Gill Opens Hearing on the Abuse of U.S. Immigration Policy

WASHINGTON—Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses Chairman Brandon Gill (R-Texas) delivered opening remarks at today’s hearing on “Amnesty and Chaos: Abuse of U.S. Immigration Policy.” In his opening statement, Task Force Chairman Gill highlighted how left-wing activist groups have used frivolous litigation to disrupt U.S. immigration enforcement, render laws ineffectual, and subvert the will of the American people. He emphasized that institutional abuse of immigration policy has put Americans in harm’s way and called on Congress to figure out how to streamline the process to prevent further abuse.

Below are Task Force Chairman Gill’s opening statement as delivered:

Good morning, and welcome to today’s important hearing on abuses of the U.S. immigration system and their effects on our nation.

Prior administrations and the infinite amnesty lobby weaponized the U.S. immigration system both for political gain and at the expense of the American people putting foreigners over our own citizens.

The Biden Administration flooded our country with millions of illegal aliens, unvetted from all over the globe, and the impact has been to reduce working class wages, to strain our social system, our education system, our healthcare system, and to culturally transform the United States.

At the same time, it’s devalued the meaning of American citizenship to the detriment of the American people. The American people were left picking up the pieces, which is precisely why they elected president Donald Trump in the last election cycle, to both secure the border and to deport illegal aliens.

And he’s done exactly that. He secured the border in record time when nobody in the American political class thought that it was possible. And he’s begun the largest deportation campaign in American history.

And yet, despite the political pressure that that has caused him to do that, the Left has pursued frivolous and coordinated litigation that seeks to subvert the will of the American people and negate our immigration laws and effectively reopen our border.

The intent, it seems, of this litigation is to make immigration law ineffective and unenforceable.

To this end, we have a vast network of radically left-wing NGOs providing legal services and other support to illegal aliens.

We’ve seen coordinated campaigns against ice personnel and facilities across the country, and even now, Democrats are holding up funding for ICE and Border Patrol, causing a partial government shutdown, while at the same time adamantly opposing the Save America Act, which would provide common sense voter ID laws and citizenship requirements to vote in American elections.

I think that the key question that many Americans ask themselves is, ‘why is that? Why would Democrats oppose borders and oppose citizenship requirements to vote in our elections?’

And I think that the answer is, of course, because they believe that they gain politically from open borders, both in with from the impact of illegal aliens impacting congressional apportionment.

Illegal aliens tend to congregate in sanctuary states and sanctuary cities, which tend to be blue, which gives Democrats greater congressional representation at the expense of Republicans.

While at the same time, Democrats are making the bet that illegal aliens who do vote in our elections will vote Democrat. That’s something that Democrats have talked about for quite some time now, and I think that that is the motivation behind pushes for amnesty in many cases.

At the same time, Democrats are doing everything they can to keep as many of these illegal aliens, people who came into our country illegally here as possible.

And we don’t need to look any further than the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS system, which was originally intended to be just that. It was intended to be temporary. A temporary reprieve from deportation due to specific circumstances.

Yet the Biden Administration abused it and has utilized TPS as a form of backdoor amnesty for over a million people who entered our country illegally.

The numbers speak for themselves. At the start of the Biden Administration, there were just about 410,000 TPS beneficiaries from ten countries in four years. That number increased by over 1 million to 1.4 million, thanks to new TPS designations and re-designations for multiple countries.

That includes Burma in 2021, Ukraine in 2022, Afghanistan in 2022, Cameroon in 2022, Ethiopia in 2022, Venezuela in 2021 and 2023, Haiti in 2024, and Lebanon in 2024.

About half of all current TPS beneficiaries weren’t even residing in the United States until after Joe Biden took office.

In other words, TPS was a vehicle for providing backdoor amnesty for the very people that the American people saw pouring into our border for four years and voted President Trump to into office to deport.

Moreover, the vast majority of the people covered under TPS did enter the U.S. illegally.

And I think that’s really important. That includes an estimated 95 percent of all Venezuelan TPS holders and 91 percent of all estimated Haitian TPS holders.

This, and many others, are precisely the abuses of our immigration system that Republicans were elected to stop.

And it’s going to be the focus of our hearing today.

So, I look forward to hearing from the witnesses today about how this institutional abuse occurred and continues to occur, and what needs to be done to restore an immigration system that works for the benefit of the American people.