Her partner was undocumented when she entered Congress. Ramirez’s experiences with the nation’s damaged immigration system will form Democrats’ resistance to Trump’s proposed insurance policies.
By Mel Leonor Barclay, for The nineteenth
Rep. Delia Ramirez spent the lead-up to the presidential election absorbing Republicans’ pledge to mass-deport unauthorized immigrants and processing many Democrats’ rightward shift on the difficulty. She was additionally fearing for the destiny of her husband and different undocumented family members.
For years, Ramirez and her husband, Boris Hernandez, navigated life as one of many tens of millions of mixed-status households in america. When the 118th Congress convened after the 2022 midterms, Ramirez, a Democrat, was sworn in as the primary Latina ever elected to Congress from Illinois — and the one member brazenly residing with an undocumented immigrant.
Ramirez will be a part of a Republican-controlled Congress for a second time period in January. Her experiences because the spouse of an undocumented immigrant and daughter of immigrants who entered america by way of its southern border will assist form Democrats’ response to President-elect Donald Trump’s expansive immigration agenda, which incorporates deploying the army to hold out the nation’s largest deportation effort.
With lower than 60 days till the presidential inauguration, Ramirez has been urging the Biden administration to take govt and administrative motion to mitigate the influence of Trump’s proposed insurance policies. Her key considerations: the prospect of household separation and the ripple results of mass deportations on the U.S. economic system.
“We’re moving into what I believe to be one of the most dangerous policies this country has seen in a very long time,” Ramirez stated in an interview with The nineteenth. Trump’s plans, she stated, will trigger a “massive partition” within the nation, with lifelong results for mixed-status households, who may develop into separated, and for communities that might see lots of their members — and workforce — vanish.
Ramirez additionally stated she believes federal policymakers “haven’t had enough conversations” in regards to the influence of their strategy to the LGBTQ+ asylum-seekers on this nation — “the fears and death threats that are very real,” she stated, “and what it means to be deported back to a country that doesn’t accept them because of either their gender or sexuality.”
There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants dwelling in america. What occurs to them doesn’t cease with them; their removing has deep and lasting penalties for his or her spouses, kids and the prolonged household networks in america. A 2023 Pew Analysis Middle evaluation of obtainable knowledge discovered that 5 % of U.S. households embody at the very least one one who is undocumented. Virtually 70 % of those households are thought of “mixed status” — in different phrases, they’re made up of approved and unauthorized immigrants, in addition to U.S.-born residents. About 4.4 million U.S.-born kids beneath 18 dwell with an unauthorized immigrant guardian, the evaluation says.
For Ramirez, talking in regards to the expertise of those immigrants has been a relentless a part of her time in Congress. Because the vice rating member of the Committee on Homeland Safety and a member of its subcommittee on border safety and enforcement, Ramirez has had a entrance seat to the dehumanizing feedback about immigrants from a variety of the identical Republican lawmakers who will now assist advance Trump’s immigration agenda.
“I’m the only member of Congress that was in a mixed-status family in this building, and it was emotional. I sat in rooms — continue to sit in rooms — with the very same committee that talks about my husband, my uncle and my brothers and sister-in-law as if they’re less than human; as if they’re criminals,” Ramirez instructed The nineteenth from her workplace in Capitol Hill.
“To be in the space to have such a personal connection to this experience with people that don’t see the humanity of my own family is anything but easy,” she stated.
Ramirez has additionally criticized colleagues in her personal social gathering for negotiating a border invoice that, amongst different issues, would have made it more durable for folks to hunt asylum in america and that didn’t embody a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, together with those that have been dropped at the nation as kids, a gaggle that Democrats have promised to shore up. A majority of those immigrants, a gaggle often called Dreamers, are girls.
In interviews on the time, Ramirez identified that negotiations in regards to the invoice didn’t embody any members of the Hispanic caucus, despite the fact that a majority of undocumented immigrants are from Latin America. Extra not too long ago, she praised the Biden administration’s program to create a pathway to citizenship for spouses of undocumented immigrants, however criticized its June order to limit asylum eligibility on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It’s been a challenge to have some very critical and difficult conversations, oftentimes with my party, oftentimes publicly denouncing some of the policies that President Biden has implemented,” Ramirez stated.“There is no doubt that Democrats certainly have a lot of work to do to actually understand immigration and how we define the policy solutions around it.”
Within the lead-up to Trump’s second time period, immigrants’ rights teams are asking the Biden administration to hurry up the processing of functions for non permanent safety applications. These embody the renewal of residency permits for Deferred Motion for Childhood Arrivals recipients, who’re quickly approved to dwell and work in america beneath an Obama-era program whose validity has been and certain can be challenged by the Trump administration.
The teams have additionally pushed to hurry up work allow renewals for refugees and asylum-seekers. Representatives from the Individuals for Civil Liberties Union on Thursday publicly requested the Biden administration to assist restrict mass deportations by closing down Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention amenities with “egregious records of human rights violations and abuses” and halt the continuing enlargement of detention facilities.
Ramirez stated she is working to encourage the administration to heed the recommendation of immigrants’ rights teams, although she wouldn’t say which particular requests she is prioritizing to keep away from derailing the work. “We are directly engaging the administration in every possible way, in their face day to day, to encourage them, to demand of them to do everything they can between now and January,” Ramirez stated.
She’s going to deliver again to Congress a ardour for a difficulty rooted in her household’s experiences with the nation’s immigration system — one each Democrats and Republicans agree is damaged. Ramirez stated immigration is engraved “in my heart and my soul”: Her mom left Guatemala and crossed the Rio Grande into Texas whereas pregnant with Ramirez. She stated her mom’s journey grew to become extra palpable throughout a go to to the border alongside different members of Congress.
“I was walking through this detention center watching these women laying there with no beds, no chairs and those aluminum foil blankets. And one of them, a pregnant woman, ran to the window, to the glass, and whispered to me to help her,” Ramirez recalled. “That could not have been more real and more traumatizing for me. It was like I was seeing my own mother, and now I’m the vice-ranking member of Homeland Security.”
Her household’s immigration story is part of her biography that can develop into extra salient given Trump’s proposal to finish birthright citizenship. Trump’s “Agenda 47,” a doc detailing the insurance policies of his subsequent administration, argues that the 14th Modification has been “misinterpreted” and that it grants citizenship solely to kids of at the very least one guardian legally approved to reside in america.
Trump has promised to problem an govt order on the primary day of his second administration to finish citizenship rights to kids born in america to undocumented mother and father. Ramirez has referred to as the proposal “un-American.”
One in every of Trump’s most talked-about plans, displayed in official placards on the Republican Nationwide Conference calling for “Mass Deportations Now,” represented a risk to Ramirez’s personal family till days earlier than the election. That’s when her husband received a discover from the Workplace of the Citizenship and Immigration Companies granting his petition for everlasting residency because the partner of a U.S. citizen.
Hernandez was 14 when he immigrated to america in 2000 together with his older brother, fleeing poverty in Guatemala. Ramirez stated the method to legalize his standing took three years and value $15,000. The couple have been granted an interview in March and after a turbulent summer season and fall, obtained a ultimate resolution proper earlier than the election.
The information arrived by e mail, “at 2:22pm, on that Sunday,” Nov. 3, she stated. “After 24 years in this country, Boris is no longer undocumented. He is now a legal permanent resident. And that’s important, and it was emotional,” Ramirez added. “With that said, our joy probably lasted about 10 minutes because it was really difficult for my husband to remain joyful when he began to make the calls to his family.”
Hernandez has siblings who’re dwelling in america beneath the non permanent permission given to them beneath the DACA program. Different siblings weren’t eligible, so they’re in limbo — “and certainly in this precise moment, living with so much fear,” she stated.
Then, there was this: One in every of Hernandez’s brothers died on Election Day. When he was buried, Ramirez recalled being struck by the thought that he had reached a special form of everlasting standing in america together with his dying.
These experiences will form her work talking to members of each events — and the broader public — about an strategy to immigration that protects the nation’s position as a spot of refuge, protects households and communities, and permits the nation to proceed to learn from the labor of undocumented immigrants.
“Congress has failed mixed-status families, immigrants and Americans for decades. My party and the Republican Party and a lot of people in this building have no idea what immigration and the process of immigration really is,” Ramirez stated. “I have a responsibility to help educate and inform and bring people along into a space that for me is so obvious and clear because I live in it.”
That work can’t wait till Trump takes workplace.
“Funny enough,” she quipped, “I literally have my sleeves rolled up right now.”
