nor does any statute require any agency to maintain a national registry of U.S. citizens.

Even if Congress were to authorize  a national ID registry, “records of Social Security numbers and account information and state drivers’ license records would not be ‘relevant or necessary’ to accomplish that purpose”:

Pursuant to the U.S. Constitution, an individual born in the U.S. acquires U.S. citizenship by birth. In the absence of a valid renunciation of citizenship — which would be executed and recorded by the Department of State, not by USCIS, the Social Security Administration (SSA), or state drivers’ license agencies — the sole fact that is relevant or necessary to ascertain their U.S. citizenship is the fact of their birth in the U.S., not whether they have a Social Security number or drivers’ license, much less any other information in SSA or drivers’ license records.

What is the relevance of whether someone has a Social Security number to whether they are a U.S. citizen? Non-U.S. citizens can and routinely do (and in many cases must) have Social Security numbers and accounts. What is the “relevance” of whether an individual has a driver’s license to whether they are a U.S. citizen? Many states can and do issue driving permits to non-U.S. citizens, on the basis of their demonstrated competence to operate motor vehicles safely rather than on the basis of citizenship. Neither the Social Security Administration nor state driver licensing agencies are authoritative adjudicators of U.S. citizenship, and neither of them has any need, for any of their official purposes, to ensure that whatever information about U.S. citizenship they may incidentally collect and maintain is either accurate or up to date.

Will anyone who doesn’t have a drivers’ license be presumed not to be a U.S. citizen?

A “citizenship” registry constructed in garbage-in, garbage-out fashion by aggregating state drivers’ license records that have nothing to do with citizenship will inevitably be incomplete, inaccurate, and unfit for the purpose of judging citizenship, eligibility to vote, or eligibility for other Federal programs.

Finally, we call out USCIS for violating the provision of the Privacy Act that requires information that is to be used to determine eligibility for Federal programs (the stated purpose of the SAVE citizenship database) to be collected directly from the individuals to whom it pertains:

The Privacy Act at 5 U.S.C. § 552a(e)(2) also requires that, “Each agency that maintains a system of records shall… (2) collect information to the greatest extent practicable directly from the subject individual when the information may result in adverse determinations about an individual’s rights, benefits, and privileges under Federal programs.”

None of the additional information in the revised SAVE system would be collected directly from the subject individuals, as required by this provision, although all of it could be.

If USCIS wants to create a registry of all U.S. citizens (and if a valid law has authorized it to do so, which it has not), USCIS must “to the greatest extent practicable” sign individuals up directly for that registry, first providing them with the notices required by the Privacy Act.

You can submit your own comments here through midnight EST tonight, December 1, 2025.

Given that the criminals at USCIS responsible for maintaining the SAVE system ignored the law when they expanded it into a  national ID registry, kept it in operation for six months before publishing a proper notice of what they were already doing, and have kept it in operation in its illegally revised and expanded form during the comment period, we have little hope that they will now come to their senses and rescind the changes, much less that they will be prosecuted for their criminal violations of the Privacy Act.

We wish all success to the League of Women Voters and their partners in their ongoing litigation against the unlawful transformation of this immigration and naturalization system into a national database of aggregated (mis)information about all U.S. citizens.