No Immigration Benefits for Hamas Terrorists Act of 2025
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
The terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel on October 7, which took the lives of more than 1,200 innocent civilians, and the subsequent war of mass destruction in Gaza, have been nothing less than a catastrophe for humanity.
More than 70,000 people have been killed to date, including an estimated 20,000 children. Hostages kidnapped by Hamas were abused, shackled in cages, and isolated in underground tunnels--in some cases, for more than 2 years. Many were killed there.
According to UNICEF, the Gaza Strip is now home to the world's highest concentration of child amputees. More than 80 percent of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed in the violence.
The world breathed a sigh of relief that a tenuous cease-fire was finally reached and that all the living hostages were returned home. Alas, the cease-fire continues to be breached. Violence and suffering continue to afflict the people of the region, including escalating vigilante settler violence in the West Bank.
Getting to a just and lasting peace in the region will require the creative leadership and hard work of statesmen and stateswomen. It is past time to break out of the brutal and circular logic of terrorism and violence and war and instead address the underlying political problems destabilizing the region. We must stay united around these goals and committed to the continuation of a strong peace process.
Madam Speaker, in the meantime, we must all agree to the aim of this bill, which passed the House with bipartisan support in the last Congress. No one affiliated with Hamas, nor anyone involved in the horrific and lawless attacks of October 7, should be admissible to the United States or eligible for any immigration benefits whatsoever. That is an obvious point of political and moral consensus in our Chamber.
However, I am afraid this is another missed opportunity for us to work across the aisle in a bipartisan fashion because it departs dramatically from the Judiciary Committee's traditional practice. This bill is essentially what we call a visa sanctions bill. For decades, we have relied on pre-negotiated, bipartisan, and bicameral texts for every such visa sanctions bill. This legislation today departs from this bipartisan practice by directly amending the Immigration and Nationality Act, the INA, to impose visa sanctions.
To put into perspective just how anomalous this approach is, consider our response to the 9/11 attacks. In the aftermath of that catastrophe, we revised our immigration laws to overhaul significant parts of our immigration system, and we created the Department of Homeland Security. Even then, we did not amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to specifically reference the events of September 11 or to bar the individuals involved in the planning or commission of those outrageous terror attacks from entering or remaining in the United States.
The reason for that is plain. The laws that we have in place already bar noncitizens who engage in terrorism or are involved with terrorist organizations from entering the United States. For any of those noncitizens who happen to be here, our laws clearly allow us to remove them and prevent them from obtaining any immigration benefits.
These laws were designed to apply broadly to any individual or organization engaged in terrorism without having to specify them by reference to specific historical events or attacks.
Under sections 212(a)(3)(B) and 237(a)(4)(B) of the INA, any noncitizen who has engaged in any terrorist activity, provided any material support to terrorists, or is a member or representative of a terrorist group or organization that enforces or espouses terrorist activity is presently inadmissible to the United States and is presently deportable. Hamas has been designated as such a terrorist group since 1997.
We already plainly have the legal tools to keep any noncitizen involved with Hamas, as well as any noncitizen who was involved in the horrific terror attacks of October 7, out of this country forever or to deport them from the United States if they are already somehow here.
This approach is, alas, symptomatic of the syndrome we just discussed in the last bill of the proliferation of redundant legislation and redundant language simply to make a point.
The Judiciary Committee's standard visa sanctions language, which was carefully crafted with the majority and minority on both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, would allow us to achieve all the aims of this legislation without departing from negotiated sanctions language and amending the INA in an unprecedented and incongruous way.
Amending the INA to impose visa sanctions sets a strange and potentially self-defeating precedent where new statutory language becomes necessary every time a new terrorist group or event emerges.
Nonetheless, we strongly support this legislation today, whose purpose is incontestable and essential. I hope we can both pass this bill and return to our bipartisan and bicameral practice for dealing with visa sanctions whenever the occasion presents itself.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Madam Speaker, again, we restate our support for this bill and its purposes and only hope that we can return to the traditional visa sanctions method of dealing with particular events. In the meantime, I wonder if the gentleman would yield for a question.
I wonder how this legislation with the new language would apply to the case of Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of the crypto firm Binance, who was prosecuted for and convicted of and sentenced to jail for taking money from a number of terrorist groups, among them Hamas, as part of his crypto venture. He was convicted of violating the Bank Secrecy Act and turning a blind eye to terrorists, including Hamas, cybercriminals, and child abusers.
I am wondering if the new language would cover Changpeng Zhao, who just received a pardon from President Trump.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I have no further speakers, and I am prepared to close.
Madam Speaker, again, I strongly support this legislation. We need to be doing whatever we can to eliminate terrorist forces and those who are providing critical material support to terrorist forces all over the world, which is why I raised the case of Changpeng Zhao, who is the former CEO of the crypto firm Binance, who was recently pardoned by President Trump.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source