On June 22, 2026, a federal judge in Washington read 75 pages' worth of evidence and shut down a Trump administration program that was flagging American citizens as noncitizens and getting them dropped from voter rolls.
Fifteen days later, Arizona's congressman for the 8th District moved to throw her off the bench.
What the judge actually found
Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the administration's 2025 overhaul of a federal system called SAVE — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, built back in 1986 to check immigration status for government benefits, not to screen voters.
What changed in 2025 is the part that matters. Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency bolted Social Security data onto the system and added a bulk-search option, so states could run their entire voter rolls through it at once.
Sooknanan found that the government had "haphazardly" combined and repurposed "the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable," and had flunked compliance with the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. Her summary of it:
"The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote."
This was not a hypothetical. In Texas, 2,724 people were flagged as potential noncitizens in October 2025. In Travis County alone, 97 were flagged — and officials confirmed that at least 11 of them were, in fact, U.S. citizens. The League of Women Voters and other voting groups brought the case because their own members had been wrongly labeled noncitizens and had their registrations cancelled.
That is what Hamadeh calls a "direct assault on election integrity."
What Hamadeh filed
Abraham Hamadeh announced on July 7, 2026 that he had introduced a resolution to remove Sooknanan from the federal bench.
His statement:
"Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan's egregious overreaching ruling blocking President Trump's common-sense effort to verify the citizenship of those who want to vote in our elections was the final straw. This is a blatant and unlawful subversion of the President's executive authority and a direct assault on election integrity."
"Judges who weaponize their bench to interfere with the President's constitutional duties must be held accountable."
Notice what's missing. Nowhere in the press release, and nowhere in the excerpt of the resolution his own office published, does Hamadeh address the actual finding — that the database was labeling citizens as noncitizens and costing them their registrations. He doesn't dispute it. He doesn't mention it.
The closest his resolution comes is a strange, hedged phrase: the judge obstructed "a program intended by its supporters to strengthen election integrity." Even his own paperwork won't claim the program worked.
The line about her passport
There's one more sentence in Hamadeh's press release worth reading closely. Right after the quotes, his office added:
"Sooknanan, who holds dual citizenship in the United States and Trinidad and Tobago, is an appointee to the bench by President Joe Biden."
Her dual citizenship has nothing to do with whether the SAVE database violated the Privacy Act. It has nothing to do with any charge in the articles of impeachment. It's in there for one reason: to suggest a federal judge is not really one of us.
This is a man who knows exactly how that works. When Hamadeh ran in the 2024 Republican primary for this seat, a group backing his rival Blake Masters ran an ad that said: "Dishonest Abe claims that 'America was founded on Islamic principles,' not the Judeo-Christian values that made America great. We have enough terrorist sympathizers in Congress." The campaign materials paired that line with a photo of Hamadeh in Mecca on his Hajj pilgrimage — on street signs.
Hamadeh knows exactly what it feels like to have his loyalty questioned because of his family's faith and where they came from. He put a line about a judge's second passport in a press release anyway.
He wants the database and the law
Two weeks after moving to impeach the judge who stopped the database, Hamadeh pressed the Senate to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act — the bill that would require every American to show proof of citizenship and a photo ID to register, and would largely wipe out mail-in voting.
Read how his own office describes the way that bill got this far: the House "advanced it by attaching its key provisions to both the NDAA and Budget Resolutions." That's not a clean up-or-down vote on making voting harder. That's bolting it onto a military spending bill and a budget bill — exactly the back-door maneuver we've documented before.
So the plan is both halves at once: a federal database that has already mislabeled citizens, and a federal law that puts new paperwork between you and the ballot. We've laid out what that bill would actually do — it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and it could keep millions of eligible citizens from registering.
In his own county, the numbers didn't hold up
Hamadeh's district sits inside Maricopa County. So does the clearest Arizona example of the database he's defending.
Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap started running voter rolls through the expanded SAVE system in August 2025. In February 2026 he announced he'd identified 137 potential noncitizens, including 60 who had previously voted. As Cronkite News reported in July, his office has not said whether any of them were confirmed to be noncitizens.
Heap also used the tool on more than 61,000 Arizona voters whose registrations got caught up in a 2004-era driver's-license records mix-up — a paperwork problem, not a fraud problem.
The head of Arizona's Clean Elections Commission, Thomas Collins, put the real risk plainly: "I think the biggest risk is preventing a qualified voter from voting." He added that he doubts limits on the SAVE tool will change much, because there's no evidence noncitizens have registered in significant numbers.
And Hamadeh has been in Heap's corner throughout. In February 2026 he issued a statement attacking the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors over its handling of the recorder's office.
He's not going to win, and he knows it
Removing a federal judge takes a majority in the House and then two-thirds of the Senate. That is not going to happen. Hamadeh's resolution isn't a plan — it's a press release with a bill number.
It's also becoming a house style. His fellow Arizona Republican Eli Crane moved to impeach the judge who blocked DOGE from Americans' Treasury records — and then Elon Musk wrote him a maximum campaign check. In Tennessee, Andy Ogles filed articles against a judge whose spokesman's own words gave away the reason: she was trying to "subvert the will of the President". Hamadeh's resolution uses almost the same language — a judge "substituting the judgment of a single unelected judge for that of the duly elected Executive Branch."
That's not a constitutional argument. That's a complaint that courts are allowed to tell a president no.
Why this should worry Arizonans specifically
Arizona voters approved a proof-of-citizenship requirement in 2004, and state officials have leaned on the SAVE database ever since. Arizona has also been the epicenter of false claims about the 2020 election.
Hamadeh is part of that history, not a bystander to it. After losing the 2022 Attorney General's race by 280 votes, he filed lawsuit after lawsuit trying to reverse it, and lost every one. The Arizona Supreme Court sanctioned him and the Republican National Committee for "misrepresenting facts to the court" and ordered him to pay over $55,000 toward his opponents' legal bills.
A judge told him his claims weren't supported by evidence. He responded by attacking the court. A judge has now told the Trump administration its voter database wasn't supported by reliable data. He is responding the same way.
The people who lose in this fight aren't judges. They're the citizens who show up to vote and find out a database decided they weren't citizens.
We deserve better.
Source
Abe Hamadeh moves to impeach Judge Sparkle Sooknanan after SAVE ruling — Kaelan Deese, Washington Examiner, July 7, 2026. Arizona reporting: "Federal SAVE database in limbo, disrupting Arizona voter citizenship checks" — Katie O'Shaughnessy, Cronkite News, July 9, 2026 (linked above).
