GOP Brings Expert From Hate Group to House's First-Ever Hearing on Trump's Muslim Ban
“I live in darkness. My family are my only light” Ismail Alghazali said Tuesday. “I want to see my son run up to me every day.” Alghazali, a U.S. citizen who works in a bodega in Brooklyn while his Yemeni wife and two young children are trapped in the U.S.-backed war in Yemen, was sharing just one of the heartbreaking stories that filled the first-ever Congressional hearing focused on Donald Trump’s Muslim ban.
At the hearing, conducted jointly by the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs subcommittees, Democratic members of the committee invited people impacted by the ban and experts like Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates. For their expert, Republicans invited Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies (“CIS”), an anti-immigrant hate group that’s tied to and has promoted countless white nationalist, as documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I wish I could say I was surprised, but at the very time of the hearing, Trump spoke before the United Nations parroting white nationalist talking points about rejecting “globalism.” This is who the GOP is today.