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.
An interesting article.