Prominent Republicans are warning against the rise of Islam — in Texas, of all places. Although census data does not record or report religious affiliations, numerous studies have shown a significant rate of growth in the Muslim population of Texas. In 1990, Texas was home to roughly 140,000 Muslims (0.7% of the state’s population), according to the Texas State Historical Association. By 2010, that number had ballooned to 421,972 (nearly 2% of the state’s population).

A report from the Lufkin Daily News tracked the number of mosques in major cities across Texas: 54 in Dallas and 65 overall in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, while there are at least 209 mosques and Muslim “storefront religious centers” in the Greater Houston area. A February study by the Middle East Forum identified more than 650 Islamic nonprofits established in Texas alone, many of which are dominated by what the report classified as “dangerous Islamist” ideology.

In testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government on Wednesday, former Border Patrol officer and Senior Fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Secure & Sovereign Nation Initiative Ammon Blair warned that the rise of Islam in Texas has brought with it an increase in the application of Islamic Sharia Law, which Blair said poses a “national security crisis” to the U.S.

“Texas is confronting weaponized mass migration, cartel-engineered smuggling networks, foreign-linked governance structures operating within our communities, and systemic failure across the entire immigration-enforcement and removal cycle,” Blair said, addressing the role mass immigration has played in the rapid spread of Islam. “These dynamics have produced concentrated enclaves with limited assimilation and fragmented allegiances, environments actively exploited by foreign terrorist organizations, hostile states, and transnational criminal networks,” he added. “Migration pipelines now function as operational infrastructure for coercion, illicit finance, transnational repression, and foreign influence.”

Those immigration networks, Blair posited, “pursue the very ‘civilization-jihadist process’ of settlement outlined in the Muslim Brotherhood’s 1991 Explanatory Memorandum. That document calls for gradual institutional entrenchment to ‘eliminate and destroy the Western civilization from within’ by building parallel power structures inside American society.” The application of Sharia law threatens to create an alternate and parallel legal system in direct opposition to the U.S. Constitution, Blair warned. He noted that, in some cases, Sharia law proponents and practitioners have even physically obstructed Muslims from seeking redress for wrongs in Texas or U.S. courts, instead forcing them to go through Sharia law judges and tribunals. “No parallel system claiming supremacy over the Constitution can be permitted.”

Appearing on “Washington Watch” Wednesday night, Subcommittee Chairman Chip Roy (R-Texas) noted that the proliferation of Islam and Sharia law has emboldened Muslims in the U.S. to commit acts of violence against Americans, citing an Islamist terrorist attack in Austin in March. “This is something that we’re seeing crop up quite a bit. But it’s bigger than that,” the congressman said. “What we exposed in the hearing today is the extent to which we have a flood of people from majority-Muslim countries into the United States over the last 25 years, since 9/11. We’ve got a massive cultural impact throughout our country,” he continued. “We have an organized effort by the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR [the Council on American-Islamic Relations], and affiliate groups and organizations that are dedicated to the task — in their own words — of waging jihad against Western civilization.”

“This is what we’re dealing with, and it’s a direct assault on our Western civilization values,” Roy insisted. “We’ve got to call it out. We’ve got to fight it. And if we don’t — we’re not going to win a war that we don’t acknowledge exists,” he added. Roy also addressed the role mass immigration has played in the rise of Islam in the U.S., noting that the majority of immigrants to the U.S. before the 1970s came from Christian Europe and were quick to assimilate to the American way of life. “Today, we have 52 or 53 million people who are foreign-born, a huge percentage of whom are people who are not consistent with our values. They have Islam, which I do not believe is consistent with Western civilization. In fact, I think it’s incompatible,” the congressman stated. “Now we’re at breaking point, and we need to address it, acknowledge it, because this is distinct.”

Roy pointed out the phenomenon of Muslim rape gangs in the United Kingdom, which some have estimated have been responsible for the systematic rape and sexual abuse of up to one million British teenage girls, and the spread of Sharia law courts in the U.K. In France, nearly half (44%) of Muslims believe that Sharia law takes precedent over French civil law, according to a poll last year.

“None of this is about any individual and what he or she believes or doesn’t believe, whether atheist, agnostic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu — doesn’t matter. The issue here,” Roy stressed, “is whether you’ve got an organized effort to go to war with our way of life, which we are seeing very much in operation through memoranda, through organizations, through funding of groups that are pushing Islam as a political ideology to undermine our way of life.” He added, “That is something we need to recognize, because you can’t defeat it if you don’t acknowledge it.”

One of the chief means of confronting the spread of anti-American ideologies like Islam, the congressman said, is to “limit immigration.” Emphasizing the faith of the Founding Fathers and the Christian roots of the American legal and governmental system, the congressman declared, “We are a Christian nation, and we need to acknowledge that, recognize it, promote it. Don’t take anybody’s rights away to believe what they want to believe but defend our way of life against an assault against it.”

During the congressional hearing Wednesday, Roy pointed out that the proliferation of Islam in the U.S. is not due entirely to illegal immigration, but also to lax legal immigration policies. “Fueled by decades of an unsecured border and expansionist legal immigration policies, Texas has seen a sharp increase in immigration from the Muslim world,” he said. “The radicals pushing political Islam do not want to coexist with America’s culture and political order. They want to replace it.”