We Belong Together, along with other groups, organized an amazing act of civil disobedience yesterday, where more than 100 women were arrested after sitting down in traffic to protest inaction on immigration reform. The event received tons of media coverage, including one great segment from Rachel Maddow at MSNBC. Watch the clip below:
Why was it only women who were arrested yesterday? As Maddow made clear, “women and children [make] up three-quarters of the immigrants in the United States. And until we fix this broken immigration system that we have, women and children are the ones who will continue to suffer the most.”
What’s standing between women, children, families, and immigration reform? The House GOP, which time and time again has made one excuse after another to delay action on immigration reform. One of their favorite excuses recently has been that there’s no time left on the legislative calendar to pass anything–which is just not true considering that House Republicans have made time to vote on defunding Obamacare no less than 41 times. Not to mention that, as Think Progress pointed out, immigration reform doesn’t need a lot of time. Both the 2005 Sensenbrenner and the 2010 DREAM Act passed in less than 48 hours. Republicans can keep making excuses, but sooner or later that’s going to catch up to them.
As Maddow put it during the segment:
The idea of fixing our system is not an esoteric thing, it’s not a big, inchoate idea. A bill has passed in the Senate. It even got 14 Republican Senators to vote in favor of it. The Senate acted. But in the Republican-controlled House, so far, they’re just refusing to even bring it up.
See, there’s no time, right? First of all, there’s lots of vacations. They had vacation earlier this month, they just got back, they’ve got another vacation later this month, and they’ve only voted 41 times so far to repeal Obamacare. So really, there’s no time to get other stuff done.
We will see how long that stance is sustainable.
