A law signed by President Donald Trump in December 2025 mandates that all men aged 18 to 25 residing in the United States, including undocumented immigrants, be registered for automatic enrollment in the Selective Service starting December 2026, directly impacting thousands of Cubans in the country.
The measure is contained in the Section 535 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, signed on December 18, 2025, and represents the most significant change to the registration system since 1980.
Until now, the responsibility to enroll fell on the individual.
With the new law, the Selective Service will use federal databases to automatically identify and register eligible men within 30 days of turning 18 or entering the country.
The regulation applies without distinction of immigration status: citizens, permanent residents, refugees, asylum seekers, beneficiaries of humanitarian permits, and also undocumented immigrants are all included within its scope.
This directly affects Cubans who arrived in the United States by sea, land, or air and are between 18 and 25 years old, regardless of how they entered the country.
The official site of the Selective Service is clear on this: "Almost all male U.S. citizens and male immigrants ages 18 to 25 are required to register with the Selective Service."
The only exceptions are women, men with valid non-immigrant visas—tourists, students, or temporary workers—military personnel on active duty since the age of 18, and those who have been continuously hospitalized or incarcerated between the ages of 18 and 26.
One of the points that generates the most concern among undocumented immigrants is whether the registration could expose their immigration status to authorities such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The Selective Service has responded clearly: the system "has no authority to collect such information, has no use for it and it is irrelevant to the registration requirement."
The agency has historically stated that it does not share data with ICE or with the Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), although the integration mechanism with federal databases raises questions about what information might be inadvertently exposed.
Registering with the Selective Service does not imply automatic enlistment in the army. According to the agency itself, "in a crisis requiring recruitment, men would be called in a sequence determined by random lottery number and year of birth" and then evaluated before being incorporated into the Armed Forces.
The consequences for failing to register are severe: up to five years in prison, fines of up to $250,000, loss of access to federal student aid, blocking of the naturalization process and exclusion from federal jobs.
Before this law, undocumented immigrants were already legally required to manually register. However, those without a driver's license—the most common mechanism for automatic registration, which by 2023 covered 98% of registrations—were excluded from the automatic process and had to do it on their own.
The proposed rule for implementing automatic registration was submitted to the Office of Information and Regulation on March 30, 2026, for review, and the system will come fully into effect in December of this year.
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