On July 21, President Joe Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the 2024 race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for President. Throughout her lived experience as the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants and tenure as California attorney general, U.S. senator, and Vice President, Harris has been a powerful advocate for immigrant communities and a leading voice in pushing back against the Trump administration’s most harmful attacks.
“As U.S. Senator, she was a powerful champion of Dreamers,” America’s Voice said, “and was the first Member of Congress to call for the investigation of the horrific family separation policies that appalled the nation in 2018.” As Vice President, she’s led the Biden-Harris initiative helping address the root causes of migration by creating economic opportunity in Central America, and has continued being a forceful advocate for Dreamers, care workers and farmworkers.
KAMALA HARRIS’ IMMIGRATION STORY
Born and raised in Oakland, “Harris grew up in a household with a Jamaican father and Indian mother,” CBS News reported in 2021. “Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, emigrated from India in 1960 to attend the University of California, Berkeley and pursue a doctorate in endocrinology. Her father, Donald Harris, emigrated from Jamaica in 1961 to also attend Berkeley. Both of her parents were actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement.”
“It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am,” she said on Instagram in June 2021. “They laid the path for me, as only the second Black woman ever elected to the United States Senate.” Vox said the year prior that Harris’ “family story is the real portrait of American greatness. From India and Jamaica to the doors of the White House in one generation.”
KAMALA HARRIS AS CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL
As attorney general of California from 2011 until her resignation following her U.S. Senate win in November 2016, Harris was a vocal defender of immigrant communities both in her state and across the nation. In 2015 she issued a letter to U.S. senators opposing former GOP Senator David Vitter’s Stop Sanctuary Policies and Protect Americans Act, which America’s Voice and a host of organizations warned would jeopardize public safety and the good will forged in communities across the country between local law enforcement and its residents.
In her letter, then-Attorney General Harris expressed worry that the proposed legislation, which was opposed by a broad coalition of voices and later stalled in the U.S. Senate, would undermine public safety and community trust within California.
“I strongly believe that serious and violent criminals—whether undocumented or not—should be held accountable for their crimes,” she said. “But when local law enforcement officials are seen as de facto immigration agents, it erodes the trust between our peace officers and the communities we are sworn to serve. Criminal justice policy should not be conflated with national immigration policy.”
Harris was a vocal proponent of then-President Obama’s executive actions to protect undocumented communities, including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012, saying that there was “no rationale” for targeting “college kids, military members, small business entrepreneurs, and productive members of society.”
Harris also supported President Obama’s immigration actions protecting the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents (known as DAPA) and expanding the DACA program, and in partnership with Univision Los Angeles, Service Employees International Union of California and iAmerica held a series of forums educating immigrant Californians about the programs. Unfortunately that year, the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals halted the actions, which Harris condemned. She said the ruling would be “a blow to the California economy and would threaten public safety because many immigrants fear reporting crimes out of concerns they may face deportation,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
Later that year, California joined 14 other states and D.C. in a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to allow the actions to go forward, saying “President Obama’s common-sense actions on immigration will allow millions of hard-working immigrants to more fully contribute to the prosperity and security of California and the nation.” The case came at a time when there were only 8 Supreme Court Judges present following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. The court did not reach a majority decision (4-4), thus, the lower courts’ decision to block DAPA and DACA+ remained.
Harris also advocated for unaccompanied migrant children who arrived at the border in 2014, convening a roundtable with immigrant rights advocates, legal service providers, and stakeholders “to discuss the ongoing need for resources and legal aid for children who have fled Central America to seek refuge in the United States.”
KAMALA HARRIS IN THE SENATE
Harris was elected to the Senate in November 2016 and began her term in early 2017, just as the Trump administration took over. In the Senate, she served on the two committees that were most important to the immigration issue: Judiciary and Homeland Security and Government Affairs. From those committees, she was a fierce and consistent defender of immigrants while serving as an unrelenting and fierce opponent of Trump’s policies. Trump administration officials, including Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, DHS Secretary and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and many others, often faced withering questions from the Senator as she challenged their policies and their agenda.
“Kamala Harris was the only senator to grill DHS nominee on radical immigration plans,” read one headline from Salon, which noted that Harris broke ranks with her colleagues and took then-DHS Secretary nominee John Kelly to task on the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant plans. Salon noted that throughout the hearing on Kelly’s nomination, most senators seemed reassured by his seemingly moderate tone.
But Harris knew that in her home state, millions of immigrants were afraid of the administration’s plans, and asked Kelly under oath if Dreamers who had submitted their personal information to the federal government would be safe. “Kelly, however, declined to elaborate on his priorities for deportation and was mostly noncommittal about Trump’s call for a deportation force to round up and remove law-abiding undocumented immigrants,” Salon reported. Eventually, Kelly said this population “would probably not be at the top of the list.”
Unconvinced by his vague answers, Harris voted against Kelly’s confirmation, a prescient decision considering the horrors that were to come, and when the Trump administration unveiled its chaotic and discriminatory Muslim ban later that year, Harris called Kelly at home, to his irritation. Harris also pressed During another hearing, Harris grilled Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Kelly’s successor at DHS, on separations, “prompting her to falsely claim, ‘We do not have a policy to separate children from their parents,'” BuzzFeed reported in 2019. Chad Wolf, also a DHS Secretary under Trump, faced questioning under Harris following a statement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was set to target DACA recipients.
Harris championed DACA recipients throughout her tenure in the Senate, and after the Trump administration’s rescission of the program in 2017, became the first senator to announce an intention to vote against any spending package unless it included permanent protections for immigrant youth.
“[I] have over many years met with our Dreamers and most recently in the last 10 months met with these young people who are terrified,” she said at the time. “They are terrified. And because I, like my colleagues, am a public face of this conversation, they approach me in all kinds of places wherever I am, and they come to me and talk about their experience and their fears. It is often the case that they will then break down and sob almost uncontrollably because they are terrified. They are terrified.”
The following year, Harris invited Dreamer Denea Joseph, then a student at UCLA, to be her guest at President Trump’s State of the Union address, and the following year cosponsored legislation that would have allowed Dreamers to work in Congress. “The giant sign outside my office says ‘DREAMers Welcome Here’ because we know and value the contributions that these young people have made to their communities,” Harris said. “Government works best when it reflects the people it represents.”
Harris was also a forceful advocate for families torn apart under the Trump administration’s cruel and traumatic “zero tolerance” policy, as the first member of Congress to call for the investigation of the horrific separations that appalled the nation in 2018, and later cosponsored a bill to reunite and protect children and parents. Harris also questioned then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on the separations, and called out the fact that the Trump administration had failed to meet the court-ordered deadline to reunite families. In 2019, Harris signed a letter urging the firing of Stephen Miller, an architect of the separations and noted white nationalist.
Harris also led on proposals that would grant important protections on a federal level to housekeepers, nannies, and more than two million home care workers, the majority of whom are women of color. The National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, on which Harris led alongside Rep. Pramila Jayapal, would “include domestic workers in common workplace rights and protections, like paid sick days, meal and rest breaks, and extend anti-workplace discrimination protections,” the National Domestic Workers Alliance said at the time.
“Domestic workers are one of the fastest growing workforces in our country,” Harris said. “They provide essential care to aging parents, children, homes, and more. However, our nation’s domestic workers have not been afforded the same rights and benefits as nearly every other worker, and it’s time we change that.”
KAMALA HARRIS AS VICE PRESIDENT
As Vice President, Harris has been a partner in an administration that has used decisive action to help keep American families together by announcing a plan that will allow the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens to apply for lawful permanent residence without leaving the country. Vice President Harris has also led the administration’s Root Causes Strategy addressing human mobility from Central America to the United States. She’s also led the “In Her Hands” economic empowerment initiative in collaboration with Partnership for Central America, which aims to support and provide opportunities for millions of women across Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras by 2030.
Vice President Harris has also used her prominent role to continue advocating for Dreamers and home care workers, meeting with a group of affected individuals on the ninth anniversary of the DACA program in June 2021. During the roundtable, the vice president reiterated the administration’s commitment to passing a pathway to citizenship, calling it a “fundamental issue.”
“I will tell you, we are here on this day, on the anniversary of DACA, and I’m here on behalf of the Biden-Harris administration to tell you: this administration fully intends to do everything in our power to protect our Dreamers,” she said. “There will be no question about that. There is no question about that. And it is really for one simple reason, and this I say to our Dreamers: because you are home. This is the only home you’ve known. And this is issue is as fundamental as that.” Following a devastating ruling the following month that halted all new DACA applications, Harris again met with impacted individuals.
