Rep. Delia Ramirez spent the lead-up to the presidential election absorbing Republicans’ pledge to mass-deport unauthorized immigrants and processing many Democrats’ rightward shift on the issue while also fearing for the fate of her husband and other undocumented loved ones. 

For years, Ramirez and her husband, Boris Hernandez, navigated life as one of the millions of mixed-status households in the United States. When the 118th Congress convened after the 2022 midterms, Ramirez, a Democrat, was sworn in as the first Latina ever elected to Congress from Illinois — and the only member openly residing with an undocumented immigrant.

Ramirez will join a Republican-controlled Congress for a second term in January. Her experiences as the wife of an undocumented immigrant and daughter of immigrants who entered the United States through its southern border will help shape Democrats’ response to President-elect Donald Trump’s expansive immigration agenda, which includes deploying the military to carry out the nation’s largest deportation effort.

With less than 60 days until the presidential inauguration, Ramirez has been urging the Biden administration to take executive and administrative action to mitigate the impact of Trump’s proposed policies. Her key concerns: the prospect of family separation and the ripple effects of mass deportations on the U.S. economy.

“We're moving into what I believe to be one of the most dangerous policies this country has seen in a very long time,” Ramirez said in an interview with The 19th. Trump’s plans, she said, will cause a “massive partition” in the country, with lifelong effects for mixed-status families, who could become separated, and for communities that could see many of their members — and workforce — vanish. 

Ramirez also said she believes federal policymakers “haven’t had enough conversations” about the impact of their approach to the LGBTQ+ asylum-seekers in this country — “the fears and death threats that are very real,” she said, “and what it means to be deported back to a country that doesn't accept them because of either their gender or sexuality.”

There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. What happens to them doesn’t stop with them; their removal has deep and lasting consequences for their spouses, children and the extended family networks in the United States. A 2023 Pew Research Center analysis of available data found that 5 percent of U.S. households include at least one person who is undocumented. Almost 70 percent of these households are considered “mixed status” — in other words, they are made up of authorized and unauthorized immigrants, as well as U.S.-born citizens. About 4.4 million U.S.-born children under 18 live with an unauthorized immigrant parent, the analysis says.

For Ramirez, speaking about the experience of these immigrants has been a constant part of her time in Congress. As the vice ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security and a member of its subcommittee on border security and enforcement, Ramirez has had a front seat to the dehumanizing comments about immigrants from a lot of the same Republican lawmakers who will now help advance Trump’s immigration agenda. 

“I'm the only member of Congress that was in a mixed-status family in this building, and it was emotional. I sat in rooms — continue to sit in rooms — with the very same committee that talks about my husband, my uncle and my brothers and sister-in-law as if they're less than human; as if they're criminals,” Ramirez told The 19th from her office in Capitol Hill.

“To be in the space to have such a personal connection to this experience with people that don't see the humanity of my own family is anything but easy,” she said.

Ramirez has also criticized colleagues in her own party for negotiating a border bill that, among other things, would have made it harder for people to seek asylum in the United States and that didn’t include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, including those who were brought to the country as children, a group that Democrats have promised to shore up. A majority of these immigrants, a group known as Dreamers, are women. 

In interviews at the time, Ramirez pointed out that negotiations about the bill didn’t include any members of the Hispanic caucus, even though a majority of undocumented immigrants are from Latin America. More recently, she praised the Biden administration’s program to create a pathway to citizenship for spouses of undocumented immigrants, but criticized its June order to restrict asylum eligibility at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“It's been a challenge to have some very critical and difficult conversations, oftentimes with my party, oftentimes publicly denouncing some of the policies that President Biden has implemented,” Ramirez said.“There is no doubt that Democrats certainly have a lot of work to do to actually understand immigration and how we define the policy solutions around it.”

In the lead-up to Trump’s second term, immigrants’ rights groups are asking the Biden administration to speed up the processing of applications for temporary protection programs. These include the renewal of residency permits for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, who are temporarily authorized to live and work in the United States under an Obama-era program whose validity has been and likely will be challenged by the Trump administration. 

The groups have also pushed to speed up work permit renewals for refugees and asylum-seekers. Representatives from the Americans for Civil Liberties Union on Thursday publicly asked the Biden administration to help limit mass deportations by closing down Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities with “egregious records of human rights violations and abuses” and halt the ongoing expansion of detention centers.

Ramirez said she is working to encourage the administration to heed the advice of immigrants’ rights groups, though she wouldn’t say which specific requests she is prioritizing to avoid derailing the work. “We are directly engaging the administration in every possible way, in their face day to day, to encourage them, to demand of them to do everything they can between now and January,” Ramirez said. 

She will bring back to Congress a passion for an issue rooted in her family’s experiences with the nation’s immigration system — one both Democrats and Republicans agree is broken. Ramirez said immigration is engraved “in my heart and my soul”: Her mother left Guatemala and crossed the Rio Grande into Texas while pregnant with Ramirez. She said her mother’s journey became more palpable during a visit to the border alongside other members of Congress. 

“I was walking through this detention center watching these women laying there with no beds, no chairs and those aluminum foil blankets. And one of them, a pregnant woman, ran to the window, to the glass, and whispered to me to help her,” Ramirez recalled. “That could not have been more real and more traumatizing for me. It was like I was seeing my own mother, and now I'm the vice-ranking member of Homeland Security.”

Her family’s immigration story is a part of her biography that will become more salient given Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship. Trump’s “Agenda 47,” a document detailing the policies of his next administration, argues that the 14th Amendment has been “misinterpreted” and that it grants citizenship only to children of at least one parent legally authorized to reside in the United States.

Trump has promised to issue an executive order on the first day of his second administration to end citizenship rights to children born in the United States to undocumented parents. Ramirez has called the proposal “un-American.”

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One of Trump’s most talked-about plans, displayed in official placards at the Republican National Convention calling for “Mass Deportations Now,” represented a threat to Ramirez’s own household until days before the election. That’s when her husband got a notice from the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services granting his petition for permanent residency as the spouse of a U.S. citizen.

Hernandez was 14 when he immigrated to the United States in 2000 with his older brother, fleeing poverty in Guatemala. Ramirez said the process to legalize his status took three years and cost $15,000. The couple were granted an interview in March and after a turbulent summer and fall, received a final decision right before the election. 

The news arrived by email, “at 2:22pm, on that Sunday,” Nov. 3, she said. “After 24 years in this country, Boris is no longer undocumented. He is now a legal permanent resident. And that's important, and it was emotional,” Ramirez added. “With that said, our joy probably lasted about 10 minutes because it was really difficult for my husband to remain joyful when he began to make the calls to his family.”

Hernandez has siblings who are living in the United States under the temporary permission given to them under the DACA program. Other siblings were not eligible, so they are in limbo — “and certainly in this precise moment, living with so much fear,” she said. 

Then, there was this: One of Hernandez’s brothers died on Election Day. When he was buried, Ramirez recalled being struck by the thought that he had reached a different kind of permanent status in the United States with his death. 

These experiences will shape her work speaking to members of both parties — and the broader public — about an approach to immigration that protects the nation’s role as a place of refuge, protects families and communities, and allows the country to continue to benefit from the labor of undocumented immigrants.

“Congress has failed mixed-status families, immigrants and Americans for decades. My party and the Republican Party and a lot of people in this building have no idea what immigration and the process of immigration really is,” Ramirez said. “I have a responsibility to help educate and inform and bring people along into a space that for me is so obvious and clear because I live in it.”

That work can’t wait until Trump takes office. 

“Funny enough,” she quipped, “I literally have my sleeves rolled up right now.”