The U.S. House of Representatives on Monday overwhelmingly approved legislation that would explicitly bar anyone involved in the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel from entering or remaining in the United States.

The “No Immigration Benefits for Hamas Terrorists Act of 2025,” sponsored by Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), adds direct references to the Oct. 7 atrocities into the Immigration and Nationality Act. The bill would render inadmissible “any alien who carried out, participated in, planned, financed, afforded material support to or otherwise facilitated any of the attacks against Israel initiated by Hamas beginning on Oct. 7,” explicitly including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives.

The measure passed by voice vote with no objections, reflecting broad bipartisan agreement on the underlying goal, even as Democrats criticized the method.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Democrats supported barring Hamas terrorists but opposed rewriting core immigration law to single out specific historical incidents, calling it an unnecessary departure from decades of precedent.

“All members of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations—like Hamas—are already barred from entering the United States,” Raskin said, warning that Republicans were creating a precedent that Congress avoided even after the most significant terror attack in U.S. history.

“To put into perspective just how anomalous this approach is,” Raskin said, “consider our response to the 9/11 attacks… Even then, we did not amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to specifically reference the events of Sept. 11 or to bar the individuals involved in those attacks.”

Raskin also asked whether the new law would apply to Changpeng Zhao, the former Binance CEO who admitted to laundering money for Hamas and was later pardoned by President Donald Trump. McClintock said he was unfamiliar with the case.

McClintock defended the legislation as both morally necessary and long overdue. He argued that Hamas should be placed in the same statutory category as the Nazi Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization—two groups already explicitly named in federal immigration law.

“Does anyone seriously argue that we should repeal the sanctions against persons who aided and abetted the Nazis’ Holocaust?” he asked. “If not, then why would they oppose extending the same sanctions to the Nazis’ would-be modern-day successors, who just two years ago slaughtered more than 1,200 innocent civilians… because they were Jewish?”

He also cited a recent Justice Department case against Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi, a Gaza-born man living in Lafayette, Louisiana, who allegedly took part in the Oct. 7 attacks before entering the United States in 2024.

“New laws would be helpful to prevent a future Joe Biden from making a mockery of our sovereignty and reopening our borders to the most violent criminal gangs and cartels and criminals and terrorists on the planet,” he said.

Monday’s vote marks the second time the House has advanced the measure. A previous version stalled in the Senate earlier this year, where Democrats signaled discomfort with codifying specific terror attacks into immigration statute rather than relying on existing terrorism-related grounds for inadmissibility.

With the bill now heading back to the upper chamber—and with no signs Democratic leadership has shifted its position—the legislation faces an uncertain path despite its unanimous House support.

Still, Republicans argue the bill’s moral clarity will force the Senate to take a definitive stand.

“The world saw what Hamas did on Oct. 7,” McClintock said. “The question now is whether our laws will reflect that reality.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)