Sponsors (9)
The bill prioritizes protecting and integrating noncitizen veterans and service members—by preventing deportation, enabling LPR status and naturalization, and restoring benefits—while increasing taxpayer and administrative costs and raising legal, public-safety, and privacy risks that may prompt litigation and implementation challenges.
Noncitizen veterans and service members can avoid deportation, obtain lawful permanent residence, and pursue naturalization, giving them immigration stability, work authorization, and citizenship rights.
Veterans subject to final removal orders can have proceedings reopened and may receive waivers of disqualifying convictions for humanitarian reasons, family unity, or exceptional military service, preserving households and preventing deportation.
Veterans and service members who become lawful permanent residents regain access to VA and military benefits (pay, healthcare, education), improving economic security and supporting recruitment/retention of affected personnel.
Taxpayers and government agencies will likely face substantial increased costs and staffing burdens from reopening removal cases, additional adjudications, supervisory reviews, recordkeeping, and expanded benefit payments.
Allowing eligibility notwithstanding prior inadmissibility/deportability or making many non-violent removable offenses non-deportable could let individuals with serious criminal histories remain in the U.S., raising public-safety and national-security concerns for local communities.
Overriding or modifying INA removal provisions, tying key definitions to sentence lengths, and broad exemption rules will likely spawn litigation and eligibility disputes that delay relief and burden courts and agencies.
Based on analysis of 8 sections of legislative text.
Introduced November 6, 2025 by Tammy Duckworth · Last progress November 6, 2025
Allows eligible noncitizen veterans and certain service members to become lawful permanent residents (LPRs) and, later, to naturalize based on military service. It requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to create an application program and the Attorney General to review and reopen removal cases so qualifying veterans overseas or under final removal orders can adjust status; it also bars most deportations of veterans and service members except where the individual was convicted of a crime of violence. The bill directs DHS and DOJ to act on tight schedules (regulations in 90 days; program and case-review actions within 180 days), restores access to military and veterans benefits for veterans who become LPRs under the program, narrows how past removal or inadmissibility affects naturalization eligibility, and requires DHS to identify, annotate, and protect service members and veterans in immigration records and case handling.