A Texas congressman is proposing a “freeze” on all immigration until the federal government fixes the country’s broken system.
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R–TX) said Wednesday he is introducing a bill called the “Pause Act” that will freeze all immigration until Congress achieves certain objectives, including reforming chain migration and birthright citizenship and ending H-1B visas.
He said the nation’s record-high foreign-born population is creating “a cultural problem about who we are as Americans.”
Roy, who is in a four-way race to be the Republican nominee for Texas attorney general in 2026, explained his proposal on The Benny Show.
In addition to the immigration freeze and related reforms, Roy called for revisiting Plyler v. Doe, a case originating in Texas that resulted in a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring states to fund the education of illegal alien children.
Roy also said his bill would require vetting people for their adherence to Sharia law.
“Why are we importing any human being that is adherent to Sharia law, which is totally contrary to the Constitution, and our values, and Western civilization?” Roy asked host Benny Johnson.
“In Texas, we’ve been dealing with the brunt of the illegal immigration influence. But now we’re seeing, I think, the ramifications of the H-1B system and how it has been abused, in addition to chain migration and diversity visas, which we’ve been trying to fix for a long time, and we’ve been unable to do so,” said Roy.
So now what are we dealing with in Texas? We’re dealing with a massive Islamism problem. We’re dealing with a massive problem of the advancement of Sharia law. We’re dealing with a mass community that is growing up that has no desire to assimilate and come here to become American and embrace Western civilization, embrace our Constitution, embrace our values.
“What I would point out here is that we’re dealing with a cultural problem about who we are as Americans,” he said.
Roy noted that more than 50 million people in the U.S. are foreign born, a higher percentage of the population than it’s ever been.
On top of that is a failed education system—“not just failing us in terms of skill sets, which is germane to the H-1B question, but failing us in terms of teaching Western civilization, in terms of teaching God, in terms of teaching our values and belief in the Declaration, teaching English.”
“And now we have a demographics problem, and we have a cultural problem, and in Texas that has resulted in EPIC City, a big Islamic center in Houston, 300 mosques across the state,” he said.
EPIC City, recently rebranded as The Meadow, is a proposed Islamic-focused community in North Texas that has not yet been approved for development. The Ismaili Center in Houston is set to open December 13.
Roy added that Texas has one of the fastest-growing Muslim populations of any state in the union. “And if we lose Texas, we lose the country.”
