One bill currently stuck in the House, H.R.4393, the “DIGNIDAD (Dignity) Act of 2025” has drawn a lot of attention of late, which is confusing until you accept it for what it has become: rage bait for those clamoring for greater enforcement of the immigration laws. This bill was designed to go nowhere, but its filing shows a failure to read the room of voters who brought Donald Trump back to the White House in November 2024.
Some Background
Prior to coming to the Center, I had retired from federal service after finishing my second tour of duty as a staffer on Capitol Hill. The first was on the Judiciary Committee where I was oversight counsel for immigration and legislative counsel for the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, and the second as staff director for the National Security Subcommittee on the House Committee on Oversight and Claims.
House Oversight has only limited legislative jurisdiction (but, as the name suggests, near total authority to review everything the federal government does), but House Judiciary has a veritable hammerlock on bills relating to all things immigration.
Not only did I review countless immigration bills proposed by members on both sides of the aisle at Judiciary, my colleague George Fishman and/or I either drafted or edited most of the immigration-related bills that passed Congress and became law between 2001 and 2006.
None of this is to brag (though humility is admittedly not one of my strengths), but rather to explain that I know what makes a successful bill successful.
The Name
The first clue that H.R. 4393 wasn’t written to pass lies in its name, formally the “Dignity for Immigrants while Guarding our Nation to Ignite and Deliver the American Dream Act of 2025” or the “DIGNIDAD (Dignity) Act of 2025”. (Dignidad is Spanish for dignity.)
The passion for giving legislation acronymic names with deeper meanings didn’t start with H.R. 3162, the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001”, but the “USA PATRIOT Act” has become the standard by which all such efforts are measured.
In a recent podcast with Fishman and our boss, Mark Krikorian, I explained that I opposed that title, for two reasons: (1) I knew that the fervor of the times would cool and critics would use the name as a cudgel for the important provisions therein; and (2) I preferred the “American Response to Terrorism (ART) Act” for purely personal reasons.
One of the most common complaints Americans have expressed about the largely uncontrolled immigration our nation has experienced over the past 30-plus years is, regardless of your own personal views, the ways it has forced Americans to adapt to new arrivals rather than vice-versa.
No less an expert than Barbara Jordan — a former congresswoman herself and then-chairwoman of President Clinton’s U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform — made clear in a September 1995 op-ed that there was nothing wrong with expecting newcomers to adapt to our principles and use our lingua franca.
As she explained: “Immigration imposes mutual obligations. Those who choose to come here must embrace the common core of American civic culture. We must assist them in learning our common language: American English.”
Respectfully, naming your bill the “DIGNIDAD Act” and then providing subtitles is the “press one for English” of legislative drafting, as it denotes a deliberate intention to ignore Jordan’s wise counsel.
The Referrals
Next, when drafting a bill, the first thing pros do is consider what are known as the “referrals”, that is the committees to which the legislation will be sent for hearing, consideration, markup, and approval (or not).
If the primary sponsor is on a committee with clear jurisdiction over an issue and has a good relationship with the chair and the other members, the smart play is to write the bill in such a way that it is referred to only that committee and no other.
Otherwise, it will usually be sent to more than one committee, for serial consideration and markup, and if any of the chairs of those other committees refuses to even consider the bill, it will stall and die.
The DIGNIDAD Act blew past that principle and drew referrals from seven different House committees: Judiciary, Homeland Security, Ways and Means, Transportation and Infrastructure, Education and Workforce, Armed Services, and Oversight and Government Reform — which as noted usually doesn’t even have legislative jurisdiction over most bills.
Unless the legislation is a clear response to an imminent and existential threat to the Republic (USA PATRIOT also drew seven referrals), more than three referrals generally always spells failure.
The Amnesty Poison Pills
Simply put, the DIGNIDAD Act wasn’t written to pass; it’s a “messaging bill” intended to make a point.
And the point in question, as Fishman explained in depth last July, is that there is bipartisan support for legalizing some, most, or all of those here illegally, in the case of this proposal roughly 12 million-plus aliens here illegally, as well as an undetermined number of those who have already been deported.
There are, admittedly, good-faith arguments for why some aliens who came illegally or overstayed their periods of nonimmigrant admission should be allowed to remain, but most amnesties have failed or, worse, simply encouraged more illegal immigration because would-be illegal migrants don’t read the fine print and smugglers have worse ethics (but better sales pitches) than telephone extended-warranty peddlers.
Consequently, selling any amnesty is a heavy lift even for the savviest of politicos, and the DIGNIDAD Act has more poison pills than Dr. Kevorkian’s pharmacopeia.
As Fishman explained, not only does it legalize millions (again, including some who aren’t here anymore), it also boosts future legal immigration by 55 percent (“over five million persons over the next decade”), including and especially of those in the very STEM fields that are threatened by AI.
Just 28 percent of respondents in an October poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs favored increasing the level of immigration to this country, while 49 percent want it to remain the same and 21 percent want a cut. The constituency demanding an immigration boost is pretty small, so why place a proposal to do so in this of all bills?
Moreover, there are two different amnesties in this bill: one that provides green cards to “between 2.5 and 2.7 million illegal aliens (Dreamers) who came to the U.S. before January 2, 2021, when under the age of 19”; and a second one that “grants second-tier amnesty (work permits) to somewhere around 11.8 million illegal aliens (Dignity-ers) who came to the U.S. before January 1, 2021”.
There will, naturally, be some overlap between the two groups so Fishman goes to pains to explain that you can’t simply add the two figures together, but can you imagine what a boost two different (complicated) amnesties would provide the immigration bar, and the much bigger shot in the arm this proposal would provide to the massive underground fake-document and migrant-smuggling industries?
The Amnesties in the Amnesties
Then, there are the amnesties in the amnesties in the DIGNIDAD Act.
Under sections 2203 (for the first amnesty) and 2303(d) (for the second one) of the bill, no applicant who “appears to be prima facie eligible for status” can be removed until a final determination is made on that application, including those who have already been ordered removed (albeit limited to removal orders issued in the last 24 months prior to enactment in the second instance).
Government databases aren’t the best or most up-to-date, and this provision would create a logistical nightmare for ICE officers trying to determine whether to investigate, let alone arrest, an alien with a final removal order.
Moreover, why would ICE bother arresting any aliens, given that they will all immediately turn around and seek amnesty?
But here’s the best part: The bill provides (sections 2102(c)(3)(G) and 2206(b)) for judicial review of denials starting at the federal district court level and going up from there.
Congress has deliberately (in section 242 of the INA) cut district court judges out of reviews of most administrative immigration decisions because those courts were where immigration cases went to die.
Furthermore, there are fewer than 700 U.S. district court judges on the bench right now, and if you were to add the hundreds of thousands of amnesty reviews (at a minimum) this bill could create to their dockets, you’d grind every other federal case to a halt.
As a taxpayer with April 15 coming up, if the DIGNIDAD Act were to pass, I’d beg DHS to rubberstamp every amnesty application to save the massive litigation costs and prevent judicial-branch calamity.
Not A Serious Effort
Nothing about this bill suggests it’s a serious effort. In fact, it is to lawmaking what graffiti is to art, a near-meta effort to call the very concept of legislating into question.
But even as a messaging bill, the DIGNIDAD Act simply reminds the public why amnesty is a bad idea: It’s unfair to those who have followed the costly and laborious process of coming legally; it’s a give-away bordering on pandering to special interests; it’s complicated and thus easily exploited; it’s a veritable “lawyers’ relief act”; and it would throw enforcement into chaos.
In fact, if you were Reps. Brandon Gill (R-Texas), Chip Roy (R-Texas), or countless other members and senators and you hated amnesty and your intent was to demonstrate any of those points (let alone all of them), you likely could not have crafted a more worthy vehicle to do so.
Simply put, the DIGNIDAD Act would be Swiftian-level satire if the sponsors’ intent was to rage bait the right into demanding more ICE arrests and deportations, and an even-tighter border. That plainly wasn’t the sponsors’ goal, but regardless it’s the reason why so many on the right are right now discussing a bill that was built to fail.