Immigrant youth leaders with United We Dream Action celebrated presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s selection of U.S. Senator Kamala Harris of California as his vice presidential running mate, calling her on Tuesday a “candidate who is a champion for immigrants” in a statement received by Daily Kos.
“Over the last four years, Senator Harris has fought alongside immigrant youth and our families against the Trump administration’s heinous attacks,” said United We Dream Action co-founder Cristina Jiménez. “When Trump attacked DACA, when he released the Muslim ban, and when he snatched children from the arms of their parents, Senator Harris defended our communities.”
The junior senator from the state with the largest population of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients in the nation, Harris has been a staunch defender of young immigrants protected by the program. Following the Trump administration announcing the program’s rescission in September 2017, Harris was the first Democratic senator to announce that she would vote against any spending package unless it included permanent protections for immigrant youth.
“[I] have over many years met with our Dreamers and most recently in the last 10 months met with these young people who are terrified,” she said at the time. “They are terrified. And because I, like my colleagues, am a public face of this conversation, they approach me in all kinds of places wherever I am, and they come to me and talk about their experience and their fears. It is often the case that they will then break down and sob almost uncontrollably because they are terrified. They are terrified.”
In the months leading into the Supreme Court’s decision on DACA, Harris pressed the administration on reports that officials were preparing to deport young immigrants before any decision had even come in, including grilling unconfirmed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Chad Wolf. That plan, thankfully, didn’t pan out: the justices ruled in June that the impeached president unlawfully ended the program.
But the ruling wasn’t the end of that fight, because the administration has since defied court orders to fully reopen the program to potentially hundreds of thousands of new applicants. Harris, along with U.S. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, led a letter from Senate Democrats demanding the administration follow the law and comply with the ruling, writing: “’[n]ow that 25 days have passed, the Roberts decision requires your immediate compliance.”
“Senator Harris is also a staunch supporter of a pathway to citizenship for all immigrants and defunding the deportation force of ICE and CBP,” Jiménez continued in the statement, and voted against the two DHS secretaries that Trump has bothered to try to get confirmed by the Senate. "She sounded an early alarm on former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly when he was nominated for Homeland Security secretary, then voted against him,” Politico reported last year. “Harris also called on Kelly’s successor, Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, to resign over the crisis involving family separations at the border.”
“The government should be in the business of keeping families together, not tearing them apart,” Harris said in 2018. “And the government should have a commitment to transparency and accountability. Under Secretary Nielsen’s tenure, the Department of Homeland Security has a track record of neither. As a result, she must resign.”
Harris continued to advocate on behalf of separated families, supporting the Keep Families Together Act and leading Senate Democrats in demanding the administration release a group of unjustly deported parents who last year returned to the U.S. to reunite with their children. “In many cases, these parents have been separated from their children for several months, and in some cases more than a year,” they said.
Harris has also championed the many immigrant women in particular who work as domestic workers, last year joining Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal and the National Domestic Workers Alliance to unveil the National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, legislation that would grant important protections on a federal level to housekeepers, nannies, and more than 2 million home care workers.
“Domestic workers are one of the fastest growing workforces in our country,” Harris said at the time. “They provide essential care to aging parents, children, homes, and more. However, our nation’s domestic workers have not been afforded the same rights and benefits as nearly every other worker, and it’s time we change that.”
“Senator Harris is not a perfect candidate, specifically her record as a prosecutor has harmed people of color,” Jiménez said in the statement. “Immigrant youth of United We Dream Action will continue to push her and presidential candidate Joe Biden to commit to take bolder action that protects immigrants, Black and brown people from the threat of deportation, jailing and death at the hands of police and enforcement agents.”