FIRST ON FOX â A Texas high school student who went viral after calling out an Islamic group for passing out hijabs on his campus last week that he has received death threats for speaking up.
Marco Hunter-Lopez, a 16-year-old student at Wylie East High School and president of the campus Republican Club, told he was invited by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, to testify May 13 before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution and Limited Government in a hearing titled, “Sharia-Free America.”
Hunter-Lopez testified about an incident that occurred on Feb. 2 on his high school campus, when he encountered an Islamic booth where four adult women from the organization “Why Islam?” were passing out hijabs to female students, copies of the Quran with conversion instructions, and a pamphlet titled, “Understanding Sharia.”
The incident drew national attention after Hunter-Lopez posted videos of the booth to social media. During his testimony, he revealed he received death threats afterward.
“I had people saying that they were going to be at my house waiting for me to get home and they were going to shoot me,” Hunter-Lopez told the subcommittee. “I had people telling me to kill myself. A lot of different things. But I know nobody can proclaim anything over me because I wake up every morning with victory with Christ.”
In his testimony, Hunter-Lopez said that with the U.S. Constitution and American values, and argued the outside group violated school policy and parental rights.
“Handing materials that present Sharia favorably to minors during the school day â without parental approval â risks normalizing ideas that undermine the very principles our public schools are supposed to uphold,” he said. “This is not neutral education; it is ideological promotion under the guise of .”
An exchange with Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., also went viral after the lawmaker questioned the purpose of the session, asking if anyone believed the U.S. needed special laws targeting specific religious populations rather than holding everyone to secular law.
When Raskin directed the question to Hunter-Lopez, the teenager challenged Raskin’s characterization of America’s , pointing out that the vast majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were church-attending Christians.
After clips of the exchange were posted to X last week, conservatives praised the teen for his articulate response to the congressman’s questioning.
Hunter-Lopez later told Fox News Digital that Raskin repeatedly cut him off before he could fully argue that lawmakers must acknowledge America’s Christian foundations, but said he was ready to defend his views.
“I believe that he thinks that he was going to catch me off guard by calling me out. But it didn’t,” Hunter-Lopez told Fox News Digital. “I took the fight.”
Representatives for Raskin did not immediately respond to Fox News Digitals request for comment.
Hunter-Lopez credited and community for giving him the boldness to stand his ground, noting that his peers have been more motivated to share their views after the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
“After that, instead of being scared to speak up, I actually saw more students brave to speak out,” he told Fox News Digital. He encouraged other students to get involved in their
