A Texas state lawmaker said he wants to revive a punishment not seen since the earliest days of the United States: banishing people from the state entirely, with Muslims as his stated target.

Republican state Rep. Andy Hopper, a first-term lawmaker, outlined the strategy during a presentation at the "Year of the Patriot" conference hosted by the True Texas Project — a grassroots conservative organization that grew out of the North Texas Tea Party movement — in Fort Worth, People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group that monitors right-wing activity through its Right Wing Watch project, reported. The event also featured former Trump administration staffer William Wolfe and white nationalist writer C. Jay Engel.

Hopper argued that Texas once had the power to inspect, quarantine, and deport people during its early statehood, and he said reviving banishment as a legal punishment is "winnable" in court. Modern U.S. courts have almost uniformly rejected banishment as a punishment, a practice more commonly associated with the colonial era, when Massachusetts Bay exiled religious dissenters including Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson.

"We need to make sure that Texas regains its power to define religion," Hopper told the crowd, adding that he would "1,000 percent support" establishing Christianity as the state's official religion. The U.S. Supreme Court has applied the First Amendment's Establishment Clause to state governments since its 1947 Everson v. Board of Education decision, a precedent line that bars state-established churches.

He also suggested reclassifying Islam legally, describing it as "a political ideology that is cloaking itself as a religion" rather than an actual faith. Hopper said that framing could help sidestep First Amendment protections altogether, though U.S. courts have consistently recognized Islam as a religion protected under the First Amendment. He cited an unsubstantiated statistic claiming Muslims could outnumber professed Christians in Texas by 2044, and called that prospect "terrifying."

The Republican lawmaker urged supporters to quietly insert anti-Muslim measures into unrelated legislation so they would avoid scrutiny before passage.

"There's a lot of ideas out there that you're going to see that never get earmarked as an Islam bill until after they pass," Hopper said. State-level measures targeting Islam have a long track record in U.S. legislatures: since 2010, lawmakers in dozens of states have introduced bills aimed at Islamic law, and the most explicit of them — Oklahoma's 2010 voter-approved amendment barring courts from considering Sharia — was blocked by federal courts, with a federal appeals court upholding that injunction in 2013.

He went further, suggesting that sympathizers try renting property inside Muslim communities specifically to provoke legal disputes. Hopper explicitly framed the approach as a way to make life "very uncomfortable" for Muslim Texans whom he accused, without evidence, of intending to "overthrow" the government. Texas is estimated to have one of the largest Muslim populations of any U.S. state.

Hopper's remarks add to a pattern of Christian nationalist rhetoric surfacing among Texas Republicans, as lawmakers increasingly test how far state legislatures can push religious-liberty restrictions targeting Muslim communities ahead of the next legislative session, which under the Legislature's every-other-year calendar convenes in January 2027.

In recent years, the Texas GOP has also targeted high-profile public expressions of faith among the state's Islamic communities, including a water park in Grand Prairie that planned to host an Islamic holiday festival and Houston George Bush Airport for installing specialized sinks for Muslim prayer rituals.