House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan is in touch with the White House about bringing his sweeping immigration overhaul bill up for a vote — in exactly the same form as in the previous Congress.
In an interview this week, the Ohio Republican said he wants to revive consideration of legislation that passed the House in May 2023 without any Democratic votes.
“What I’d like to do in our committee, and we’re talking to the White House about when it makes sense to do this, is look at … the language that we had last Congress,” said Jordan.
Jordan had previously signaled an openness to tweaking the bill text to include some changes to high-skilled visa rules — a policy change championed by Elon Musk, tech mogul and former head of the Department of Department Efficiency initiative.
Since that time, however, Musk left his administration posting on bad terms with Donald Trump over for the GOP’s sweeping domestic policy package, railing against the megabill and burning bridges with the president along the way.
And while Musk and Jordan had at one point been close allies, Jordan was recently one of the several high-profile Republicans who Musk unfollowed on his social media platform, X, following passage of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
Jordan’s immigration overhaul bill would significantly crack down on legal immigration in the United States through limits on asylum and parole eligibility. It also would require employers to use E-Verify, an online system where they can ascertain an individual’s eligibility to work in the U.S., while setting a new minimum of 22,000 active-duty agents for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
A 2023 report from the Congressional Budget Office found that the bill would lower population estimates by 2033 by 600,000 “mostly by reducing the number of unaccompanied alien children present in the country.” The nonpartisan scorekeeper also estimated that 4.4 million people would also no longer be eligible for parole or asylum.
It would come on the heels of the megabill’s allocations of tens of billions of dollars for completing the border wall and implementing new fees for applicants seeking entry into the country.
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