In May 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced a program offering undocumented immigrants $1,000 and a plane ticket if they agreed to leave the country on their own.
Randy Weber went on the radio to say it was too soft.
On the program "Washington Watch," hosted by former congressman Jody Hice, Weber said this:
"It's a plane ticket and $1,000. I'm a Texan. I guess I'm old school. I think that they ought to really be punished in some fashion. Maybe they either get — I'll say this tongue in cheek — they get a plane ride ... We fly over their country, open the door, [and] they can either have $1,000 or a parachute."
Then, according to Right Wing Watch's account of the broadcast, Weber said he wasn't going to say that in front of the camera. Hice pointed out that he just had.
"Tongue in cheek" is the tell
Weber flagged it as a joke before he finished the sentence. That's worth taking seriously, but not the way he means it.
A member of Congress does not need a punchline to describe deportation. He could have said the $1,000 was too generous, or that he wanted more removals, or that he preferred detention to voluntary departure. Any of those would have been an ordinary, if harsh, policy position.
What he reached for instead was an image of people being thrown out of a moving aircraft. It came to him easily enough that he said it into a live microphone — and his own instinct one second later was that it shouldn't be on camera.
He knew how it would sound. He said it anyway.
And he won't take questions about it
Weber has represented Texas's 14th District, on the Gulf Coast around Galveston, since 2013.
In April 2025 — a month before the parachute remark — about 300 people gathered in the Clear Lake area to ask Weber and a neighboring congressman to hold a town hall. Neither showed up. Houston Public Media was there.
"Both of them have been in office for over 10 years and have never, never had a town hall meeting," organizer John Cobarruvias told the crowd. "Instead what they do, they have these tele-cons. I call them tele-cowards."
A spokesperson for Weber did not return Houston Public Media's request for comment.
So the parachute line went out on a friendly radio show, to an audience that wouldn't push back, from a congressman who does not hold rooms where anyone could.
Meanwhile, the enforcement Weber says isn't punishing enough has been killing people in the region he represents. In Houston, ICE agents shot and killed a man who had lived there 35 years and put three children through college.
There is no version of that story where the problem was that the government was being too gentle.
What a joke costs
The defense of remarks like this is always that nobody meant it literally, and that critics have no sense of humor.
But an elected official's words set the temperature for the people carrying out the policy. Agents in the field hear their party's members of Congress describing the people they're arresting as a punchline about parachutes. Families in Weber's own district hear it too — including U.S. citizens with relatives who aren't.
Weber has form here. In 2015, after no senior U.S. official attended the unity march in Paris following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he tweeted that "Even Adolph Hitler thought it more important than Obama to get to Paris." He apologized, saying it was not his intention "to trivialize the Holocaust nor to compare the President to Adolf Hitler."
Ten years and an apology later, the reflex is unchanged. What has changed is the target: in 2015 he was talking about the President of the United States. In 2025 he was talking about people with no power at all.
He hasn't apologized for this one.
Source
"Rep. Randy Weber Jokes About Dropping Undocumented Immigrants Out Of Airplanes," Right Wing Watch, May 12, 2025. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.
