The bill amends the Immigration and Nationality Act to require the Department of Homeland Security to make certain removal-related records publicly available. It directs the department to publish identifying information about individuals subject to final removal orders on DHS’s website.
That change converts what has been primarily an enforcement and adjudicative record into a national, public registry. Compliance officers, enforcement lawyers, background-check vendors, and privacy counsel should pay attention: the statute creates new operational work for DHS and exposes noncitizens to public exposure and potential misuse of personal information.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill adds a new subsection to Section 240 of the Immigration and Nationality Act that tasks the Secretary of Homeland Security with posting specified identifying information about people with final removal orders on the Department’s website. It makes publication a statutory duty rather than an administrative policy choice.
Who It Affects
People subject to final orders of removal, the Department of Homeland Security and its adjudicative and enforcement components, federal/state/local law enforcement agencies, immigration practitioners, and private-background and media organizations that mine public records.
Why It Matters
By creating a centralized, public federal listing the bill shifts how removal outcomes are shared and used: it amplifies enforcement visibility and public scrutiny, changes privacy expectations for affected individuals, and forces DHS to create procedures for publication and record maintenance.
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What This Bill Actually Does
The bill instructs DHS to put identifying elements of removal records online. In practical terms the agency would publish a person’s name, a photograph, any known aliases, and the last State in which the person resided as part of a web-accessible record tied to a final removal determination.
The statutory text places the publication obligation in Section 240 of the INA and directs the Secretary to carry it out on the Department’s public website.
The statute does not specify formatting, search functionality, frequency of updates, or how DHS must source and verify photographs and alias information. Those operational choices will determine how the public registry actually works: whether entries come from enforcement intake photos, court filings, or other DHS databases; how long records stay online; and whether people can seek corrections or removal of inaccurate listings.Although the text creates a simple, mandatory publication requirement, implementation will intersect with existing privacy and recordkeeping rules.
DHS will need to decide whether the registry is maintained inside an existing system of records for Privacy Act purposes or whether it requires a new administrative infrastructure. The agency will also face decisions about moderating misuse, handling requests for takedown, and preventing misidentification when multiple people share names or aliases.Operationally, the provision centralizes information that previously circulated primarily among enforcement agencies and counsel.
That increases the utility of the data for law enforcement, background-screening firms, journalists, and oversight bodies, but it also increases the risk that private actors will repurpose the information for non-governmental screening, public shaming, or harassment.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The bill’s short title is the “Deportation Disclosure Act.”, Sponsor and identifier: House Bill 5795, introduced by Rep. Andy Biggs in the 119th Congress on October 21, 2025.
The statutory amendment targets Section 240 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1229a).
The publication duty applies only to final orders of removal issued after the date of enactment of this provision.
The bill’s text includes a technical change that redesignates the existing subsection (e) of Section 240 as subsection (f).
Section-by-Section Breakdown
Every bill we cover gets an analysis of its key sections.
Short title
This brief provision names the act the “Deportation Disclosure Act.” It’s a drafting convention with no legal effect beyond identifying the statute for citation and legislative history searches.
Adds a publication mandate into the removal statute
The bill inserts a new subsection into the statutory framework that governs removal proceedings. By placing the duty directly in Section 240, Congress makes publication an express statutory obligation rather than leaving it to DHS policy. That placement directs agency planners to treat the task as part of the statutory removal regime and may affect judicial review standards and administrative implementation choices.
What the statute requires DHS to publish
The new subsection instructs the Secretary of Homeland Security to publish identifying items on the Department’s website. Drafting is terse: it names the specific elements to publish but it does not provide rules about data verification, the timing of postings, retention length, or a correction and takedown process. Those omissions shift a large part of the policy work from Congress to DHS and create multiple practical questions for record management and privacy compliance.
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Who Benefits
- Federal and state law enforcement: A centralized public registry reduces friction for locating individuals with final removal orders and can support arrests, deportation logistics, and interagency information-sharing without repeated records requests.
- Journalists and researchers: Public access to removal outcomes enables verification of enforcement activity, quantitative research on removal patterns, and independent oversight of immigration policy implementation.
- Private background-screening firms and employers that conduct immigration-related checks: Easier access to federal removal data lowers search costs and broadens the data pool available for automated screening tools and commercial products.
- Congressional oversight and policy advocates focused on enforcement: A public list provides a single, searchable source for tracking enforcement outcomes and measuring policy impact.
Who Bears the Cost
- Individuals with final removal orders: Public exposure of names, photos, aliases, and residence information creates real safety, stigma, and privacy risks, and raises the likelihood of harassment or misidentification.
- Department of Homeland Security: DHS must build, staff, and operate the registry, create verification and takedown workflows, and absorb litigation and privacy-review costs without any implementation detail or funding mechanism in the text.
- Immigration attorneys and legal services organizations: The public registry may complicate client intake, force defensive litigation over accuracy, and increase demand for correction requests and representation.
- Community organizations and local governments: Municipalities and advocacy groups may face increased local tensions and resource needs to respond to harassment, misinformation, or vigilante activity prompted by public listings.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is whether the public’s interest in transparency and easier enforcement outweighs the privacy and safety costs borne by individuals who have received final removal orders; the statute solves visibility for enforcement but creates real risks of harm and error for the people whose information it publishes.
The bill trades a simple, bright-line transparency rule for a set of complex implementation problems it does not resolve. On paper, publication is straightforward: make records public.
In practice, the absence of statutory guidance about verification, retention, access controls, or correction procedures hands DHS a difficult design problem with high stakes. If DHS sources photographs and aliases from enforcement files without stronger accuracy checks, the registry risks misidentifying people and propagating errors that are hard to reverse.
There is also a tension between the public-interest value of transparency and the concrete safety risks to individuals. Publishing a last known State, a photograph, and aliases helps law enforcement and researchers but also makes it easier for private parties to locate and harass people who have exhausted their appeals.
The statute contains no carve-outs for victims of crime, trafficking, minors, or those with sensitive medical or safety concerns. That omission will shape both implementation choices and legal challenges under privacy and administrative-law doctrines.
Finally, the bill raises unresolved questions about administrative burden and legal exposure. DHS will need to align the registry with Privacy Act systems-of-record rules, set up dispute-resolution workflows, and may face litigation over accuracy, privacy, and separation-of-powers issues.
Those downstream costs and conflicts are not addressed in the text; Congress delegates them to the agency without criteria for how to balance competing values.
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