The US supreme court has lifted restrictions on a controversial federal voter database before November’s elections, granting Donald Trump a temporary win in his aggressive campaign against non-citizen voting.

The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Department of Homeland Security program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls.

The court’s three liberal justices publicly dissented from the decision.

The order puts on hold a federal judge’s June ruling that had deemed the Trump administration’s recently revamped version of SAVE illegal. US district court judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan had blocked the use of the tool, saying it violated Americans’ privacy rights and could result in voters being wrongly removed from the rolls.

A federal appeals court let her order stand.

But the supreme court majority found that a 1996 law explicitly allows DHS to get information about citizenship and immigration from other federal agencies. The federal government also has “an obligation to respond” to states seeking to verify citizenship.

“The order below prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,” the majority wrote in the unsigned order.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. The database has long been seen to fall under federal privacy laws, she wrote, and there are real risks that legitimate voter registrations could be mistakenly revoked.

Jackson wrote:

The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.

The plaintiffs and counsel team in the case called the ruling “profoundly disappointing” and said it puts “millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database” before the midterms.

“However, this case is not over,” their statement read, as quoted by the Associated Press. “The D.C. district court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws. We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands.”