Delia Ramirez is a freshman member of Congress who represents a swath of central and west Chicago. Ramirez is also the wife of an undocumented immigrant. Her husband came to this country as a teenager, and is living under the protections of DACA — or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — an Obama-era policy that has provided work eligibility to some 600,000 who came to the United States as children.
Former President Donald Trump has made the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants the centerpiece of his dark domestic agenda. And even Dreamers — as immigrants without papers raised in America, including DACA recipients, are known — are not insulated from Trump’s cruel designs.
Trump attempted to abolish DACA in 2017, only to see his administration overruled by a 5-4 decision from the Supreme Court. The high court has swung wildly to the right since then, thanks to Trump’s conservative appointees. And a new challenge moving through the federal courts in Texas could give the Supreme Court a chance to issue yet another nightmare ruling. “This program has been on a thread for a very long time,” Ramirez says, “and the only comfort in this precise moment is that Joe Biden is the current president.”
Ramirez has another close family member — an uncle — who does not have any legal status, despite four decades of working and building community in the United States, who she fears could be caught up in Trump’s promised roundups.
Ramirez spoke to Rolling Stone on the phone last week — following the presidential debate in which Trump slandered Haitian immigrants who moved to Ohio — about how the threat of a second Trump term affects her personally, informs her work in the House, where she’s pushing for a more responsible conversation, and comprehensive solutions around immigration and the border.
The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start with Trump’s attack on the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. What is your reaction to his foul and baseless claim — eagerly parroted by many MAGA Republicans — that these new arrivals, legal immigrants, are eating their neighbors’ pets?
There is an intention to make immigrants — a certain kind of immigrants — less than human. Because if they are not human, you make them “savages” or whatever it is that you are intending to make them, therefore you can discard them. You can harm them. You can criminalize them. And you can deport them.
You’re talking about Haitian immigrants. You’re talking about Black immigrants. If this is not bigotry and racism, I don’t know what is. And if you can support that man and say you are not racist, then you need to go back and read the dictionary. It is mind boggling for me. It is the most disgusting act I could ever have imagined, in 2024, in this country. When he’s talking about taking us back, how far back are we going?
They are doing it because if you are human, if you are my equal, then according to the Scripture that I may read on Sunday, I should treat them as I treat myself right? Love your neighbor as you love yourself. But if they’re not human, if they are less than human, then that rule doesn’t apply. I have colleagues [in Congress] who support Trump, affirm him, and affirm these actions, who are also talking about how they’re going to be the one that’s going to read Psalm 91 next Sunday in church. The deep level of hypocrisy infuriates me.
Trump’s immigration threats could impact millions of families — including your own. Can you share your experience?
I’m the only member of Congress that is married to someone who is currently undocumented. He’s a Dreamer who is watching what’s happening in Texas, and in courtrooms across the country. And he’s worried that, any moment, that program will end, and that the small business he started might also end as a result of it.
And the idea that he’s married to a U.S. citizen, and it’s been almost four years, and we’re still trying to navigate this really dysfunctional system of immigration — that also speaks to where we are in this moment.
If November comes and someone like — I can’t even say his name at the moment — becomes president, I know that I will fight like hell to protect Boris. But not everyone is married to ‘Delia the congresswoman,’ right? So that’s certainly the reality of so many households.
It’s also the reality of my uncle, who calls me every single week. He has been in this country since a little bit before 1981, and he has attempted in every possible way to address his status. He has spent thousands and thousands of dollars — lied to by many lawyers — and here he is with no pathway to a Green Card or any adjustment. He’s undocumented and in fear that even as he is in his 70s and working at a diner, that he’ll have to work until he dies or until he’s deported.
These are realities, and it makes you ask yourself: Why dehumanize a community that has built this country? Why dehumanize people when your ancestors were immigrants? Why dehumanize people when your wife is an immigrant? The level of hypocrisy coupled with evilness that I see in this precise moment — it makes me sick, but this is where we are. I find myself having to figure out what kind of lotion to use to thicken my skin, to not let it get to me in the way that it is.
Can I ask you about the specifics of your husband’s story, how he came to the United States?
Boris had just turned 14, February of 2000. I know that because we just went to our USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] interview. He came with his older brother, who was about to turn 16. They both came to work because their parents were almost starving in their home village. Mom had a very small baby, and they said to their parents, “We were going to go figure out how to make sure that our family survives this poverty.”
Boris, like many people, attempted to cross the border four times before he was able to successfully do it. Going through the USCIS interview, and having the officer recount the number of times that my husband tried to come here makes me teary. Because I saw the physical reaction he was having, reliving that terrifying experience that this child went through — the things he saw, the things he felt, the things that happened to him crossing the border.
Today, he has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and has spent years doing early-child development. Today, he is a business owner and employing people and with living wages, and has helped support his little brother. That little brother that I talked to you about, who today is a doctor, in the same village that they come from, and providing the health care of an entire community as a result of the sacrifice of his brothers. And yet we vilify him. And yet we make it nearly impossible for him, 23 years in this country, to finally not have to live in the shadows.
Even married to a Congress member.
Even married to a congresswoman. It also gives me an understanding of the work we must do to also improve the efficiency of the [legal immigration] process. I can’t begin telling you the level of paperwork, the amount of money, the stressors, the pains, and the tears that we’ve gone through these last three years. It’s what so many others go through. Yet in some ways it’s little compared to what others go through. Because at least in our case, Boris now is eligible for an adjustment, eventually, as long as Donald Trump doesn’t become president. But so many people, like my uncle — unless we do some form of reform — are left in limbo.
Your husband qualified for DACA. People who don’t follow this issue closely might think, DACA’s fine, the Supreme Court protected it. But the high court is different now.
I have different feelings about DACA, because DACA was supposed to be temporary, and should have been permanent, with a pathway to citizenship. But here we are 12 years later. DACA is not safe.
The reality is, we have a different Supreme Court, and we are prepared that at any given time, a courtroom in Texas can end the program. This program has been on a thread for a very long time, and the only comfort in this precise moment is that Joe Biden is the current president.
But if there is a change where you have the man that scapegoats immigrants in the White House, it ends for everyone. By the way, when you look at statistics during the pandemic, over a third of Dreamers were in the health care industry, saving people’s lives, right? Imagine the impact that this would have on the nation.
Trump talks about rounding up and removing 20 million people from this country. Can you talk about what it would mean to have cops or federal troops coming to your door or coming to your uncle’s door. What does that threat feel like?
It keeps me up at night. You’re talking to the first Latina elected in the midwest to Congress; the daughter of a woman who crossed the border, pregnant with her; the vice ranking member of [the Committee on] Homeland Security; and someone that is co-leading the Dream and Promise Act bill, which would create a pathway citizenship for Dreamers, negotiating and trying to fight to create immigration reform… who is every day, living in fear for my own family — which has contributed to my neighborhood and my city in in ways that I could never begin to put in tangible, concrete numbers, right?
These very same people could be ripped away and sent back to places where there’s no guarantee of their safety. It makes me think about the number of people that are being deported now, and whom he would deport, who would go back to countries to literally be slaughtered. And I’m doing everything in my power to make sure that someone as evil as Donald Trump never gets back to that White House.
It’s a fear and anger against people like him, who benefit and exploit immigrants and then discard them. Trump has literally done everything in his power to dehumanize immigrants, to make them less than human, to accuse them of eating cats and dogs, accusing them of raping people, of being released from asylums — because he doesn’t even know what the word “asylum” means. He thinks it’s an asylum institution. Donald Trump, much of the wealth he has now through many of his hotels comes on the backs of immigrants.
I’m old enough to remember when a core part of our national identity was celebrating America as a “nation of immigrants.”
I have to continue to say: Immigrants are part of the solution, not the problem. And I have to say it to Republicans, and I have to say it to a few of my colleagues on the Democratic side as well. Because we have to take control of this conversation. And we have to do so through facts.
There’s a human side of it, and there’s also the economic-impact side of it. The reality is that $96.7 billion is what undocumented immigrants contribute in taxes every single year. And we know that if we pass comprehensive immigration reform, that number would immediately go up to closer to $150 billion, and much of that goes to Social Security, Medicare, and state taxes. The reality is that immigrants are protecting Social Security, in some cases, for the same people that want to deport them.
It’s also telling of this precise moment the short memory that we have. In the early 1900s, Italians were treated as less than human. And if we were in that precise moment, and fast forwarding to now, we would say, “Absolutely not.” We would protect and fight for them. So it’s hard for me to watch the very same grandchildren of these orphans that were harmed and were neglected and abandoned and starved, that somehow survived — those very same grandchildren doing the same thing to others that were done to their grandparents. Which is why, every chance I get, I remind them of their roots.
How would you shape a more constructive national discussion about immigration?
There is no question that we have issues at the border. There’s no question that we have an immigration problem. I would say that we also have an immigration opportunity, and I am committed to solutions. I came to this place to get work done and to make life for my constituents better.
It’s important for us to be clear that immigrants are, in fact, a solution. They’re addressing a historic labor shortage. We have about 9 million jobs open at any given time. They’re increasing revenue through taxes, lowering inflation, and helping with population shortages in small towns — boosting local economies across the country. Why are we criminalizing them when we should be saying, “Thank you for coming. Thank you for making this country great.”
If we’re serious about addressing security concerns at the border and the humanitarian crisis manufactured by decades of political inaction, then we really have to move beyond the border. I visited Guatemala, I heard the pleas of families looking for asylum and pleading for safe pathways to asylum.
We have to invest in solutions that would actually address the root cause of migration, like corruption, like poverty, like attacks on human rights, as well as solutions that would actually address years of destabilizing foreign policy that we as a nation have had in Latin America and around the world. And a promise to also address climate change and the realities of climate emergencies and migration. If we did that, we would address issues at the border; we would address the issue of immigration.
But we must move away from political rhetoric that is quite dangerous. Every time I speak in Homeland Security [in the House], I get calls at our office, death threats, trolls saying the worst things about me, and the ways that they would “end me.”
There’s real consequences to this moment. And if we want to get to the solutions, we have to have the political courage to work together. I believe that the Democratic Party has the tools and ability to get this done. And I’m going to hold it accountable — hopefully once we win on November 5.
