Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said he has concerns about Sharia law being “forced upon the American people” during remarks on the House floor Tuesday.
“Well, I’ve got some pretty strong concerns about Sharia law,” Roy said while discussing his broader worries about border security and foreign aid. “And whether that’ll be forced upon the American people.”
In the remarks, Roy referenced a “massive Muslim takeover of the United Kingdom” and said he had “pretty strong concerns about people who wanna see Israel’s destruction, who were happy about Oct. 7, who were elected in the United Kingdom.”
“Some might say that we’ve seen that here in the United States,” Roy continued, echoing criticism of pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses. “What are we gonna do about that?”
Roy’s remarks mirrored a post on the social platform X he made Sunday, in which he responded to a post critical of Mothin Ali, a man who was elected to the city council in Leeds, England, as part of the Green Party.
In remarks celebrating his election, Ali is seen in front of a Palestinian flag saying “Allahu Akbar” and “this is a win for the people of Gaza”.
“Coming to America,” Roy said in his post responding to the video.
Ali is in hot water for comments he made on Oct. 7, the day Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel, when he reportedly said on social media that Palestinians had the right to “fight back.”
Responding to criticism after his election, Ali apologized for “any upset” his comments caused, but said the negative response to his post-election video was driven by Islamophobia, according to The Guardian.
Roy has been a fierce critic of campus protests that have popped up across the country in recent weeks. He said a House bill passed last week didn’t go far enough in combating antisemitism, which critics say the protests have helped fuel.
“It is not good enough to merely ask the Department of Education to consider a definition of anti-Semitism in discrimination investigations; rather, we should cut off taxpayer funding to the supposedly ‘elite’ institutions that are poisoning the minds of our children and propagating this despicable behavior,” Roy said in a statement on the bill.
Roy has also been among the most outspoken members of Congress in calling to close the southern border to immigrants. In his speech Tuesday, he suggested the foreign-born population in America was a threat to “Western values.”
“We have 51.5 million people who are foreign-born in the United States, they have about 20 [million] to 25 million kids. That puts that well over 20-something percent of our population, it’s the highest such number in the history of our country,” he said. “People say, ‘Well isn’t that great?’ Is it?”