Immigration Reform
Immigration Reform
Our immigration system has been broken for a long time. The legal foundation of the modern system was built out of a wave of anti-Chinese racism in the 1880s, and the enforcement architecture that drives so much of today's cruelty was bolted on after 9/11 in a wave of Islamophobia. Neither reflects the kind of country I want to live in.
I will fight for common sense changes to end employer slave labor, create reasonable pathways to citizenship, and guarantee human and constitutional rights for everyone living in this country, regardless of their immigration status. I will fight to abolish ICE, which is currently operating as a lawless secret police force. Most importantly, I will work to rebuild an immigration system grounded in humanity rather than in cruelty.
As of 2025, over 53 million immigrants lived in the United States. They come here for the same reasons people have always come here: to escape poverty, famine, war, torture, persecution, and increasingly, the devastation of climate change. Many of them are here in part because of decisions our own government has made abroad, including the wars, regime change operations, trade policies, and climate inaction that have destabilized their home countries and forced people to move.
If we want better immigration policy, we have to be honest about that. The United States has played a direct role in producing many of the migration pressures we then turn around and treat as crises at our border. Acknowledging that is the starting point for foreign policy and immigration policy that actually work.
Before 9/11, immigration was primarily handled as an administrative and civil matter. After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security was created, and ICE and CBP were folded into it. From that point on, immigration in this country has been treated less like an administrative process and more like a criminal one. The vast majority of immigrants have committed no crime, and study after study shows that crime rates among immigrant populations are lower than among the US-born population. None of that has slowed the construction of what advocates have rightly called the crimmigration system: a sprawling apparatus of detention, deportation, surveillance, and enforcement that treats migration itself as a kind of criminal threat.
The result has been some of the most inhumane and chaotic practices in recent American history. Detention centers have ballooned in size and number, holding nonviolent immigrants, families, and unaccompanied minors for months at a time in harsh, unhealthy conditions. Families have been forcibly separated, and many of those families remain separated years later. Many asylum seekers have been forced out of the United States and into Mexico while their cases are pending, where organized criminals routinely target them for extortion, kidnapping, and worse.
Our current immigration system largely functions as a system for delivering exploitable labor to American employers. Undocumented workers are essential for industries like agriculture, construction, food processing, and elder care, and yet the same political class that benefits from their labor turns around and treats their presence as a crisis whenever it is politically convenient.
The result is one of the largest shadow workforces in the developed world. Millions of people work some of the country's hardest and most dangerous jobs without legal protections, leaving them vulnerable to wage theft, workplace injury, sexual harassment, and retaliation. Employers know that workers without documents cannot easily report abuse, cannot easily quit for better conditions, and cannot easily organize without facing immediate deportation. This is a system that has been designed, over decades, to keep labor cheap and powerless. This is employer slave labor, and it has to end.
In Congress, I will fight to:
Aim immigration enforcement at the employers exploiting undocumented workers, not at the workers themselves. The current system targets the people with the least power and protects the people with the most.
Provide reasonable pathways to citizenship for the long-term residents who have built their lives here, so that no worker is trapped in exploitative conditions because their immigration status is held over their head.
Strengthen protections for immigrant workers reporting workplace violations, including U-visa and similar programs that allow workers to come forward without facing retaliation.
Apply the full weight of US labor law to every worker on US soil, regardless of immigration status. There can be no two-tier labor market in this country and there cannot be a category of workers whose rights employers can violate at will.
In the first 100 days of his second term, Donald Trump signed 181 executive actions limiting immigration and accelerating deportation. The horrors that followed are not abstract. Masked ICE agents have violently apprehended, detained, deported, and in some cases killed people, with little or no transparency into the government's actions. Immigrants are being denied due process and access to legal representation. Temporary Protected Status has been stripped from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, and others fleeing political collapse and natural disaster, sending them back to countries the State Department itself classifies as too dangerous for Americans to visit. People are being deported not just to their home countries but to third countries they have never set foot in, including El Salvador's CECOT mega-prison, where the US government has paid a foreign regime to disappear immigrants into a notoriously brutal facility from which there is effectively no return. Afghan allies who worked alongside US forces during the war in Afghanistan, and who would face execution under the Taliban, are losing the protections this country promised them. All the while, the federal government continues to expand the network of detention centers used to warehouse human beings.
The war on immigrants has to end. We have to start from the recognition that this country has been built and sustained by immigrants, and that we can’t have a bright future without recommitting to robust legal pathways for immigration.
ICE was created out of a post-9/11 panic that has produced far more harm than security. The agency is now operating as the Trump administration's secret police, with masked agents conducting raids, snatching people off the street, separating families, and operating with effectively no oversight from Congress or the courts.
I am fully committed to abolishing ICE. The legitimate functions of immigration administration, including processing visas, adjudicating claims, and overseeing legal immigration, can and should be carried out by civil agencies oriented toward service rather than enforcement. The militarized, unaccountable enforcement model that ICE represents needs to go.
The Fourteenth Amendment is clear: every person born on US soil is a citizen of the United States. That has been the law of this country since 1868 and it has been the foundation of how we define belonging here for more than 150 years. On day one of his second term, Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and many lawful temporary residents. Federal courts have rightly blocked the order and the Supreme Court seems poised to strike it down.
No executive order can override the Constitution. But the fact that the executive branch is willing to attempt such an order signals what lies ahead if we do not actively defend this protection. I will fight every attempt to weaken birthright citizenship, whether by executive action, administrative reinterpretation, or congressional legislation, and I will support legislation explicitly reaffirming the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to every person born on American soil.
As your representative, I will focus on immigration as a humanitarian issue rather than a criminal matter. Specifically, I will:
Fight to abolish ICE as it currently exists and replace it with civilian agencies focused on service, not enforcement.
Defend sanctuary cities and oppose every federal effort to coerce local governments into doing immigration enforcement on the federal government's behalf.
Fight for permanent legal protections for young immigrants already in the United States, including Dreamers and DACA recipients, who have built their lives here and have every right to stay.
End family separations and end the detention of nonviolent immigrants.
Guarantee due process and access to legal representation for every person facing immigration proceedings. No one should be deported without their day in court, and no one should face that court alone because they cannot afford a lawyer.
Protect access to essential services for undocumented immigrants, including education, healthcare, and basic social services. Everyone has the right to basic necessities of life, regardless of immigration status.
Work to clarify and simplify the immigration process, which has become a frustrating, confusing, multi-year ordeal even for people doing everything by the book. A good, just immigration system is one ordinary people can actually navigate.
Accepting refugees is one of the most important ways this country grows. Diversity is one of our greatest strengths. Welcoming people who are struggling shows that we actually put our money where our mouths are.
The single best way to support refugees is to stop making more of them with our foreign policy decisions. The wars we wage, the regimes we prop up, the climate crisis we have failed to act on–all of these produce the very migration pressures that the political right then exploits to attack immigrants who come to our country. Ending forever wars, ending the financial and military support of human rights abusing governments, and meeting our climate obligations are all immigration policy as much as they are foreign policy.
For the refugees and immigrants who are already here, the need is to fix the system. That means reasonable pathways to citizenship for the people who have built their lives in this country. It means services and institutions that operate with cultural competence and provide people the tools and resources they need to thrive. It means treating every person, citizen or not, as a full human being deserving of dignity, due process, and the protections of the Constitution.
Being a Country Worth Coming To
The people coming to this country are doing what humans have always done in the face of hardship: trying to build a better life for themselves and their families. They are valuable neighbors, helpful coworkers, and engaged citizens. Treating immigrants as threats says far more about the country we are becoming than about the people knocking on our door.
I am running because I still believe this country can be one worth coming to. That requires actually living up to the values we claim and rebuilding an immigration system that reflects them.
My Checklist for Congress
Abolish ICE and stop the Trump regime's cruelty
Create humane policy to foster immigration
Pass regulations to end the exploitation of immigrant labor
Defend birthright citizenship, a clear Constitutional process
Welcome refugees from around the world