Sponsors (4)
The bill strengthens tools to identify, bar, detain, and remove alleged gang-affiliated noncitizens—aiming to improve public safety and add formal designation and review processes—while imposing retroactive and procedural limits that heighten risks to due process, expand detention costs, and concentrate executive power with limited public oversight.
Noncitizens convicted of listed serious offenses or who meaningfully participate in gang activities can be barred from admission or removed, reducing the presence of individuals the government considers high-risk.
Aliens covered by the gang provisions face expanded mandatory detention during removal proceedings, which proponents say helps keep high‑risk noncitizens detained and improves public safety for communities and law enforcement.
The bill creates a formal DHS designation process with required notice to congressional leaders, publication, and provides for judicial review in the D.C. Circuit with enumerated grounds to set aside designations, increasing transparency and a legal check on executive designations.
Immigrants with past associations or past conduct could be retroactively subject to inadmissibility, removal, and detention—even for acts years earlier—broadening the pool of people affected.
The bill restricts immigrants' ability to contest designations by permitting classified ex parte information and by prohibiting raising the validity of an effective designation as a defense, narrowing judicial and immigration-court review and limiting due process.
Expanded mandatory detention increases the likelihood of prolonged detention without individualized bond hearings, raising costs for taxpayers and straining detention capacity.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Introduced February 6, 2025 by Vernon G. Buchanan · Last progress February 6, 2025
Creates a new statutory definition of “criminal gang,” lets the Department of Homeland Security (with consultation from the Attorney General) administratively designate groups of five or more people as criminal gangs, and makes membership in or participation with such designated gangs a ground for inadmissibility and deportability. It expands mandatory detention to cover people deemed inadmissible or deportable under the new gang rules, limits certain immigration protections (including asylum, TPS, special immigrant juvenile status, and parole) for those covered, and adds a fast-track, record-limited judicial review process in the D.C. Circuit. The bill establishes procedures for designation (including the use of classified information), requires short pre-notice to congressional leaders and publication in the Federal Register, creates a process to petition for revocation and periodic review, mandates annual reporting to congressional judiciary committees on numbers detained, and applies these rules retroactively to past acts as well as future conduct.