Sponsors (6)
The bill tightens enforcement and immigration consequences for child-care fraud to protect children and taxpayer funds and speed agency action, but it does so by expanding administrative penalties, detention and removal powers, and rulemaking waivers that significantly reduce procedural safeguards and raise due-process, access, and service-availability risks.
Children and parents-families: the bill bars individuals permanently debarred for child-care fraud (including foreign debarred providers) from providing care in the U.S., reducing risk that fraudulent or harmful providers serve children.
State governments and taxpayers: the bill strengthens program integrity by notifying states of fraud findings, enabling recovery of improper payments and increasing referrals to DOJ to deter and prosecute child-care fraud.
Immigration adjudicators and government actors: the bill clarifies and harmonizes immigration inadmissibility rules to explicitly include child-care fraud debarments and certain terrorism-association categories, reducing statutory ambiguity for decisionmakers.
Immigrants and families: administrative debarments can trigger inadmissibility, loss of asylum/adjustment/naturalization eligibility, expedited removal, and detention without a criminal conviction or full hearing, posing major due-process and liberty risks.
Public and stakeholders: agencies may waive APA/PRA notice-and-comment and paperwork safeguards, reducing transparency, limiting public input on significant rules, and concentrating discretion in agency leaders.
Immigrants and taxpayers: expanding mandatory detention and expedited removal for alleged child-care fraud increases the risk of erroneous deportations, raises litigation and adjudication burdens, and drives up detention and court costs.
Based on analysis of 9 sections of legislative text.
Establishes mandatory permanent debarment for providers who commit CCDBG fraud, requires state exclusion, pursues recoveries, and makes debarment a new immigration removal/inadmissibility ground with expedited removal.
Official title: Amend the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act of 1990 to debar child care providers who commit fraud from receiving certain financial assistance, and for other purposes.
Introduced January 14, 2026 by John Cornyn · Last progress January 14, 2026
Creates new, permanent federal penalties for child care providers found to have fraudulently obtained federal child care funds, requires states to bar and refuse funds to debarred providers, and makes such debarment a new immigration ground of inadmissibility, removability, and mandatory detention/expedited removal for noncitizen providers. The bill also authorizes HHS to seek reimbursement/offsets, requires referral for criminal investigation when an administrative debarment occurs, adds related criminal/terrorism-list wording edits, and permits HHS, DHS, and DOJ to bypass certain paperwork and notice-and-comment rulemaking when implementing these changes. Most provisions take effect at enactment and include retroactive application for relevant alien conduct back to September 30, 1996 under a limited condition.