Yassamin Ansari in August 2024. Photo by Gage Skidmore | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
President Donald Trump is expected to celebrate his aggressive anti-immigration agenda Tuesday night when he addresses a joint session of Congress, and has invited several people with family members who were victims of crimes allegedly committed by immigrants to hear his speech to symbolize the need for a continued crackdown.
Meanwhile, Arizona’s freshman Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari, who represents a heavily Hispanic district, will be sitting in the crowd with DACA recipient Yadira Garcia.
Garcia has lived in Arizona since she was seven years old, and is a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, which President Barack Obama implemented in 2012 to offer applicants a work permit and temporary shield from deportation. Today, she teaches high school students math in Tolleson.
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Garcia said she hopes her presence in the nation’s capital can put a face on the more than three million Dreamers who consider the country home — and help anti-immigrant politicians realize that undocumented people aren’t a threat, but a benefit.
“Just because we are undocumented doesn’t make us criminals, it’s just the fact that we’re missing a nine-digit number,” she said, referring to the Social Security Number that citizens receive. “We’re people that have lives — I contribute to this country every day.”
Ansari, a Democrat and former Phoenix city council member who was elected to Congress in November, criticized the Trump administration’s hostility towards immigrants, saying that she’s concerned about the impacts on her district, which spans Phoenix, Glendale and Guadalupe and has a voting population that is 51% Hispanic.
“Since Donald Trump has taken office, there have been relentless, cruel and un-American attacks on immigrant families,” she said during an online news conference on Tuesday afternoon.
Trump’s first six weeks in office have been marked by a focus on deporting as many people as possible, regardless of their actual legal status. Under the direction of the White House and leaders appointed by Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have detained migrants showing up to official check-ins or court hearings, prioritized the deportation of unaccompanied children seeking asylum, and detained a Puerto Rican veteran in New Jersey and a veteran with legal permanent residency in Arizona.
Ansari, whose parents fled Iran after its government was taken over by a theocratic regime and some of their family members were killed, has been a vocal advocate for immigrant rights. She was the lone member of Arizona’s federal delegation to vote against the Laken Riley Act earlier this year, which mandates the detention, without bail, of undocumented people arrested for low-level crimes like shoplifting, even if they haven’t been convicted.
Just hours ahead of Trump’s address, Ansari called for immigration reform, accusing the administration of doing nothing to reform the country’s broken immigration system. Last week, Democrats in the House introduced legislation to give permanent legal status to Dreamers, titled the American Dream and Promise Act. Ansari, along with U.S. Reps. Greg Stanton and Raúl Grijalva, signed on as co-sponsors.
The bill is likely to meet a dead-end in the Republican-controlled chamber. Only one Republican, U.S. Rep. Maria Salazar from Florida, has signed on to support it. Ansari acknowledged that Republicans are unwilling to go against Trump, who ran on a campaign promise to oversee mass deportations, but said she’s optimistic about the possibility of increased bipartisanship, noting that last year Republicans and Democrats worked together on an immigration reform package.
That legislation, however, was later killed at Trump’s direction, who opposed giving Biden a win on border security before he could campaign on the issue. Either way, Ansari said, the new bill is important because it serves to both contrast Republican priorities and to give Americans a lens into what Democrats are backing.
“It’s really important for us as Democrats to put forward our own legislation, our own vision on what immigration reform looks like,” she said. “It’s important that our vision is clear and we have a counternarrative to all of the hostility and hate from the Republicans.”
And while some Republicans might point to Arizona’s overwhelming support for Trump last year, and the easy passage of the Prop. 314, which made it a state crime for migrants to cross the state’s southern border anywhere but at an official port of entry, as proof that voters in the Grand Canyon State want more aggressive border policies, Ansari said her constituents are asking for humane, pro-immigrant proposals. And, she added, Arizonans as a whole have previously shown support for Dreamers, casting their ballots in 2022 to give undocumented students seeking a college education the same tuition rates as their peers.
“We have passed propositions in our state to make in-state tuition the same for Dreamers as it is for anyone in our state, and that’s because Dreamers are Arizonans,” she said. “Dreamers are Americans. They’re our friends, they’re our neighbors, they pay taxes, they’re teachers, they’re moms and it’s long overdue.”
Garcia said she’s hopeful the legislation can prevail despite the uphill battle it faces, because it’s nerve-wracking to live with constant uncertainty about her future in the country.
“It’s been tough. Every two years, I find myself having to renew my DACA documentation to see what’s going to happen next,” she said. “I still find myself wondering what’s going to be next: ‘Am I going to be able to continue teaching? What’s going to happen to my son?’”
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