California Attorney General Rob Bonta today co-led a coalition of 18 attorneys general in opposing the Trump Administration’s expansion of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to include the information of U.S.-born citizens who have never interacted with our immigration system and who never consented to the use of their personal data in this manner. In a comment letter, Attorney General Bonta and the coalition argue that, taken alongside the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) well-documented efforts to acquire massive troves of personal data from a variety of sources, the expansion of the SAVE program is an ill-advised, massive invasion of privacy that exposes millions of individuals to possible data breaches, pools vast swaths of sensitive data, and furthers the Administration’s efforts to create a national surveillance database.
“The Trump Administration has made no secret of its plan to build a mass surveillance machine. The expansion of SAVE to include data on U.S. citizens is the latest salvo in this dystopian power grab,” said Attorney General Bonta. “What’s worse is that the Department of Homeland Security is only now formally informing the public of this plan — despite making many of these changes to SAVE months ago. I urge the Department to rescind this ill-advised plan that exposes Americans’ private data to potential misuse by the federal government and external actors alike without providing sufficient safeguards.”