This bill directs U.S. Customs and Border Protection to publish a broad set of operational statistics on a publicly accessible Department of Homeland Security website and requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to give Congress periodic assessments of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) moving members or affiliates into the United States. The disclosure mandate reaches encounter counts, nationality breakdowns, gang and TCO affiliations, drug seizures, got-aways, deceased encounters, and related operational metrics.
For practitioners, the bill formalizes near-real-time transparency into frontline enforcement activity while creating a recurring analytic product for congressional oversight. That increased visibility will change how analysts, advocates, and other agencies use CBP data — and it will force CBP and DHS to standardize, classify, and publish operational categorizations that today often exist only in internal systems.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill requires CBP to publish a set of operational border metrics on a publicly available DHS website each month and directs DHS to deliver a written assessment to Congress on FTOs and TCOs attempting to move members into the U.S. The statute lists categories CBP must include and asks DHS for an evaluation of organized criminal and terrorist threats tied to border pathways.
Who It Affects
Primary actors are U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security, plus congressional Homeland Security committees that receive the reports. Secondary audiences include federal partner agencies (ICE, DOJ), state and local law enforcement, academics, journalists, and NGOs that monitor migration and security data.
Why It Matters
The bill converts internal operational logs into recurring public outputs, increasing transparency for oversight and public analysis while imposing new data collection, labeling, and publication responsibilities on CBP and DHS. That shift will influence resource allocation, interagency data-sharing, and the public narrative about border security.
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What This Bill Actually Does
Section 2 creates a recurring public reporting duty for CBP. Beginning after enactment, CBP must publish on a DHS public website monthly operational statistics recorded during the preceding month.
The list of required categories is long and specific: total and "unique" alien encounters with nationality detail; counts of gang-affiliated apprehensions and their nationalities; drug seizures; encounters that match or are included in the terrorist screening database; arrests of criminal aliens or persons wanted by law enforcement; known got-aways; encounters with deceased aliens; encounters and apprehensions linked to transnational criminal organizations; and other related or associated statistics as recorded by CBP.
That same section drills further into terrorist and TCO counts. It directs CBP to report totals of individuals on the terrorist screening database who have repeatedly attempted unlawful entry, totals of such individuals who have been apprehended (with information on whether they were released into the United States or removed), and parallel totals for individuals affiliated with transnational criminal organizations.
Those subitems require CBP to flag repeat attempts, classify affiliations, and track post-apprehension disposition (release versus removal), which implicates cross-agency case management and data reconciliation.Section 3 requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to submit to the House and Senate homeland security committees an assessment of foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations attempting to move members or affiliates into the United States via the southern, northern, or maritime border. The bill defines "foreign terrorist organization" by reference to section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1189), tying the statutory assessment to the existing legal list of designated FTOs.
The required product is a recurring intelligence/assessment deliverable intended to support congressional oversight of organized criminal and terrorist use of migration routes.
The Five Things You Need to Know
CBP must publish monthly operational statistics on a public DHS website covering the preceding month’s activity.
The mandatory statistics include counts by nationality for total and "unique" alien encounters, gang-affiliated apprehensions, drug seizures, known got-aways, and encounters linked to transnational criminal organizations.
The statute demands four explicit tallies: (a) TSD-listed individuals who repeatedly attempted unlawful entry, (b) TSD-listed individuals apprehended (noting release or removal), (c) TCO-affiliated individuals who repeatedly attempted entry, and (d) TCO-affiliated individuals apprehended (noting release or removal).
DHS must send Congress an assessment of FTOs and TCOs attempting to move members or affiliates into the U.S. via southern, northern, or maritime borders, first within 90 days of enactment and then on an annual basis.
The bill ties the term "foreign terrorist organization" to the Immigration and Nationality Act’s section 219 definition (8 U.S.C. 1189), anchoring the report’s scope to the statutory FTO list.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Short title – CARTEL Act of 2025
Provides the act’s formal name (Cartel And Radical Terrorist Enforcement Log Act of 2025). This is purely stylistic but signals the bill’s dual focus on cartel/TCO activity and terrorism-related listings; it sets reader expectations for the substantive reporting requirements that follow.
Monthly public publication of CBP operational statistics
Imposes a standing obligation on the CBP Commissioner to publish, on a public DHS website, a defined set of operational metrics covering the immediately preceding month. Practically, CBP must extract discrete fields from its operational systems, classify encounters (including gang or TCO affiliation and whether an encounter matches the terrorist screening database), and include nationality breakdowns. The provision also explicitly asks for disposition information on apprehended TSD-listed and TCO-affiliated individuals (released versus removed), which requires reliable linkage between encounter records, adjudication or removal records, and post-apprehension outcomes — a nontrivial data-integration task across CBP, ICE, and partner systems.
Congressional assessment on FTOs and TCOs; statutory cross-reference
Directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to produce an initial assessment and then annual assessments for congressional homeland security committees focused on FTOs and TCOs moving members or affiliates into the United States through southern, northern, or maritime approaches. The section ties the FTO term to the INA section 219 definition, limiting the universe of groups considered 'FTOs' for purposes of the report. The assessments will need to synthesize CBP operational data, intelligence reporting, and partner-agency inputs to identify patterns, routes, and organizational involvement.
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Explore Immigration in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Congressional homeland security committees — receive a recurring, standardized data stream and formal assessments to support oversight, hearings, and legislative follow-up.
- Analysts, researchers, and journalists — gain month-to-month public access to operational metrics and trends that previously required FOIA requests or reliance on aggregate press releases.
- State and local law enforcement and fusion centers — obtain publicized trend data to inform intergovernmental planning and resource allocation when CBP disclosures reveal geographic or affiliation patterns.
Who Bears the Cost
- U.S. Customs and Border Protection — must allocate staff, IT, and program resources to standardize data extracts, classify encounters (e.g., TCO or gang affiliation), and publish monthly datasets; will shoulder the biggest operational burden.
- Department of Homeland Security central offices and partner agencies (ICE, DOJ) — must coordinate to provide disposition outcomes (release vs. removal) and intelligence inputs for the required congressional assessments.
- Migrants and foreign nationals — may face increased public exposure of nationality- and affiliation-level statistics, raising privacy, reputational, and diplomatic concerns if data are incomplete or mischaracterized.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is transparency versus tradecraft and privacy: the statute pushes for public accountability by turning internal border enforcement metrics into routine public outputs, but doing so accurately and safely requires definitions, data-linkage capabilities, and privacy safeguards that may constrain the usefulness or timeliness of the disclosures — solving one problem (oversight) risks creating others (misclassification, operational exposure, and heightened resource demands).
The bill forces CBP to convert internal encounter records and investigative flags into public-facing statistics. That requirement surfaces three implementation frictions.
First, definitional ambiguity: terms the bill uses — "unique" encounters, "gang affiliated," and "affiliated with transnational criminal organizations" — are operationally loaded and lack statutory definitions in the text, so CBP must create reproducible criteria to avoid inconsistent or misleading classification. Second, data integrity and linkage: tracking repeat attempts and post-apprehension disposition (released into the United States versus removed) requires robust cross-system matching across CBP, ICE, and removal databases; without investment, published numbers risk undercounting, double-counting, or mismatches.
Third, transparency versus privacy/operational security: releasing nationality-by-category breakdowns and counts of TSD-listed individuals raises privacy and diplomatic concerns and could reveal operational patterns that adversaries exploit.
Beyond those frictions, the public products may be interpreted outside the context of enforcement nuance. Monthly snapshots can mislead if readers do not understand operational drivers (seasonality, policy changes, or targeted operations).
Finally, the bill’s mandated assessments will require DHS to blend intelligence judgments with law-enforcement data — a synthesis that demands explicit methodology to be useful to Congress while avoiding the appearance of raw intelligence disclosure.
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