Freshman Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas., introduced his first bill in Congress on Thursday, legislation intended to reinstate President-elect Donald Trump’s Remain in Mexico
policy regarding would-be immigrants.
The bill would restore a policy from Trump’s first term that required all asylum-seekers coming through Mexico
to remain there until their asylum hearing in an American court. President Joe Biden immediately reversed that policy upon taking office in 2021.
In an interview
with The Daily Signal’s Bradley Devlin on “The Signal Sitdown” podcast, Gill reviled Biden’s reversal of that policy, but also argued that Trump’s policies must be enshrined into law if they are going to last into the future.
“We had border security under President Trump. Joe Biden got rid of it. Why is that? It’s because everything’s been done through executive order,” said Gill.
Ryan Walker, vice president of Heritage Action, voiced his support for the legislation, telling The Daily Signal, “Enough is enough. Republicans campaigned on the promise to secure the border, and in November, the American people gave them a mandate to deliver. The Remain in Mexico Act is an important step to protect American citizens and begin restoring stability to our broken immigration system.”
At just 30 years of age, Gill is a young face in one of the oldest Congresses in history.
As his first introduced bill, the Remain in Mexico Act serves to position him as a firm ally of Trump on immigration, one of the central issues of the 2024 campaign.
“I think we all recognize this is his mandate,
” Gill told The Daily Signal.
“We have a majority in the House because of President Trump, not because of anybody else. We have a majority in the Senate because of President Trump. So, that is the vision that President Trump has cast for the party, which is an America-first agenda. That’s what we’re going to be focused on passing.”
Gill enters the House of Representatives at a time of increased bipartisan support for immigration reform. Some 48 House Democrats
joined Republicans in voting for the Laken Riley Act, which would require the detention of illegal immigrants who have committed violent crimes. But 159 House Democrats voted against the legislation, which might have prevented the death of Riley, 22, a Georgia college student who was slain nearly a year ago on Feb. 22. An illegal alien was convicted Nov. 20 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
On Thursday, the Senate overcame a legislative filibuster by a handful of liberal Democrats on a procedural vote by a margin of 84-9, easily clearing the 60-vote threshold and paving the way for a Senate vote on the measure.
A bipartisan and bicameral group of lawmakers unveiled legislation Thursday that would punish swatting with criminal penalties of up to 20 years in prison in the worst cases.
U.S. military forces in the Pacific are deploying large numbers of drone weapons and increasing overall force readiness in preparation for a potential 2027 war with China, according to the commander of the Indo-Pacific Command.
President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to use executive action to force California to funnel more water to the southern part of the state, after a water shortage helped fuel devastating fires in Los Angeles.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video fromnoted historian and Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson.
I’m here in California
. I’ve been a lifelong resident of the state, fifth generation to live in the same house. I had a house in the Sierra, and it would almost burn down three years ago during the Aspen Fire, and I’m speaking on the evening when you’ve all heard about the disastrous fire in Los Angeles.
As I’m speaking on a Wednesday night, there have been 15,000 acres, 1,000 structures destroyed. Nobody knows how many people are killed or missing. And how do we characterize this? Everybody’s talking about the Santa Ana winds, climate change—I mean everybody, the people in power.
But it was preventable. And once it started, this fire, it could have been assuaged. You could have had it lessened, that the severity didn’t have to be as catastrophic. So, I would characterize it as a DEI
–Green New Deal
hydrogen bomb. It’s something out of “Dante’s Inferno.”
And what I mean by that is, it’s a systems breakdown, a civilizational collapse. When you look at the people in charge, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom
flew in, to sort of do these performance-art stunts, but he has systematically ensured that water out of the Sacramento River and the watershed of Northern California would go out to the sea, rather than into the aqueduct, so Los Angeles didn’t have sufficient amounts of water.
He bragged not very long ago that he blew up four dams on the Klamath River. They provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power. They offered recreation, flood control, irrigation. He blew them up.
California’s fire management, whether we look at the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire near where I’m speaking, it destroyed 60 million trees. We have no timber industry in California. [Newsom’s] dismantled it.
We don’t clean the forest. We don’t let loggers come in and have a viable livelihood by harvesting trees. It’s sort of considered natural to let these things burn or to at least create the conditions in which they will inevitably be burned.
It’s almost as if we don’t like humans. We worry about grubs and worms and birds and the ecosystem.
The second breakdown was the mayor, Karen Bass, was in Africa
. You tell me why the mayor of the third-largest city in the United States at fire season, when she had been warned and warned for days on end that the Santa Ana winds were up to 100 miles an hour in the evening, and there was a danger of fire, and she goes off to Africa for the inauguration of the president of Ghana.
With all due respect, Mayor, but who cares? You have an obligation to the 6 million people of greater Los Angeles. And then we have the fire chief. I don’t really care that she’s LGBTQ, I don’t care [about] any of that. All I do care is her emphases. She’s been bragging for the last two years that her goal was to make sure [the Fire Department] was diverse and inclusive.
That can be good if it’s competent. But when you announce that 70% of your hiring will not be meritocratic, but will be based on diversity, equity, inclusion, then you’re not putting the interest of your constituents first.
There were not even enough, there wasn’t enough water pressure in Pacific Palisades. Pacific Palisades is not where I live. It’s one of the wealthiest, most exclusive neighborhoods in the United States. If they don’t have water, then no one’s going to get water, believe me.
There’s not enough insurance. There were famous actors that didn’t have insurance. Why? Because industry is overregulated, it’s fraught with people who make fraudulent claims, and the insurance industry knows that California is hostile to it, but more importantly that it will never clean up its forest or take preventive, time-tried, ancient protocols to lessen the dangers of fire.
And so put it all together, whether it’s a deliberate policy to not store water, not preserve water. Last year was one of the wettest years that we’ve had. We’ve had three out of the last four years have been very wet. We had a huge snowpack. We had rivers that were running in 19th century fashion, but out to the sea to save the delta smelt.
So, it was a total systems collapse from the idea of not spending money on irrigation, storage, water, fire prevention, force management, a viable insurance industry, a DEI hierarchy. You put it all together and it’s something like a DEI Green New Deal hydrogen bomb.
Gavin Newsom was fiddling, as he’s almost Nero Newsom. And this has been something that is just unimaginable, this system’s breakdown.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass are seen here Nov. 16, 2023, at a joint press conference. (Sarah Reingewirtz/ Media News Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)
And to finish, what we’re seeing in California is a state with 40 million people. And yet the people who run it feel that it should return to a 19th-century pastoral condition. They are decivilizing the state, and deindustrializing the state, and defarming the state, but they’re not telling the 40 million people that their lifestyles will have to revert back to the 19th century when you had no protection from fire, you didn’t have enough water in California, you didn’t have enough power, you didn’t pump oil.
So, we are deliberately making these decisions not to develop energy, not to develop a timber industry, not to protect the insurance industry, not to protect houses and property.
And we’re doing it in almost a purely nihilistic fashion. And Karen Bass should resign. She came to the airport, back from Africa. She had nothing to say. She was confronted at the airport: “Why were you in Africa? Why did you cut the fire department?”
They cut the fire department by almost $18 million. They gave fire protective equipment to Ukraine’s first responders, and she had nothing to say. She had nothing to say because she couldn’t say anything.
I don’t want to be too pessimistic or bleak tonight, but this is one of the most alarming symptoms of a society gone mad, and if this continues, and if this were to spread to other states, we would become a Third World country if we’re not in parts already.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
