The secretary of the internal security of Christie Nuem performs at the headquarters of the Ministry of Internal Security in January 2025.
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The unprecedented efforts of the Trump administration to combine personal data of Americans are faced with a new legal task.
Federal lawsuit Submitted on Tuesday Approves the actions of the Trump administration, which combined personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans from various federal agencies, violated federal laws on confidentiality and the US Constitution, put confidential data in the risk Security violations, and can lead to deprivation of citizenship of authorized voters.
The lawsuit states that the Ministry of Internal Security, along with the group of the Department of State Efficiency, “is working quickly on the creation of this type of“ national data banks ”. The American people and Congress were constantly resisting, and the law on confidentiality was developed to prevent. “
The lawsuit was filed in the Federal Court in Washington, the district of Colombia, on behalf of the League of Women -Collectors, the electronic information center of confidentiality and five unnamed US citizens.
“This country was based on the principle that the government does not have a business business in our private affairs,” said John Davisson, director of trial on the electronic information center of confidentiality in his statement. “Nevertheless, this administration will trample our confidentiality on the greatest scale, illegally accumulates our confidential personal information and threatens our most cherished rights.”
Davisson represents the plaintiffs together with citizens' lawyers for responsibility and ethics in Washington (crew), the Fund of the striker of democracy and a fair electoral center.
The lawsuit is partially focused on the data system of the Ministry of Internal Security, known as “save”, which in recent months converted the Trump administration into a tool for finding citizenship, connecting data from the social security administration.
From these changes, state and federal agencies can now request the preservation of social insurance numbers. Initially, the tool was created only to provide information about the population born of foreign origin, but after these changes it can now provide information about citizens born in the United States.
NPR was the first news organization report this change In June.
The lawsuit claims that the federal government did not take the steps required by federal laws on confidentiality, when it made these changes to preserve, and did it “in secret, without notification, required by law and comments from the public or congress, and without evaluating the consequences of the confidentiality or risks of error in this way.”
Earlier this month, NPR reported That a number of states led by the Republicans began to manage all state voters to verify non -citizens, and more than 33 million voters were still held.
The lawsuit states that the use of US citizens who have the right to vote as non -citizens may be mistaken and can lead to their deprivation of rights or make them targeted for unlawful criminal investigations for legal voting.
The lawsuit also states that the federal government illegally combined the confidential entries of Americans in relation to the so -called “data lake” posted in the field of US citizenship and immigration services (USCIS), including social insurance numbers, biometric data, tax information, records of wages and records of employment, medical and disability reports.
The lawsuit calls the collection of the federal government of personal data “Bullseye for hackers.”
In recent months, a number of reports on data security issues have been presented, since DOGE took steps to combine government data in new ways. In August, the Director of the Social Support Administration At that time, it was reported that DOGE member made a live copy of the social security records of more than 300 million Americans and placed it in the private cloud of the agency, where it was available to other employees and was vulnerable to identification thieves.
The claim asks the judge to order the federal government to stop using new data tools.
DHS, the Social Security Administration and the Ministry of Justice, as well as the leaders of their agency are called the accused in the trial. The Ministry of Justice refused comments.
