The Trump administration is building a national citizenship system : NPR

Michel Martin, host:

For almost 250 years, the United States has passed without list of each of its citizens. But in less than five months, the Trump administration built a tool that aims to make one. It was designed in conjunction with the Elon Musk group organized, the Ministry of Effectiveness of the Government, or DOGE. NPR is the first to account for the details of this new tool. One of the journalists in this story is Miles Parks, and here he is here to tell us more. Hello, Miles.

Miles Parks, Byline: Hey, Michel.

Martin: So what is the objective of this new system that the administration deploys?

Parks: It is designed to verify that only American citizens are on electoral lists, and it is a major expansion of a tool that already existed within the immigration division of the Ministry of Internal Security. It’s called saving. There have been decades for decades for decades for decades only to verify the status of non-citizens who are legally in the country so that local governments can decide to offer them advantages. About ten years ago, electoral officials also started using it to check if someone on voters who had files indicating that he was a non-city had in fact naturalized and became eligible to vote. But now DHS has expanded this system so that he can also seek American citizens, which has really shocked experts in a private life and in election to whom we have spoken.

Martin: Ok, so go back just a minute. I think some people may be surprised to discover that there is no system so far to check if someone is an American citizen. So could you talk about it?

Parks: I mean, there was just a very long history of people on the left – and I will then say, in particular right – of people who did not trust the federal government with this type of sensitive data in a centralized place. But what seems to have a priority here is President Trump’s concern about the voting of non-citizens, who, to be clear, never proved to be a widespread problem in the US elections. Each study or effort to discover it has revealed that this only happens in tiny microscopic numbers. And those responsible for the vote said that the verification of citizenship in cases where it is not clear is laborious work, and they wanted there to be better systems in place to help. But the fact that this new citizenship verification tool seems to be motivated by disinformation can simply cause more problems.

Martin: How is the system supposed to work exactly?

Parks: So, basically, Save is a tool that is able to make a ping to a pile of different immigration databases to obtain a response on citizenship status, traditionally for legal non-citizens. Now, thanks to Doge, the system can also make a data ping at the Social Security Administration, which retains ad hoc information on American citizens when they get a number. So when you combine these two capacities, essentially, what DHS says is that they should be able to legally verify the citizenship status of almost all the Americans in the country because almost all Americans now have a number.

Martin: So you explained why there had not been this database before. But since there has never been a database of American citizens before, is it controversial?

Parks: I mean, there is an open question to find out if it’s legal, Michel. There are federal laws that govern how new data systems with the personal information of Americans can be created, and legal experts to whom we have spoken seem to doubt that these processes have been followed in this case. Another great stranger is whether the system even works. I mean, of course, precision is a big problem when you talk about questioning someone’s citizenship. And a person who attended a DHS briefing on the system told us that the agency had already directed more than 9 million voter files via the system, but none of this analysis has been made public so far. Here is Kim Wyman, who is the former Republican State secretary of Washington.

Kim Wyman: It seems that it is more than four months old in the federal government to be able to make a complete national database of information that will be accurate.

Parks: And then, finally, it is simply difficult to know what DHS does with all these electoral data once it has it. I spoke to a vote manager who said they would be interested in using the tool if he was considered exact, but they did not expect their state to try him because they were worried that the federal government could do another with these electoral data. We asked the DHS immigration branch on all these questions, but we have received no answer.

Martin: It’s the Miles de NPR parks. Miles, thank you.

Parks: Thank you.

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