(The Center Square) – With early voting underway in a Republican runoff election, U.S. Rep. Chip Roy keeps filing anti-Muslim bills that aren’t expected to pass.
On Monday, as early voting began in Texas, Roy filed a bill targeting Muslim imams. On Tuesday, he filed a bill banning foreign adversaries from buying homes in the U.S.
Polling shows Roy is currently trailing state Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, in a Republican runoff election for Texas attorney general.
The two-page Inhibiting Militant Adversarial Mullahs (IMAN) Act seeks to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to prohibit certain Islamic leaders from being admitted to the United States through R Visas, a nonimmigrant religious worker visa.
“An alien may not be admitted under section 101(a)(15)(R) if the alien has any of the following titles: (1) Imam or grand imam, (2) Shaykha, (3) Mufti or grand mufti, (4) Ayatollah or grand ayatollah,” the bill states.
Roy says the titles denote “anti-American foreign clerics who preach Sharia Law and political Islam,” who “spread Islamist teachings that run counter to our Constitution and Western Civilization.”
“The United States should never roll out the red carpet for foreign clerics who preach anti-American hatred, celebrate terrorism, or serve as mouthpieces for radical regimes,” he said.
He also claims that “for years, adversarial religious figures have manipulated loopholes in our immigration laws to enter this country under so-called religious visas while spreading extremism. America will not import militant ideology disguised as ministry. If you promote the values of enemies of the West, you should not get a visa to come to the United States – period.”
Roy, who’s been in office since 2019, hasn’t previously prioritized Islamic issues. In the last few months, and increasingly in the last few weeks, he’s been rapidly filing anti-Islam bills after launching an Anti-Sharia caucus in the U.S. House last year.
Roy has also led a delegation calling on the federal government to take action against CAIR-CA, arguing “CAIR’s longstanding ties to terrorist organizations, including Hamas … combined with documented financial mismanagement and misuse of federal grant funds … pose a grave risk to national security and render CAIR unfit to receive taxpayer dollars.”
On Tuesday, he filed a Ban Chinese Communist and Islamist Home Ownership Act to ban foreign adversaries from buying American homes. Texas already has several foreign adversary bans enacted, The Center Square reported.
“American homes belong to American families — not the Chinese Communist Party, foreign Islamists, or our geopolitical foes. While Americans struggle to afford housing, hostile regimes are buying up our land and neighborhoods. This bill slams the door on foreign adversaries owning American housing and forces them to sell what they already control. We’re putting America’s homes back in American hands,” he said.
The four-page bill would prohibit the American housing supply from being sold to “Foreign Countries of Concern and their citizens, Foreign Entities of Concern, designated foreign adversaries, designated state sponsors of terrorism, any agent or instrument of the previously designated, and corporations with ownership stakes by any of the previously listed persons or entities.”
It applies to single-family homes, apartments, coops and “all American housing stock.” It requires any property already owned by the applicable entities to be sold to a U.S. citizen.
Roy also filed the Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists (MAMDANI) Act to denaturalize and deport individuals he argues are Marxist and Islamists, including the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, after which the bill is named.
None of these bills are expected to pass Congress.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-Texas argues Roy’s “public demand for the exclusion of an entire faith group is a shameful betrayal of his oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. … By targeting American Muslims, Rep. Roy is not only inciting bigotry but is actively calling for the dismantling of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty. It is the height of hypocrisy for a lawmaker to claim the mantle of a ‘constitutionalist’ while advocating for a religious test that the Founding Fathers explicitly prohibited.”
After a shooting targeting the Islamic Center of San Diego on Monday, multiple Islamic groups in Texas called for an end to “hateful rhetoric and fearmongering by some Texas politicians” which “creates dangerous real-world consequences by normalizing hostility, intimidation, and potential violence against Muslims in Texas.”
CAIR’s leaders also said they weren’t surprised that the alleged attackers “were reportedly motivated by anti-Muslim hate. Hate against American Muslims is completely out of control.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has designated CAIR a foreign terrorist organization and called for its nonprofit status to be stripped, prompting lawsuits.
