Legislative Tracker — February 2026 Update

The CLEAN Act would deny ACA refundable premium tax credits to any individual, or spouse on a joint return, who meets the bill’s sex-offender definition as of the last day of the taxable year.

It would also amend Medicaid funding provisions to block federal matching funds for medical assistance provided to covered individuals and would allow states to elect not to make Medicaid medical assistance available to them.

The legal effect is not simply a tax or benefits adjustment. It would convert sex-offense status into a categorical barrier to major health-coverage systems.

Health coverage is tied to medication continuity, mental-health care, treatment access, disability care, chronic-disease management, employment capacity, and family stability.

For families, the burden would not stop with the covered person. Costs and consequences could shift to spouses, parents, children, emergency rooms, local systems, and untreated illness.

A policy that destabilizes treatment and medical care in the name of public safety risks undermining the very stability that evidence-based reentry depends on.

• Whether H.R. 7453 receives committee activity or a Senate companion.
• Whether amendments define covered status by current registration, federal Adam Walsh Act categories, any qualifying conviction, or state-law registration.
• Whether disability, age, hospice, minor-dependent, treatment, or post-registration-relief exceptions are proposed.

H.R. 7624 would prohibit covered domestic-violence and homeless shelters receiving federal funds from providing services or housing to covered sex offenders.

The bill would make noncompliant shelters ineligible for federal funds during the following fiscal year and would prohibit covered sex offenders from entering or using covered shelters except to seek information about non-covered shelters.

It would require covered sex offenders entering a covered shelter to notify staff of their status and would create criminal penalties for knowing violations, including fines or imprisonment up to five years.

Emergency shelter is not a luxury benefit. For people facing homelessness, domestic violence, disaster displacement, poverty, eviction, or family breakdown, it may be the difference between lawful stability and street-level survival.

Shelter exclusion can make registration compliance harder because many registration systems require a stable or reportable address. The practical risk is that a person is denied shelter and then punished for the instability that denial creates.

Families can also be forced into impossible choices when one household member is excluded from the facility that would otherwise keep the family safe.

• Whether H.R. 7624 receives hearing activity or a Senate companion.
• Whether shelter providers raise implementation, confidentiality, emergency-displacement, due-process, and homelessness concerns.
• Whether the bill’s covered-population definition is narrowed or remains status-based.

Florida SB 212 and HB 45 would expand or adjust restrictions tied to schools, child-care facilities, parks, public swimming pools, playgrounds, and related locations.

The February Senate Judiciary substitute narrowed some draft language by deleting public-bathing-space references, shifting some language from a 200-foot restricted zone to an on-the-premises standard, and revising warrantless-arrest language in the same direction.

The bill would still require supervising officers to deny certain requests by conditional releasees or probationers to visit a public swimming pool unless specific exemptions apply.

The practical issue is not just whether a person can enter a pool or park. It is whether everyday geography becomes a criminal-risk map for parents, grandparents, caregivers, workers, voters, people attending religious services, and people trying to comply with supervision.

Premises language may be clearer than a 200-foot buffer, but clarity does not eliminate the burden if covered locations are common, boundaries are unclear, or exceptions are too narrow to use in ordinary family life.

For families, restrictions around recreation and child-centered places can turn ordinary activities into requests for permission, discretionary denials, or fear of technical violations.

• Whether final language keeps premises-based wording rather than a 200-foot zone.
• Whether exemptions are practical for family, voting, religious, treatment, employment, caregiving, and official-business purposes.
• Whether local governments and supervising officers receive clear implementation guidance.

Wyoming SF 88 would bar registered sex offenders age 18 or older from living within 1,000 feet of covered childcare facilities.

Covered facilities include government-run childcare facilities and daycares licensed by the Wyoming Department of Family Services.

The proposal includes a limited grandfathering provision for people already established in their homes before July 1, 2026, and reported violations would carry jail and fine exposure.

Housing stability is one of the strongest practical foundations for compliance, work, treatment, supervision success, and family support.

A broad daycare buffer can shrink lawful housing options in smaller communities, especially when childcare facilities are embedded throughout residential neighborhoods.

Grandfathering may protect a current address, but it does not protect people who later face eviction, rising rent, job loss, disability, caregiving needs, family reunification, or the need to move closer to support.

• Whether the House preserves, narrows, or expands the Senate language.
• Whether measurement rules and childcare-facility boundaries are clear enough for ordinary people to follow.
• Whether exceptions are added for non-child-related offenses, caregiving, disability, housing scarcity, or individualized risk findings.

Idaho H0683 would clarify residence and habitual-living standards for sexual-offender registration purposes, including objective time and frequency rules.

The bill clarifies application to homeless registrants and exceptions allowing registered adult criminal sex offenders to reside within 500 feet of a school or daycare when living in licensed or certified incarceration, hospital, health, or convalescent-care facilities.

The text also references posted-notice requirements for covered property, including notice size, statutory reference, use of the term registered sex offender, and placement at public entrances.

Residence definitions decide whether a person is compliant, unlawfully residing somewhere, or exposed to enforcement. For people with stable housing, a definition may be a paperwork issue; for people without stable housing, it can decide whether survival arrangements become legal risk.

Clarity can reduce arbitrary enforcement, but objective thresholds can also expand enforcement if temporary stays, caregiving, medical placement, homelessness, or couch-surfing are treated as residence.

Families may need to reassess temporary stays, shared custody, hospital or care-facility stays, treatment placement, and emergency housing under the new framework.

• Final implementation guidance from Idaho State Police, local sheriffs, and facility administrators.
• How habitual-living rules apply to homelessness, temporary caregiving, shared custody, medical placement, and unstable housing.
• Whether posted notices stigmatize facilities or create collateral exclusion from health and care settings.

South Carolina S. 924 would require a judge to order, as a condition of probation or parole, that a person convicted of a registerable offense use the person’s registry name when accessing social networking websites, using dating applications, or communicating with others for the purpose of promoting sexual relations.

A first violation would be a misdemeanor punishable by a fine up to $1,000 or imprisonment up to one year, or both. A second or later violation would carry a fine up to $2,500 or imprisonment up to three years, or both.

The proposal sits at the intersection of registration, supervision, online identity, speech, privacy, and technical-violation exposure.

Digital identity is part of ordinary life: family communication, work, support groups, mutual aid, dating, advocacy, and basic social participation all happen online.

A vague or rigid name-use rule can create risk for people who use initials, nicknames, legal name changes, aliases, shared household devices, platform-required display names, or accounts created before supervision.

For families, the risk may spill into shared accounts, household technology, or the fear that ordinary online contact could be treated as a supervision violation.

• Whether the bill is narrowed to specific platforms, conduct, or risk findings.
• Whether First Amendment, privacy, compelled-speech, and vagueness concerns are raised.
• Whether registry-name requirements account for legal name changes, aliases, initials, platform rules, and household technology use.

New Mexico HB 199 would have added tier classifications, shortened initial and change reporting deadlines from five business days to three, and expanded registrable information.

The proposal would have required information including aliases, social networking identifiers for law-enforcement use, phone numbers, professional licenses, vehicle, aircraft, and watercraft identifiers, school information, passport, and immigration documents.

It also would have changed verification periods to 90 days for life for tier 3, every six months for 25 years for tier 2, and annually for 15 years for tier 1, with additional rules for out-of-state and juvenile registration.

Shorter deadlines and broader information collection increase the chance that poverty, unstable housing, transportation barriers, confusing paperwork, or ordinary life changes become felony-risk events.

For families, expanded vehicle, address, temporary-location, school, work, travel, and digital reporting can make household life feel permanently administrated by registry rules.

The bill was postponed indefinitely, but the architecture matters because SORNA-alignment proposals often return in later sessions or as committee substitutes.

• Whether similar SORNA-alignment language returns in a future session.
• Whether any committee substitute narrowed burdens before postponement.
• Whether federal-compliance pressure is invoked in future New Mexico registry proposals.

Missouri HB 2311 would expand lifetime-registration categories, change exemption procedure, move multiple offenses into higher tiers, and add registration-system handoff duties.

The February fiscal note identified registry, incarceration, exemption, and agency-implementation consequences from the bill.

The bill would add lifetime-registration categories, including people required to register under federal law and people required to register for an offense sexual in nature committed against a minor or incapacitated person.

It would require people who qualify for exemption from registration to petition the court, and it would move multiple offenses currently listed under tier I or tier II into tier III.

Tier movement and lifetime-registration categories are not abstract labels. They can decide how long a person remains publicly marked, how often they report, whether relief is possible, and whether family stability remains subject to permanent registry consequences.

A court-petition requirement can make exemption depend on money, counsel, transportation, filing access, and the ability to navigate a legal system that many impacted families cannot easily use.

Facility release and system-entry duties may reduce some administrative confusion, but they also strengthen surveillance handoffs at the moment of reentry.

• Whether any court-petition requirement includes appointed counsel, fee waivers, clear standards, and accessible procedures.
• Which specific offenses remain moved into tier III in final text.
• Whether lifetime-registration categories are tied to current federal law or broad offense characterizations.

Idaho H0604 would revise psychosexual-evaluation provisions, including how failure to provide an evaluation may operate as an aggravating circumstance.

The bill would also revise payment provisions for psychosexual evaluations and establish rules involving certain funding and restitution.

Because psychosexual evaluations can affect sentencing, treatment, supervision, risk classification, and future relief posture, the payment and nonproduction rules matter as much as the evaluation requirement itself.

Evaluation rules can be useful when they are fair, qualified, accessible, and tied to individualized assessment. They become dangerous when poverty or lack of provider access is treated like refusal.

For families, evaluation costs can become a major financial pressure point at the same moment they are already managing legal fees, transportation, housing instability, treatment costs, and reentry planning.

The bill’s practical effect depends on whether Idaho builds safeguards for indigency, provider shortages, disability, and non-willful inability to produce an evaluation.

• Full official bill text, statement of purpose, and committee analysis.
• Whether evaluation nonproduction distinguishes refusal from inability to pay or lack of evaluator access.
• Whether funding and restitution provisions create meaningful access or simply shift costs to defendants and families.

Washington HB 2403 would move failure to register as a sex offender to seriousness level I and remove second-or-subsequent failure to register from seriousness level II.

The bill would keep failure to register tied to a felony registration duty as a class C felony while deleting language that escalates third or later felony failure-to-register offenses to class B felonies.

It would remove second-or-subsequent felony failure-to-register from the statutory definition of sex offense for sentencing purposes, while still requiring two years of community custody for second or later violations.

Failure-to-register prosecutions often punish instability, homelessness, confusion, poverty, transportation barriers, mental illness, administrative mistakes, or paperwork failures.

Reducing repeat escalation can lower carceral exposure without eliminating registration duties or accountability.

For families, this kind of reform can reduce the risk that a technical paperwork or address problem becomes a life-altering sentencing event.

• Whether the bill reaches the House floor.
• Whether amendments restore harsher penalty treatment.
• Whether opposition frames administrative noncompliance as equivalent to new sexual harm.

In State of Iowa v. Uranga, the Iowa Supreme Court held that a change in residence, by itself, does not trigger Iowa’s temporary-lodging notice statute unless the person is away from a principal residence for more than five days.

The court concluded the State charged a temporary-lodging violation but argued a change-of-residence theory, and it found insufficient evidence for the charged temporary-lodging trigger.

The court vacated the court of appeals decision, reversed the district court, and remanded for judgment of acquittal.

Registry statutes often contain overlapping duties, and technical prosecutions can turn on precise reporting triggers.

For people experiencing homelessness, eviction, temporary lodging, residence transition, or unstable family housing, the difference between one reporting duty and another can decide whether conduct becomes a criminal conviction.

The decision does not eliminate reporting duties. It reinforces that the government must charge and prove the duty it actually relies on.

• Whether prosecutors shift to charging change-of-residence provisions more carefully.
• Whether Iowa lawmakers respond by amending temporary-lodging or residence-change statutes.
• Whether defense counsel use the opinion in technical-violation cases involving unstable housing.

In D.L. v. Pennsylvania State Police, the Commonwealth Court rejected an Act 29 challenge raising ex post facto, reputation, due-process, public-disclosure, and irrebuttable presumption arguments.

The court held that Pennsylvania Supreme Court precedent, including Lacombe and Torsilieri II, controlled the petitioner’s claims.

The court denied the petitioner’s summary-relief application, granted PSP summary relief, and dismissed the amended petition.

The decision reinforces Pennsylvania’s difficult litigation terrain for broad adult Act 29 challenges.

For registrants and families, the practical meaning is that public registration, retroactivity arguments, and reputation-based claims remain hard to challenge through broad facial theories in the current state-court posture.

Future litigation may need narrower claims, stronger records, juvenile distinctions, removal-stage theories, federal theories, or targeted as-applied arguments.

• Whether the petitioner appeals.
• Pending Pennsylvania cases challenging removal-stage presumptions or narrower Act 29 applications.
• Whether federal litigation develops around public dissemination, digital tracking, or individualized-risk findings.