New Bill Scraps 84-Year-Old Alien Registration Law, Removing Outdated Paperwork and Penalties

The “No Round Up Act” is kicking off with some serious administrative spring cleaning. The first major item on the list is the complete repeal of the Alien Registration Act of 1940. Think of this as finally deleting that ancient, unused app from your phone that was just taking up space and occasionally sending confusing notifications.

Deleting the Digital Dust: What the Repeal Means

This bill specifically strikes out Section 262 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was the core requirement for the registration of aliens. For anyone who might have been subject to these rules, the immediate impact is the removal of an outdated administrative burden and the associated penalties that came with non-compliance. The government is essentially saying, "We don't need this specific 1940s-era paperwork anymore."

Because the main registration requirement is gone, the bill then makes a bunch of technical, conforming changes across the rest of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). This is the policy equivalent of changing every single cross-reference in a massive spreadsheet when you delete a column. For instance, the bill amends Section 264, which used to require the Attorney General to create forms for registering and fingerprinting aliens. That requirement is now scrapped. Sections 265 and 266, which dealt with specific requirements and penalties related to that old registration, are also being repealed entirely.

The Real-World Impact of Cleaning Up the Books

While this might sound like deep-in-the-weeds bureaucratic stuff, it matters because it simplifies the rules and removes potential pitfalls for people living and working in the U.S. who are not citizens. When you eliminate a requirement that the government needs to maintain a separate registration and fingerprinting system—which is what the bill does by removing subsection (e) of Section 264—you streamline operations and reduce the chances of someone facing a penalty for failing to comply with an obsolete rule.

This move essentially modernizes parts of the INA by removing statutes that have been rendered redundant or irrelevant over the decades. It’s a low-drama, high-efficiency change that benefits both the government, which no longer has to enforce or maintain these outdated systems, and the people who were previously subject to the old registration mandates.