Kayla Hamilton Act

This bill rewrites the rules for how the government screens, detains, and places unaccompanied alien children in its custody. Before the Department of Health and Human Services can make a placement, it must consult with the Department of Homeland Security and the Attorney General to ensure the child will appear at immigration proceedings and be protected from traffickers and gangs, and to determine whether the child is a flight risk, a danger, or has a criminal record. For a child 12 or older, HHS must contact the child's home-country consulate to obtain arrest and conviction records and examine the child for gang-related tattoos or markings. A child may not be released on their own recognizance. A child 12 or older must be placed in a secure facility for the duration of proceedings if they are a flight risk or a danger, including if they have a gang-related tattoo, a serious criminal conviction, an aggravated felony conviction, or any arrest, charge, pending proceeding, or conviction connected to gang activity. The bill bars placing a child with any sponsor who is not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, or who lives in a household with anyone convicted of listed crimes including sex offenses, human trafficking, domestic violence, child abuse, murder or manslaughter, child sexual abuse material offenses, any aggravated felony, any felony, or any crime punishable by more than one year. Before any placement, HHS must give DHS identifying and background information on the sponsor and every adult in the household, including names, Social Security or taxpayer ID numbers, dates of birth, address, immigration status, contact information, and results of sex-offender, public-records, and fingerprint-based national criminal background checks. It also amends the Homeland Security Act to route placement determinations through these standards. The bill lets the named agencies bypass the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Administrative Procedure Act where they determine compliance would impede immediate implementation, and it includes a severability clause. It applies to placement and custody determinations pending or occurring on or after enactment, and to all release redeterminations.

At least 8 organizations named this measure in a lobbying filing. A floor, not a total: they were counted by the client name on 19 quarterly reports filed by 3 lobbying firms and by 5 organizations lobbying for themselves in 2025 Q3, 2025 Q4 and 2026 Q1. An organization that lobbied this measure without naming it is not counted here.

The filings record that lobbying was reported on the measure. The form has no per-bill dollar figure and no field for a position, so nothing here says how much was spent or which side an organization took.

5 of them, in no ranking: American Civil Liberties Union; Kids in Need of Defense; Federation for American Immigration Reform; Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP); Moveon.Org Civic Action. Listed as filed, in the order the filings were read, and 3 others are not shown. These are not the largest, the earliest or the most active: we keep five names per measure, and the filings give no ranking.

From the LD-2 quarterly lobbying filings published at lda.gov by the Senate Office of Public Records. Read for 2025 Q1, 2025 Q2, 2025 Q3, 2025 Q4, 2026 Q1, 2026 Q2 and 2026 Q3. Our copy holds 24 fewer filings for 2025 Q1, 39 fewer filings for 2025 Q2, 42 fewer filings for 2025 Q3, 33 fewer filings for 2025 Q4, 28 fewer filings for 2026 Q1, 48 fewer filings for 2026 Q2 and 218 fewer filings for 2026 Q3 than the Senate's register counts, so those quarters are the filings we could read rather than every one filed. 2026 Q4 is still inside its filing window, so that quarter is only the filings posted so far.