Homeland Security Gains New Power to Issue Subpoenas with Mandatory 180-Day Gag Orders

The newly proposed Targeting Child Predators Act of 2025 is less about the title and more about a major shift in how the federal government can demand information from you or your business—and how quiet you have to keep about it. This bill hands the authority to issue certain administrative subpoenas entirely to the Secretary of Homeland Security, taking it away from the Treasury Department. Crucially, it also removes a requirement for these subpoenas to be “ordered by a court” in that specific section of the law, meaning Homeland Security can issue them directly.

The Automatic Gag Order: Mandatory Secrecy

Here’s the part that hits closest to home for anyone running a business, managing a server, or just holding sensitive data: if the Secretary of Homeland Security issues one of these subpoenas and certifies that telling anyone about it would jeopardize an investigation—say, by letting someone flee or destroy evidence—a mandatory 180-day non-disclosure requirement, or 'gag order,' kicks in automatically. That means if the government demands your data, you can’t tell anyone for six months. The official just has to check a box saying disclosure would 'seriously mess up the investigation.' This is a significant restriction on the recipient, who now has the burden of complying with the request while legally barred from discussing the government’s action.

Judicial Review, But Behind Closed Doors

The bill does create a new process for judicial review if you want to fight that gag order (Section 3486A). However, the deck is stacked from the start. Once you challenge the secrecy requirement, the government has 30 days to ask a court to enforce the gag order, and that order stays in place while the court reviews it. Even more concerning is the transparency issue: the bill explicitly mandates that all court proceedings related to reviewing these nondisclosure requirements—the petitions, the filings, the orders, and the hearings—must be closed to the public. Essentially, the entire process of challenging this government secrecy will happen in the dark, limiting public oversight on how broadly this new power is being used.

What This Means for Everyday People and Businesses

If you’re a small business owner, a tech company, or even just an individual who receives one of these subpoenas, the immediate impact is a mandatory, six-month silence. You can talk to your lawyer or those necessary for compliance, but you must pass the secrecy obligation onto them. This lack of transparency means that the public—including those who might be affected by the investigation—will have no way of tracking how often the government uses these powerful, secretive tools. While the bill aims to prevent evidence destruction and flight from prosecution in serious cases, the broad criteria for imposing secrecy, combined with the removal of judicial oversight in the initial issuance phase, grants significant, unchecked power to the Secretary of Homeland Security. The burden and cost of fighting a mandatory gag order now falls squarely on the recipient, who must do so in a completely sealed court environment.