The "SAFE" Registry Is Neither Safe Nor New
A candidate in Wisconsin’s 8th District is proposing a national registry of undocumented immigrants.
A candidate in Wisconsin’s 8th District is proposing a national registry of undocumented immigrants. The registry already exists in federal law; the confidentiality he promises is one no member of Congress can deliver, and the enforcement infrastructure that would consume the data is already killing people who were never on any list.
Mark Scheffler, a candidate in the WI-08 Democratic primary, has published an immigration framework that includes something he calls the SAFE Registry: Secure Accountability for Foreign Entrants. His website describes a “modern, secure, digital system” to document people who are required to register under federal law. His answer in the League of Women Voters candidate guide describes “a SAFE national immigrant registry for undocumented workers.”
His primary opponent, Rick Crosson, issued a statement today calling the proposal dangerous. This post is not that statement. This is the legal and technical case for why the proposal cannot do what it claims, walked through the way I would walk through any agency memo or policy announcement: by asking whether the instrument can deliver what the author promises. This one cannot, and the ways it cannot are revealing.
The registry already exists, and it is being used against the people on it
Alien registration is not a new idea waiting for a visionary candidate. It has been federal law since 1940. Section 262 of the Immigration and Nationality Act requires most noncitizens who remain in the United States for 30 days or more to register. Section 265 requires them to report every change of address within ten days. Willful failure to register is a federal crime.
For decades those provisions sat mostly dormant because there was no practical mechanism to comply. That changed in 2025, when DHS created Form G-325R and an online registration process and paired it with public messaging that registration was an enforcement priority. The federal government is, right now, operating an alien registry and treating non-registration as a hook for criminal exposure.
So when a congressional candidate proposes “creating” a registry that “would build upon existing federal registration requirements,” he is proposing to rebrand a system that already exists, is already mandatory, and is already functioning as an enforcement tool. There is no policy content in the proposal. There is a name, a gimmick.
The central promise is one no member of Congress can keep
Scheffler’s website says the registry “would not determine immigration status, nor would it be accessible by law enforcement (ICE).”
Read that sentence the way a lawyer has to read it. Registration is a DHS function. USCIS, which runs the current registration process, sits inside DHS. ICE sits inside DHS. The proposal never identifies which agency would administer the SAFE Registry, and there is no plausible option that is not an immigration enforcement agency or its sister component. The promised wall between the database and the enforcers is a wall inside one building.
Could Congress write statutory confidentiality protections? In theory. In practice, the history of confidentiality promises attached to government lists of noncitizens is a history of those promises failing:
The 1940 census. Census confidentiality was suspended by statute during World War II, and census data was used to identify Japanese Americans for internment.
NSEERS. The post-9/11 special registration program registered tens of thousands of men and boys from majority-Muslim countries. Thousands of registrants were placed in removal proceedings based on information they voluntarily provided. The program produced no terrorism convictions from the registration itself and was eventually shut down.
DACA. Applicants were assured their information would generally not be used for enforcement. That assurance was agency policy, not statute, and every administration since has been free to revisit it.
ITINs and tax records. For decades, undocumented workers were told that filing taxes was the safe, responsible thing to do, and that taxpayer data was walled off from enforcement. In 2025, the IRS signed a data-sharing agreement with immigration enforcement. The people who did exactly what the government asked are now findable because they did it.
The pattern is not subtle. A database of people organized by immigration status outlasts the intentions of whoever built it. The next administration inherits the list, not the promise.
The infrastructure is already built, and it runs on lists
The confidentiality problem is no longer only historical or legal. It is architectural. The federal government has spent the last two years building an enforcement apparatus whose entire design purpose is to fuse lists.
ICE operates ImmigrationOS, a Palantir-built platform layered on top of the agency’s case management system, designed to streamline the identification, prioritization, and removal of targets. Its tactical layer is a targeting tool called ELITE, short for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement. According to an internal user guide obtained by 404 Media and sworn testimony from an ICE officer in Oregon litigation, ELITE builds dossiers on individuals, assigns confidence scores to home addresses, maps neighborhoods by target density, and exports the lists that agents act on in the field. It ingests data from across the government and beyond: Health and Human Services records including Medicaid enrollment, USCIS files, Social Security data, license plate readers, and commercial data brokers.
Two details from that user guide matter here. First, ELITE is built to integrate new data sources. That is a feature, not a footnote. Second, the guide indicates that during special operations targeting “groups of pre-defined aliens,” normal safeguards in the tool may be turned off.
Sit with that phrase. Pre-defined groups. A registry of undocumented immigrants, complete with verified identities and current addresses, is not merely at risk of being absorbed by this system. It is the system’s ideal input. It is a pre-defined group with a confidence score of 100.
Nearly every database now feeding this apparatus was, at some point, promised to be safe. Medicaid enrollment was healthcare, not enforcement. Tax filings were revenue, not targeting. The proposal on the table asks voters to believe that one more list, this one composed entirely of the people the apparatus exists to remove, would be the exception.
What the data-driven dragnet does in the real world
This is where the analysis stops being abstract, because in the past week the country got two demonstrations of what happens when address-based targeting meets aggressive field enforcement.
On Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents surveilling the last known address of a man with a final removal order shot and killed 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero as he left for work. Guerrero was not the target. According to Maine’s congressional delegation and immigrant advocacy groups, he was authorized to work in the United States and had a Social Security number. His wife and three-year-old daughter were reportedly at the scene. Six days earlier in the Houston area, an ICE agent shot and killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a traffic stop. He was not the target of that operation either. The administrative warrant named other men, one of whom agents believed was in the vehicle Salgado Araujo was driving.
Notice what connects the two deaths. Neither man was on the target list. Both were killed because enforcement data placed them near it: a last known address in one case, a suspected vehicle match in the other. That is how list-driven enforcement fails. The list does not have to be wrong about you. It only has to put armed agents in your proximity.
Now hold that reality next to a proposal asking undocumented residents to voluntarily file their names and home addresses with the federal government. The proposal does not just misjudge the risk to the people who would register. It misjudges the risk to everyone who lives with them, works with them, or happens to be leaving the driveway at the wrong time.
What does a registrant get? Nothing. That is not an oversight
Here is where the proposal stops being merely uninformed and starts contradicting itself.
The website version is explicit that the registry would not grant legal residency, would not provide work authorization, and would not create immigration benefits. Its purpose would be “administrative accountability.”
Strip away the language and look at the transaction. An undocumented person is asked to hand the federal government their name, address, and an admission of unlawful presence. In exchange they receive nothing. No status. No protection from removal. No work authorization. Not even a commitment that the information stays out of the targeting tools described above, because as we have covered, that commitment cannot be made.
No competent immigration attorney could advise a client to participate in that exchange. Registration under those terms is self-surrender with extra paperwork.
Now compare the LWV guide version, where the same candidate promises “temporary protected status for all registered immigrants” and a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship. Set aside that this flatly contradicts his own website. It is also a statutory impossibility. TPS is not a benefit an agency can hand out to registrants. Under INA 244, the DHS Secretary designates specific countries based on conditions in those countries, and eligibility flows from nationality. “TPS for everyone who signs up” is not a policy position. It is evidence that the candidate does not know what TPS is.
When a proposal changes its core promises depending on which audience is reading, that tells you what the proposal is for. It is not for immigrants. It is for voters.
Anyone who has spent an hour with the affected community knows how that lands. Among practitioners, the reaction to this proposal has been unusually uniform: it reads as the work of a candidate who has never sat across the table from the people his framework would touch, and who has not thought carefully about the issues he claims to solve. That is not a partisan judgment. It is a professional one.
The fear this proposal ignores is already reshaping daily life
Every immigration attorney in the country is having the same conversations right now. Clients skipping medical appointments. Parents rearranging school pickup so the undocumented spouse never has to be the one at the curb. Workers weighing whether an injury is bad enough to justify the risk of an ambulance. Families writing out guardianship plans at the kitchen table in case a knock comes.
These are people making daily calculations about whether it is safe to go to the grocery store, to send their kids to school, to show up at church. The proposal on the table asks them to voluntarily file their names and home addresses with the federal government, for nothing in return, during the most aggressive interior enforcement climate in modern memory, in the same week that climate produced two funerals for men who were not even targets.
Anyone who has spent an hour with the affected community knows how that lands. Which is the point. Among practitioners, the reaction to this proposal has been unusually uniform: it reads as the work of a candidate who has never sat across the table from the people his framework would touch, and who has not thought carefully about the issues he claims to solve. That is not a partisan judgment. It is a professional one.
The acronym is doing the work the policy cannot
There is one more thing worth naming, because it is the most honest part of the proposal.
The registry is called SAFE. Safe for whom? Not for the people registering, who assume all of the risk and receive none of the protection. The name is aimed at the anxious voter, the one who wants to feel that someone is keeping track, that order is being restored, that the situation is handled.
That is the double duty of the branding. The word “safe” reassures the audience the proposal is actually written for, while the mechanism it describes makes the people inside it less safe. When the most carefully engineered element of an immigration plan is its acronym, you are not looking at policy. You are looking at positioning.
For the lawyers
The statutory and documentary landscape, for readers who want the hooks:
Registration duty: INA § 262, 8 U.S.C. § 1302 (registration for noncitizens present 30 days or more); INA § 265, 8 U.S.C. § 1305 (change of address within 10 days); 8 U.S.C. § 1304(e) (carry requirement).
Penalties: 8 U.S.C. § 1306(a) (willful failure to register: misdemeanor); § 1306(b) (address violations, with deportability consequences).
Current implementation: DHS interim final rule establishing Form G-325R and the USCIS online registration process, effective April 2025, promulgated without notice and comment and litigated shortly after.
NSEERS: special registration implemented by regulation at 8 C.F.R. § 264.1(f), delisted in 2011, regulatory structure removed in December 2016.
TPS: INA § 244, 8 U.S.C. § 1254a. Designation is country-based and Secretary-initiated. There is no mechanism for conferring TPS on individuals as a class of registrants.
Enforcement infrastructure: ImmigrationOS and ELITE were developed under modifications to Palantir’s long-running ICE delivery order (70CTD022FR0000170). The ELITE user guide and the Oregon fugitive-operations deposition describing its field use were obtained and reported by 404 Media in January 2026.
The through line: registration authority already exists and already carries criminal exposure; confidentiality would require statutory protections that neither history nor current data architecture supports; and the benefits promised in one version of this proposal are ones the cited instruments cannot deliver.
The bottom line
A proposal that duplicates existing law, promises confidentiality that both history and ICE’s own targeting infrastructure contradict, offers registrants nothing, changes its terms between platforms, and misstates how TPS works is not a serious contribution to immigration reform. It is a signal sent to voters, wrapped in an acronym, at the expense of people who are already afraid to answer the door, in a week when the cost of being near the wrong list was paid twice.
Northeast Wisconsin’s immigrant communities deserve candidates who understand the system before proposing to expand its reach. So does everyone else.
Wisconsin will hold its primary election on August 11th, where this candidate is seeking the Democratic nomination for Congress in Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional District, and is running against Ret. Lt. Colonel Rick Crosson and Katrina DeVille. The winner on August 11th will seek to unseat “Trump-Endorsed” Tony Wied.
Immigration Docket tracks the gap between what officials announce and what the law actually allows. If this kind of analysis is useful to you, subscribe to get it in your inbox.