Fear is the product
How Rob Wittman exploits immigration instead of fixing it
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Congressman Rob Wittman wants you to believe he’s serious about immigration. His issues page opens with the line “America was built by immigrants” before pivoting to ominous talk of a “broken system,” “catch and release,” and the urgent need to enforce the law. It’s a familiar two-step: a polite nod to the people who built this country, followed by a long list of reasons we should be afraid of them.
So let’s ask the question Wittman doesn’t want asked: What has he actually done?
Has he supported the only serious bipartisan immigration fix in a generation?
No — he stood by while his party killed it.
Has he proposed a workable, humane plan to fix legal pathways that have been deliberately strangled?
Nope.
Has he told VA-01 the truth about what immigrants contribute to our economy, our farms, our shipyards, and our communities?
Absolutely not.
What he has done is vote for political-stunt bills, parrot misleading talking points about “open borders” and immigrants getting free smartphones, and exploit grief over a tragic killing to falsely attack the governor for trying to keep state law enforcement focused on actual crimes.
It’s time to separate what’s real from the propaganda, and look hard at the gap between what Wittman says about immigration and what he does.
First, the truth: immigrants built (and still build) Virginia
There are more than one million immigrants in Virginia today, making up 12.5% of the state’s population. Of the top ten states by immigrant population, Virginia leads in the share of foreign-born residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher. And a majority of Virginia’s immigrants are naturalized U.S. citizens.
Even undocumented Virginians — the population Wittman talks about most often, and most demagogically — pay an estimated $689.8 million in state and local taxes every year, funding Virginia schools, roads, and emergency services they themselves are mostly barred from accessing. They pay a higher effective state and local tax rate (7.9%) than Virginia’s top 1% of households (7.2%). More than a quarter of undocumented immigrant Virginians live with a U.S. citizen child under 18. These are our neighbors.
Nationally, the data is clear: immigrants — including undocumented immigrants — commit crimes at lower rates than native-born U.S. citizens. In the years in which border encounters reached record highs, violent crime in border states actually declined. The “migrant crime wave” Wittman and his allies invoke is a campaign slogan, not a data-driven statistic.
Here in VA-01, immigrants are not an abstraction. They are the workers in our shipyards, the farmhands harvesting Northern Neck produce, the doctors in our hospitals, the engineers at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, the small-business owners in Fredericksburg and Williamsburg, the kids in our public schools who are first in their families to dream about college. Wittman represents these people too.
Before we catalogue Wittman’s failures, one more thing needs to be said clearly: there is a real and significant difference between legal and illegal immigration. Legal immigrants — green card holders, visa holders, asylum seekers following the required process, DACA recipients, Temporary Protected Status holders — have every right to be here. Coming here legally has been made deliberately harder; in many cases, nearly impossible. Visa backlogs can stretch for years or even longer. The asylum system is buried under hundreds of thousands of unprocessed claims. Work-visa programs are too rigid to serve the agricultural and seafood employers right here in VA-01.
Wittman and Trump ignore all of this. In their rhetoric and their policy choices, they collapse the entire spectrum into a single threatening category with no legitimate claim to be here. That is not immigration enforcement. It is the deliberate erasure of legal status as a meaningful category. And it is the foundation on which every piece of their dishonest rhetoric is built.
The four big failures
Wittman has failed VA-01 on immigration in four interlocking ways:
At Trump’s command, he helped kill the most conservative bipartisan border deal in 40 years.
He votes for political-stunt legislation that doesn’t fix the system but generates great campaign mailers.
He spreads misleading rhetoric — sometimes outright lies — about immigrants and immigration enforcement.
He stays silent while immigration enforcement morphs from law-enforcement work into political theater that hurts our communities.
1. Wittman helped kill the bipartisan border deal at Trump’s command
In late 2023 and early 2024, three senators — James Lankford (R-OK), Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), and Chris Murphy (D-CT) — spent four months hammering out a bipartisan border security deal. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blessed the negotiations. The National Border Patrol Council endorsed the bill. Lankford himself called it the most conservative border security bill in four decades.
The deal would have:
Raised the bar for asylum claims, with faster processing
Given the President authority to shut down the border when daily encounters exceeded set thresholds
Hired thousands more Border Patrol agents and asylum officers
Funded fentanyl detection at ports of entry
Ended the practice of having migrants wait in U.S. communities for years before their cases were heard
This was not a Democratic wish list. This was a deal Republicans had spent the previous year demanding. President Biden — whom Wittman calls weak on the border — had endorsed the deal and pledged to sign it.
And then, in a Truth Social post, Donald Trump demanded that Republicans in Congress kill it. Why? Because rather than help the country improve border security, he wanted the border chaos to continue to aid his run against Biden in November 2024.
Senate Republicans collapsed into line. House Speaker Mike Johnson declared the bill dead on arrival in the House. Senator Chris Murphy, one of the deal’s authors, said it plainly: that Republicans had crafted a bill too effective for them to support, because they wanted to keep immigration alive as a political weapon to exploit.
Where was Wittman?
Silent, compliant, and cowering. He did not break with Speaker Johnson. He did not co-sponsor an alternative bipartisan companion. He did not call for the deal to get a vote. He let the most conservative immigration bill in a generation die at Trump’s command — because Trump needed a broken border more than he needed a fixed one.
If Wittman actually believed his own talking points about a “border crisis” — if he genuinely thought Americans were in danger and the system was broken — he would have moved heaven and earth to pass that bill. But he didn’t, because the goal was never to fix the border. The goal was to keep the border useful as a political wedge, and to amp up Americans’ fear of the people they would have embraced as their neighbors.
That is the central unforgivable fact of Rob Wittman’s record on immigration. He never sincerely tries to solve the real immigration problems that America has.
2. Wittman votes for stunts, not solutions
Once the bipartisan deal was dead, Wittman lined up to vote for the showpieces — bills designed to dominate cable chyrons, not to actually overhaul a broken system.
H. R. 2, the “Secure the Border Act” of 2023
Wittman voted YES on this entirely partisan bill in May 2023. It passed the House 219–213 with zero Democratic support. It would have effectively shut down the asylum system, restarted border-wall construction, and barred even religiously affiliated nonprofits from helping migrants. Everyone — including Wittman — knew it had no chance in the Senate. It was a campaign prop, not a legislative effort.
The Laken Riley Act
Wittman voted YES in January 2025. The bill mandates ICE detention without bond for any non-citizen arrested for or merely charged with — not convicted of — offenses including shoplifting and minor theft. Civil rights groups across the spectrum opposed it: the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the League of Women Voters, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Education Association, the National Council of Churches, and many more. Their core objection was that the bill strips basic due process by mandating detention based on accusation rather than conviction — a principle that should alarm anyone, regardless of party, who understands that “innocent until proven guilty” is fundamental to the American legal system.
The murder of Laken Riley was a horror. Her family deserves justice. But the bill named after her would not have prevented her killing; it would, however, allow ICE to indefinitely detain people accused of stealing diapers. That isn’t border security. That’s expansion of carceral power dressed up in a young woman’s name.
H. R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill”
Wittman voted YES on this monstrosity in 2025, and a major component of it was a record-shattering expansion of ICE and CBP funding — the largest in U.S. history — to fund mass deportation. The same bill strips healthcare from roughly 323,000 Virginians, risks food assistance for 78,000 of us, and threatens seven rural Virginia hospitals with closure. Wittman traded our healthcare and our hospitals for an immigration-enforcement spending spree he could put in a press release.
Notice the pattern: every Wittman immigration vote is maximalist on enforcement, minimalist on solutions. He votes for detention. He votes for deportation funding. He has never once voted for a comprehensive bill that would clear the asylum backlog, expand legal pathways, modernize work visas for the agriculture and seafood employers in our own district, or protect the Dreamers who have lived here their entire conscious lives.
That isn’t an immigration policy. That’s a brand.
3. Wittman’s rhetoric is engineered to mislead
Wittman doesn’t just vote for political-theater bills. He talks about immigration in ways calibrated to create fear and confusion.
In April 2022, Wittman went on Richmond radio and told listeners that the Biden administration was going to give smartphones to people crossing the border — implying lavish freebies for migrants on the public dime. The reality: ICE issues stripped-down devices for the specific purpose of tracking migrants released from detention. The phones cannot make personal calls, browse the internet, or open social media. They run a single app, SmartLINK, used to monitor non-detained migrants awaiting hearings. They are surveillance tools, not perks.
A serious legislator would have known this. Wittman either did know and said it anyway, or he didn’t bother to learn before going on radio. Take your pick — neither is good.
In March 2026, after the tragic killing of Fairfax County mother Stephanie Minter by an illegal immigrant, Wittman issued a joint Republican-delegation statement attacking Governor Abigail Spanberger for ending Virginia’s participation in the federal 287(g) program, which deputized state and local officers to enforce federal civil immigration law. Wittman framed it as a public-safety failure.
Wittman twisted the facts to suit his attack on Spanberger. First, the murderer was first arrested in 2018 and had a court order for deportation in 2020 – but ICE never picked him up, not even during Glenn Youngkin’s governorship of Virginia, and neither ICE nor Fairfax County law enforcement can explain why. Wittman completely ignored this history to cast Spanberger’s policy as the cause of Ms. Minter’s murder.
Second, Wittman twisted Spanberger’s policy to suit his attack. What Spanberger actually said was that state law enforcement should focus on investigating and solving crimes, not on civil immigration paperwork. Her directive explicitly preserves cooperation with federal authorities when there’s a valid judicial warrant. The reform is about resources and trust: when immigrant communities fear that calling 911 will get a relative deported, they stop calling. Crimes go unreported, witnesses go silent, and predators take advantage. Police chiefs across the country have warned about this for years.
Wittman knows this. He doesn’t care. He used the family’s grief to score a political point against the Governor.
4. Real enforcement doesn’t look like political theater
Here’s the part Wittman never wants to discuss: legitimate immigration enforcement and the spectacle currently unfolding under the Trump administration are not the same thing.
Legitimate enforcement is the prosecution of cartels and human traffickers, the orderly processing of asylum claims, work-authorization audits of employers, and the targeted detention of individuals convicted of serious crimes. Most Virginians support this. The bipartisan deal Wittman let die would have funded it.
What is happening now is something else. Masked federal agents are seizing people at courthouses — people who followed the rules and showed up for their own immigration hearings. Border Patrol agents are being deployed to U.S. cities far from any border. People with active legal status (Temporary Protected Status holders, asylum seekers with pending cases, green-card holders) are being swept up. Children are being separated from parents. Due process is being routed around as a matter of policy.
This isn’t law enforcement. It’s a performance of toughness designed to be filmed, posted, and used in campaign ads. It is, almost literally, theater — performance without policy.
What does Wittman say about any of this? Almost nothing. He has not held an in-person town hall to answer constituent questions about it — his constituents had to host a town hall in his absence at the Twin Hickory Library, with an empty chair where their congressman should have been. About 150 VA-01 residents showed up. Many spoke directly to the chair.
Wittman has not introduced legislation to require judicial oversight of ICE operations. He has not signed letters demanding accountability for due-process violations. He has not asked the hard questions about masked agents in our communities. That’s silent complicity.
What Democrats actually proposed — and what Wittman could still do
One more myth worth dispatching: the lazy claim that Democrats “want open borders” or “have no plan.”
Democrats worked with their Republican colleagues and tried to pass the most conservative border security overhaul in 40 years — the Lankford-Sinema-Murphy bill. The Biden administration endorsed it and pledged to sign it. House Democrats have repeatedly proposed bills to expand legal pathways, modernize agricultural visas, and protect Dreamers. Senate Democrats voted for the bipartisan deal not once but twice. Virginia’s senators — Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — voted yes both times.
Senate Republicans voted no. And in the House, Wittman and his Republican colleagues refused to allow a vote at all..
So when Wittman tells you Democrats are responsible for the “broken system,” ask him: Why did your party kill the only serious bipartisan fix in a generation?
If Wittman wanted to lead, here’s what he could do tomorrow:
Co-sponsor a House version of the Lankford-Sinema-Murphy framework
Demand judicial oversight of ICE detention and deportation operations
Withhold funding for ICE until sufficient reforms are in place to protect the innocent
Support a Dreamer protection bill — most of these young people have never known another country, and must not be held accountable for decisions they didn’t make
Modernize agricultural and seafood worker visas so the Northern Neck farmers and Hampton Roads watermen who employ them can hire legally
Hold an actual in-person town hall in VA-01 and answer questions about ICE tactics in our state
Tell the truth about what immigrants contribute to Virginia, even when it complicates a campaign mailer
Wittman is choosing fear over facts, and politics over people
Strip away the press releases and the folksy emails, and Rob Wittman’s actual record on immigration is this: he stood by as his party killed the most conservative border deal in 40 years, voted for stunts that don’t fix anything, parroted false claims when it served the campaign narrative, exploited a family’s grief and twisted the facts to attack a Virginia governor doing serious work, and stayed silent when masked federal agents started disappearing his neighbors at courthouses.
We deserve a member of Congress who can hold two thoughts in their head at once: that immigration policy genuinely needs reform, and that the people affected by that policy are human beings — our neighbors, our coworkers, our kids’ classmates. We deserve a representative who will tell the truth instead of peddling fear. That is not who Rob Wittman is, so it’s time for him to go.
We can do better… and we will! Find out about eight better options to represent VA-01. We’ll continue to bring you updates on what we can all do to make sure we replace Wittman this November.
What do you think Wittman should do — or stop doing — on immigration? Let us know what you think by posting comments here or on any of our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, or Reddit.