CR

I grew up in a very political family. My parents were involved in the brown nationalist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, and they then transitioned into electoral politics in the 1980s during the Harold Washington era. There had been a long fight between more reform-oriented, progressive folks and the Democratic machine. My parents were very much on the reform, progressive, independent side of that fight.

I always viewed electoral politics as a way to move towards movement for social and economic justice. At the same time, I also grew up queer and Latinx and was very aware of the different ways in which people that were marginalized faced oppression. All of those experiences led me to get involved in activism in high school against the Iraq War in 2003. Then in 2006, the mega-marches that started in Chicago for immigrant rights and against HR 4437, the anti-immigrant bill, began. Seeing hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets informed my worldview: there were people in power who would use that power to hurt our communities unless we organized to build our own collective power.

That led into activism in college at the University of Illinois, then Miguel del Valle’s campaign against Rahm Emanuel for mayor in 2011, then working in the office of Rep. Luis Gutierrez as a congressional case worker. That experience helped radicalize me because I saw working-class people, mainly Latinx immigrants, come into the office every single day facing all types of exploitation and disenfranchisement: foreclosure, deportation. And I threw myself into the work of helping families in deportation crisis, trying to use the leverage Congressman Luis Gutierrez’s office had to stop deportations.

In Congressman Gutierrez’s office, I focused on deportation defense work, linking up with a group called the Immigrant Youth Justice League (IYJL). We began to engage in an inside/outside strategy where they would send me individuals that were facing deportation, I would secure the assistance of Rep. Gutierrez’s office in appealing to ICE for an end to their deportation; likewise, when individuals would come to our office and seek assistance with their deportation case, I would refer them to IYJL, in hopes that they would join this grassroots base of undocumented people fighting individual deportations and to win relief from deportations at the federal, state, and local levels.

That then led me to become an organizer with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights where I became a deportation defense organizer. We worked on legislation at the state level to stop deportations and close the trapdoor that leads to the deportation pipeline. For example, if someone gets stopped with a broken light and they don’t have a driver’s license, it can lead to them being detained by ICE.

When we would advocate for these laws to stop deportations, we would often sit across the table from so-called progressive Democrats who were oftentimes a bigger impediment than some of the Republicans we were speaking to. So I began to think about the need to have elected officials that were deeply tied to movements and viewed themselves as an extension of those movements — whose job it was to raise those demands through the official channels in the halls of power.