When I was 7, I would see families crossing, and I would see that they were terrified. I didn’t know what it was, but felt like something was wrong. I felt kind of powerless — I couldn’t spot the differences between their families and ours in what they experienced.

At that point I committed that one day I was going to be an abogada. I felt like all my experiences were leading me to be an immigration lawyer. The culture down here is that everyone is bilingual — the default is Spanish.

My family came here because my sister had a medical issue. We were just like other Latino families I always saw. My parents sacrificed so much just for their kids to be happy here. Having that shared experience of growing up here, on two sides of the border, led me to think constantly about what immigrants experience.

So you were convinced you wanted to be a lawyer, but how did you decide that you wanted to run for office?

Back in 2011, when I was in college at University of Texas at Austin, the debate around immigration wasn’t as heated as it is now. Under the Obama administration, we saw him as deporter in chief. He also brought back family detention. At UT, law students and professors were definitely focused on trying to end family detention.

Most of the debate as we see it now started once I was in law schoo l. When Trump was elected, I was in my second year. I knew I wanted to do immigration law, so in the fall of 2016, I signed up for as many human rights law classes as I could . We were asking ourselves: Where are we going? What are going to be the asks for the next administration? We thought, why stop at ending family detention? Let’s push for the end of detention, period.

Then Trump gets elected and our ideas went from being on the offensive — as in, what are we going to ask for? — to being on major defense. How are we going to protect what we fought for? How will we help our clients and their rights when there are family separations and children dying in custody?