House Deportation Bill Could Brand Legal-State Marijuana Users ‘Criminal Gang Members’ — While the Army Just Dropped Its Cannabis Bar

A House Cannabis Inquirer’s legislative tracker inching toward a floor vote would give the Department of Homeland Security sweeping authority to designate immigrants as gang members — and the definition of “criminal gang” is written broadly enough to include anyone who regularly smokes marijuana in a group of five or more, even in a state where cannabis is fully legal.

Representative Jaime Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, flagged the issue in the minority section of the committee’s formal report on H.R. 5713, the “Expedited Removal of Criminal Aliens Act.” The bill cleared committee several months ago and is now moving toward full House floor consideration.

“The definition of a ‘criminal gang’ in this bill is extremely broad,” Raskin wrote, citing language that would define a criminal gang as “an ongoing group, club, organization, or association of five or more persons that has as one of its primary purposes the commission of… a felony drug offense, including felony simple possession of marijuana.”

The implication is direct: in states where simple possession of marijuana above a certain amount is still classified as a felony under state law — and that category covers more jurisdictions than many assume — a group of people who regularly smoke together could, under a sufficiently aggressive reading, satisfy the definition.

The Structural Problem

The bill’s supporters would argue that enforcement discretion exists for a reason: federal prosecutors and DHS officials aren’t going to classify suburban book clubs that share a joint as criminal organizations. But Raskin’s point isn’t about what enforcement will look like on day one. It’s about what the statute authorizes — and what happens when executive discretion is exercised in ways courts are then asked to review.

H.R. 5713 would allow noncitizens to be subject to expedited removal proceedings based on DHS’s gang designation authority, with limited judicial review. That’s the second-order concern that matters: the bill doesn’t just create a broad definition. It pairs that broad definition with a fast-track removal process that strips standard due process protections.

Under expedited removal, there is no immigration court hearing in the traditional sense. A person designated by DHS can be removed rapidly, with narrow appeal rights. When you combine an elastic “gang” definition with a compressed adjudication process, the risk isn’t just theoretical overreach — it’s built into the architecture of the bill.

“This Administration has demonstrated it cannot be trusted to identify gang members and terrorists,” Raskin wrote. “But this bill would give them even more power to do that and strip people of their due process rights.”

The Army Just Did the Opposite

Here is the part that warrants attention beyond the immigration context: the same week this bill is advancing toward a House floor vote, the U.S. Army quietly removed its own cannabis conviction barrier for enlistees.

New Army regulations published this week eliminate the requirement that recruits with a single conviction for marijuana possession obtain a special Pentagon waiver. Previously, such a conviction triggered a 24-month waiting period and required a drug test. That barrier is now gone — effective for the Army, Army National Guard, and Army Reserves.

The Army’s stated rationale is practical: recruitment targets have been difficult to meet, and the existing marijuana waiver process was filtering out otherwise-qualified candidates. The change brings Army policy closer in line with the Navy and Air Force, which had already relaxed similar restrictions.

The contrast is not subtle. On one side of the Capitol, a committee-passed House bill is building new legal infrastructure to deport immigrants with marijuana-adjacent associations. On the other, the Department of Defense is tearing down barriers that prevented Americans with marijuana convictions from serving their country.

Both positions are arguably defensible on their own terms — the Army’s problem is operational; the House bill’s stated purpose is border enforcement. But together, they capture something important about where federal cannabis policy actually stands in 2026: not coherent, not moving in a direction, but pulling simultaneously in opposite directions depending on which agency you’re looking at and which population is affected.

State Law Is Not a Shield

One aspect of the H.R. 5713 language that deserves particular scrutiny: it does not carve out state-legal conduct.

Raskin’s dissent specifically notes that the scenario he’s describing — a group of high school students regularly gathering to smoke cannabis — involves behavior that “in a state where it is lawful” would still fall within the bill’s definition. Cannabis remains a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law, meaning federal drug offense statutes apply regardless of what California, Colorado, or New York have decided.

This is a well-worn fault line in federal cannabis enforcement, but H.R. 5713 adds a new dimension to it. The question previously was whether someone could be prosecuted federally for conduct legal under state law. The practical answer, for most of the past decade, was no — enforcement priorities intervened. The new question H.R. 5713 poses is whether state-legal cannabis conduct, when it involves groups of five or more people in a pattern, could serve as predicate evidence for a gang designation used to remove someone from the country.

It’s a more targeted threat than general federal prosecution, but it’s also harder to see. The designation doesn’t require a conviction. It requires DHS to make a determination. That’s a meaningfully different standard.

Where This Sits in the Broader Landscape

The CLIMB Act — a new bipartisan banking access bill introduced this week by Reps. Troy Carter (D-LA) and Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) — frames the cannabis policy moment in a different register: American cannabis businesses, locked out of traditional lending and capital markets, are competing at a disadvantage against foreign operators who can freely access U.S. financial infrastructure. Congress should fix that.

Those two pieces of legislation, advancing in the same week, represent the full range of the federal cannabis debate in 2026: one bill is trying to make the industry more viable; another is building enforcement tools that could, as a byproduct, criminalize its customers.

Neither bill has reached final passage. H.R. 5713 faces a Senate where immigration enforcement bills face their own procedural headwinds. The CLIMB Act is new enough that its trajectory is unclear.

But the pattern they collectively describe — a federal government that has not reconciled what it thinks about cannabis, producing laws and policies that operate at cross purposes — is not going away. The Army figured out its position this week. Congress still hasn’t.

Ethan Vale covers federal cannabis policy, regulation, and legislation for CannabisInquirer.com.