A congressional caucus that had 48 members in late February added four new signatures between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning — pushing its official membership to 64 across 25 states. The Sharia-Free America Caucus has now grown by sixteen members in thirty days. It has not, during that same period, held a single committee markup on any of the four bills it has introduced.

The velocity is the story. The pace at which a caucus is adding members is an institutional signal that is different from the content of the bills it has introduced. A caucus growing at four members every thirty-six hours is operating on a momentum curve that outpaces its legislative output. That gap — between enrollment rate and mark-up rate — is the question this article examines.

The four new members, per press statements cross-referenced against each member's official congressional websites, are Rep. Russ Fulcher of Idaho, Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska, Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia, and Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee. The caucus's growth pattern through the weekend was first publicly tracked by the Jewish News Syndicate, whose reporting has served as the caucus's primary ecosystem amplifier. JNS reported a 60-member figure as of Friday; the Saturday-to-Monday additions push the count to 64.

The Numbers on the Wall

The Sharia-Free America Caucus was founded in the 119th Congress by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and Rep. Keith Self of Texas. Its stated purpose, per its public founding materials, is to oppose the incorporation of "foreign legal traditions" into American courts. Since its founding, the caucus has introduced four bills: the No Sharia Act (H.R. 5512), the Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act (H.R. 5722), the Tehran Incitement Act (H.R. 5913), and the PAUSE Act (H.R. 6225) — the last of which freezes every category of legal immigration rather than addressing the caucus's stated focus on legal traditions. La Verdad Tejana's community-side reporting on the PAUSE Act documents what that freeze would mean for Texas families in family-reunification, employment, and spousal-visa queues.

According to congressional records cross-referenced with each member's House.gov profile and with the JNS caucus tracker, the caucus's 64 current members are distributed across 25 states. Texas leads with nine members — Roy, Self, Pfluger, Cloud, Arrington, Fallon, Gooden, De La Cruz, and Moran. Florida has seven. Tennessee, after Ogles joined Monday, is tied with Georgia at five. Idaho's delegation is fully enlisted — both Fulcher and Simpson — after this weekend's addition.

The caucus does not publish its roster on a standalone page. The roster is assembled from each member's individual press releases, cosponsor listings on the four bills (available on Congress.gov), and statements to outlets in the caucus's amplifier network. Those outlets are, per bylines published over the past ninety days: JNS, Granite Grok's IMANI vertical, RAIR Foundation, RSBN, and NOTUS. A caucus of 64 members operating without a single committee hearing is running an unusual communication architecture: the roster lives in external publications, not in institutional records.

The Velocity Itself

The single most useful analytical frame on a growing caucus is the differential rate — how many members it adds per unit of time. A caucus that adds members steadily across months is one kind of political phenomenon. A caucus that adds members in clusters, after external events, is another. The Sharia-Free America Caucus's growth pattern, mapped against publicly available press releases and member statements, falls into the second category.

The caucus had 48 members on February 25, per a JNS tracker column published that week. It added two members in the first week of March. It added four members in the last week of March, after Abbott's March 21 state terrorist designation of the Muslim Brotherhood. It added three more members in the week after the caucus's April 9 introduction of the PAUSE Act. The six additions since Thursday — two Thursday–Friday, four Saturday–Monday — represent the fastest sustained enrollment pace in the caucus's fourteen-month existence.

Those additions track a visible external trigger. The House FISA warrant revolt on Thursday, which collapsed the 18-month clean extension and produced a 13-day stopgap, was followed within twelve hours by three caucus-aligned press statements from members of the House Freedom Caucus whose Fourth Amendment positions overlap with the Sharia-Free Caucus's constitutional-populist framing. The convergence is not accidental.

What the Caucus Has Not Done

Four bills. Zero committee markups. No floor votes. No caucus-led hearings at which a single witness has testified. According to the House Judiciary Committee's published schedule, none of the four caucus bills has been scheduled for hearing or markup during the current legislative window.

The absence is consistent. It is the caucus's operating posture. Its four bills exist as signaling devices — referred and waiting — rather than as legislation expected to advance through regular order. The growth rate, in this light, is not a rate at which a caucus is preparing to move a bill. It is a rate at which a caucus is accumulating signatories for the purpose of public declaration.

The Middle East Forum, in its April monthly round-up, explicitly cited the caucus's existence and size as one of the institutional outcomes its publications pipeline has helped produce. MEF's self-claim of the caucus as a downstream product is a notable institutional admission — the caucus is, in MEF's own framing, a coordination layer. The downstream product does not need committee markups to serve its purpose. It needs members.

The Texas Delegation Hinge

Nine of the 64 members — more than one in seven — are Texas Republicans. The Texas concentration has been the caucus's structural backbone since its founding. Roy and Self are the co-chairs. Pfluger, Cloud, Arrington, Fallon, Gooden, De La Cruz, and Moran are the next seven. That puts the Texas delegation's weight on one side of the caucus's institutional identity and provides the geographic anchor for the caucus's policy focus.

It also explains why the caucus's legislative agenda intersects with the Texas voucher litigation now heading to a permanent-injunction hearing on April 24. The Texas Attorney General's Office — which withdrew from the Hancock voucher defense on April 14 — and the Spectrum case filings reference several of the caucus's publication-pipeline allies. The caucus's growth is occurring in a week when the Texas voucher case, the Texas AG's separate Islamic mediation probe, and the caucus's own four-bill slate are all in simultaneous motion. That convergence is not accidental either.

What to Watch

Three signals will determine whether the caucus's growth trajectory continues or inflects over the next ten days.

The first is the April 24 permanent injunction hearing. A ruling either direction — grant, deny, or defer — will produce a predictable caucus response. A denial of the injunction (the outcome the caucus's allies are positioned for) will trigger a press cycle in which the caucus claims institutional credit; a grant will trigger a very different press cycle in which the caucus reframes as constitutional-opposition. Either produces additional enrollment pressure on fence-sitting members.

The second is the Religious Liberty Commission final report, expected ~May 1. Per the Interfaith Alliance v. Trump FACA filing, the commission's public report will land roughly four weeks before a preliminary-injunction hearing on May 28. The caucus's four bills are legally distinct from the Commission's work, but the publication will produce a broad constitutional-religion news cycle that the caucus is structurally positioned to absorb.

The third is the MEF 2026 Policy Conference on May 19. That conference has historically produced both new members for aligned caucuses and new policy proposals that get absorbed into member legislation. The conference is the point at which the caucus's ecosystem formally convenes, and it is the most predictable enrollment inflection point over the next month.

Why It Matters

A caucus that adds four members every thirty-six hours without holding a single markup is a caucus designed for a different purpose than passing bills. It is a caucus designed to accumulate public declaration — the roster itself is the product. The four-bill slate is the occasion for the declaration. The ecosystem publications are the distribution.

For readers attending to the institutional shape of the current moment, the velocity number is the one to track. Membership at 64 and rising signals something different than a caucus that had 48 in February and flatlined. It signals that the caucus's external amplifier network — the publications pipeline, the state-level designation cascade, the Texas Attorney General's parallel actions — is generating enough reinforcement to keep enrollment accelerating in the absence of legislative output.

Whether the curve bends this week depends on the Friday hearing. If the ruling lands in favor of the voucher plaintiffs, the caucus will absorb the win into its messaging and the rate will accelerate. If it lands against, the caucus's constitutional-opposition frame will activate — and the rate, historically, has only gone up under that condition.

The members the caucus has now are public. The members it adds next week will tell you what it thinks the court did.