Sponsors (28)
The bill strengthens tools to identify, exclude, and detain people tied to gangs—aiming to improve public safety and centralized oversight—while significantly expanding mandatory detention and curtailing protections, due process, and transparency for many immigrants.
Communities and law enforcement: current or former gang members would be barred from entering or remaining in the U.S., aiming to reduce gang-related crime and community harm.
Federal agencies and law enforcement: establishes a centralized administrative designation process with periodic review to identify and update lists of dangerous groups, creating clearer procedures for enforcement and coordination.
Congress and the public: requires DHS to report annually on numbers detained under the expansion, increasing oversight and transparency about detention levels and use of the designation authority.
Immigrants accused of gang affiliation: can lose access to asylum, TPS, SIJ, parole, and other forms of relief — even for past conduct — reducing protections for vulnerable people and increasing risk of deportation.
Immigrants targeted by designations: face curtailed due process and transparency because the designation process permits classified evidence and limits their ability to contest designations in removal proceedings.
Immigrants and taxpayers: expansion of mandatory detention removes individualized parole discretion and likely increases the number and duration of detentions, raising detention costs for taxpayers and burdens on detention systems.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Defines 'criminal gang,' makes membership/related conduct deportable and inadmissible, bars many reliefs, expands mandatory detention, and creates an administrative DHS designation process.
Introduced January 3, 2025 by Tom McClintock · Last progress January 3, 2025
Creates a new federal definition of “criminal gang” and makes membership in, participation in, or acting in furtherance of such a gang a ground for inadmissibility and deportability. It gives DHS (with DOJ consultation) an administrative process to designate groups of five or more people as criminal gangs, expands mandatory detention for people covered by the new gang grounds, bars many forms of immigration relief for those covered, allows detention of TPS beneficiaries, and applies the changes retroactively to past, present, and future acts.