[Source: Reuters]

The US Supreme Court revived on Friday an expanded immigration database that President Donald Trump’s administration said aims to combat voting by noncitizens but critics contend could disenfranchise eligible voters.

The justices ​granted the Justice Department’s request to block a judge’s order that had stopped state officials from using Social Security numbers and other information to conduct sweeping checks of ‌the citizenship status of registered voters against federal records.

The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from Friday’s order.

The majority said the plaintiffs’ arguments likely fail because federal law expressly authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive information relating to citizenship and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration.

The administration’s data-sharing arrangement is one in a series of actions boosting the federal government’s involvement in voting ahead of November’s midterm elections ​in which Trump’s fellow Republicans seek to maintain control of Congress.

The U.S. Constitution gives individual states the primary authority to run and administer elections.

The Department of Homeland Security last year ​redesigned a federal database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, used to verify a person’s citizenship and immigration status.

The revamp ⁠allowed users to search many records at a time and to conduct searches using individuals’ Social Security numbers.

In a social media post on Friday, James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, ​replied to a post about the court’s order, saying, 4

“Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop ​noncitizens from illegally voting.”

Since the federal database was expanded, several Republican-led states have compared their voter lists to the database, and some voters flagged as potential noncitizens have had their registrations canceled.

Critics say such election-related actions by Republicans are driven less by concerns over election security than by an attempt to gain political advantage by narrowing the electorate, risking the disenfranchisement of eligible, often Democratic-leaning voters.

Trump has carried out hardline policies toward immigration and has made false claims ​of widespread voting fraud including in his 2020 election loss to Democratic former President Joe Biden.

Advocacy groups that sued to block the revised SAVE system said that the new approach has resulted in people ​who were wrongfully identified as noncitizens being kicked off voter rolls.

They have argued that SAVE can be outdated, meaning immigrants who have become naturalized US citizens and are thus eligible to vote are sometimes labeled as noncitizens.