US House Rep. Scott Perry’s latest comments are part of a longer track record targeting immigrants.
While appearing on Newsmax on Monday, US House Rep. Scott Perry (R-York) launched a tirade against Democratic lawmakers, claiming the only reason they shut down the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was to prevent their supporters from being deported.
“They don’t want any of their voters to be deported, and they’re willing to vote ‘no’ and blame it on Republicans,” Perry said in an interview.
He added, “They’re willing to sacrifice the lives of people that are killed by immigrants. People that are here illegally, who kill them, rape them, and rob them. They’re willing to sacrifice that to make sure the midterms go their way.”
Democrats successfully forced a partial shutdown involving DHS after federal immigration officials shot and killed two Minnesota residents earlier this year. Republicans in the Senate came to an agreement with Democrats to reopen most of the agency, but US House Republicans rejected the deal.
Perry is no stranger when it comes to attacking immigrants in order to advance his beliefs in the fringe, right-wing great replacement theory, which alleges that non-white immigrants will replace white populations in the US.
After talking about immigration in a 2021 subcommittee meeting for the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Perry was called out by the Washington Post for spreading the false theory during a hearing.
“For many Americans, what seems to be happening or what they believe right now is happening is, what appears to them is we’re replacing national-born Americans, native-born Americans to permanently transform the landscape of this very nation,” Perry said at the time.
Then in 2024, Perry was caught defending the white nationalist theory in a closed-door briefing where, according to CNN, he stated that the Ku Klux Klan was the “military wing of the Democratic party,” and that immigrants coming to the US “have no interest in being Americans.”
“Replacement theory is real. They added white to it to stop everybody from talking about it,” Perry said in the recording.
He added, “what is happening now is we’re importing people into the country that want to be in America … but have no interest in being Americans, and that’s very different and to disparage the comments is to chill the conversation so that we can continue to bring in more people that we never met that are un-American.”
