A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 , 2021
KARLA GACHET FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTKARLA GACHET FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTBY MARIA SACCHETTIlos angeles — In the neighbor-
hood where Sen. Alex Padilla
(D-Calif.) grew up, undocument-
ed immigrants have long occu-
pied the aging bungalows and
faded campers that jam up
against roaring freeways.
“Ilegales,” his father, Santos
Padilla, now 80 and a naturalized
U.S. citizen, said with a sweep of
his hand following Mass one
recent Sunday when asked how
he and his late wife arrived in the
United States. “Like everyone.”
Alex Padilla became the first
Latino senator from California in
January when Gov. Gavin News-
om (D) appointed him to fill the
seat left open by Vice President
Harris, and he took over the
immigration subcommittee. But
he and others have twice failed to
convince the Senate parliamen-
tarian that citizenship for the
11 million undocumented immi-
grants in the United States
should be included in a budget
bill that Democrats hope to pass
this year as part of a massive
spending package.
In an interview this month in
Pacoima, his old neighborhood
in Los Angeles, Padilla said he is
“not giving up” on citizenship,
even as he and other Democrats
are planning to return to the
parliamentarian with a Plan C.
He said one option under this
plan is to give millions of undoc-
umented immigrants work per-
mits instead of a path to citizen-
ship, but that is not the only
possibility. “There are still better
options on the table,” Padilla
said, though he would not elabo-
rate.
“I don’t give up that easy,” he
said standing beside his father
outside Mary Immaculate
Church, blocks from where his
family settled in the 1960s.
But pressure is growing on
Padilla to decide whether he
would support Biden’s budget
bill if immigration reform drops
out. Some lawmakers have al-
ready said they will not vote for
the spending package without
some form of relief for undocu-
mented immigrants and have
urged the Senate to ignore the
parliamentarian’s advice and in-
clude citizenship anyway.
The budget measure is a k ey
vehicle for Democrats in the
evenly divided Senate because
they can pass it with a majority
vote instead of the usual 60.
“They have the power, now
they can do it,” said Veronica
Lagunas, 43, an immigrant from
El Salvador who lives in the
Pacoima area and has been in the
United States under temporary
protected status since 2001. She
has a work permit, but no path to
citizenship. She and her 17-year-
old son, Alex, a U.S. citizen, met
Padilla this year while on a
hunger strike to call for citizen-
ship.
“They can ignore the parlia-
mentarian and pass something
for me, for us,” said Lagunas, a
member of the National TPS
Alliance, which advocates for
hundreds of thousands of immi-
grants granted temporary pro-
tected status because of wars or
disasters in their homelands.
Nowhere has more at stake
than California, home to 2.2 mil-
lion undocumented immigrants,
th e largest share in the nation.
The Pew Research Center esti-
mates that fewer than 10 percent
are new arrivals. Many have
waited years, even decades, for
permanent residency, the first
step toward citizenship.
Republicans have praised the
parliamentarian’s ruling, saying
citizenship is a major policy
issue that should have input
from both parties, like President
Biden’s infrastructure bill. And
critics note that Democrats are
not planning to increase immi-
gration enforcement at a t ime
when apprehensions at the
southwest border are the highest
in U.S. hi story.
“It seems to me that the goal is
to basically reward the people
who have broken the law for the
longest,” said Rosemary Jenks,
director of government relations
for NumbersUSA, an organiza-
tion that seeks to reduce immi-
gration to pressure employers to
raise wages.
She said she believes Demo-
crats could ignore the parlia-
mentarian and pass a citizenship
measure, but warned that it
could cost them in next year’s
congressional elections.
“ If this is their number-one
priority and they don’t mind
losing the majority, sure, they
can do it,” Jenks said.
Approximately 1 in 4 residents
in Pacoima are not U.S. citizens,
city records show, and many are
here illegally.
“He’s one of us,” Raul San-
doval, 75, who teaches citizen-
ship classes at Mary Immaculate
Church, said of Padilla. “We hope
his ideas don’t fall apart.”
The church is one of the few
places where i mmigrants feel
free to gather in numbers. They
are the white-haired construc-
tion worker from El Salvador
who directs traffic in the church
parking lot, the roofer from Mex-
ico who passes out church fliers
at the door, and the green-card
holder struggling to pass San-
doval’s citizenship class so that
she can obtain legal residency for
her 60-year-old husband, who
hasn’t seen his mother in Mexico
in 21 years.
Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif .),
who grew up near the Padillas
and is now the senator’s room-
mate in Washington, said they
sometimes reflect on having
been born on this side of the
U.S.-M exico border. Cárdenas
said he and Padilla never had to
fear immigration agents and a
“knock on the door.”
“They live in fear of taking
their kids to school and then all
of a sudden turning and realizing
that this person is going to
handcuff them and take them
away from their family,” said
Cárdenas of undocumented im-
migrants in an interview. “That
is torture.”
Months after Padilla graduat-
ed from MIT in 1994, California
voters passed Proposition 187, a
ballot initiative that sought to
bar undocumented immigrants
from public services such as
health care and schools. Sup-
porters called the ballot measure
“Save our State.”
Padilla, with his mechanical
engineering degree in hand, said
he returned home and “saw the
governor of California on televi-
sion saying the state ’s going
downhill and it’s the fault of
families like yours and people
like your parents.”
His father had worked as a
short-order cook, while his
mother cleaned houses. Both had
joined a neighborhood associa-
tion to fight drugs and crime. His
mother, Guadalupe, who died in
2018, did even more by donating
home-cooked meals to day labor-
ers, running an after-school pro-
gram in her backyard, and send-
ing care packages to victims of
the 1995 Oklahoma City bomb-
ing.
The couple owned a house and
sent all three children to college.
A daughter became a school
administrator and another son is
a local political aide.
But Padilla said Proposition
187 also served as an inflection
point for Latinos, inspiring his
parents to finally apply for U.S.
citizenship, while he threw him-
self into politics, one of many
who worked to elect more Lati-
nos to local, state and federal
offices.
Now the once Republican-led
state is solidly Democratic, and
California has state laws allow-
ing undocumented immigrants
to get driver’s licenses and pay
in-state tuition at colleges. State
law also limits local law enforce-ment from helping federal offi-
cials detain and deport undocu-
mented immigrants.
Luis Perez, 40, a formerly
undocumented immigrant from
Mexico, said the Padilla family
rallied around him when he was
young, one of seven children
born to undocumented parents
who worked constantly but
struggled to pay the bills.
Padilla’s mother invited him to
Thanksgiving dinners, paid him
to do odd jobs so he’d stay out of
trouble, and encouraged him to
study.
But the year Perez was accept-
ed into the University of Califor-
nia School of Law, he said, an
immigration appeals court or-
dered his family deported, a
decision he fought for years to
get overturned.
Perez won his case finally, and
asked Padilla to swear him into
the state bar.
“There’s no one as passionate
as him,” Perez, in charge of the
immigration services bureau at
the state Department of Social
Services, said of Padilla. “He’s
been part of it and he knows
undocumented people. “To him,
it’s is very personal.”
Padilla and others are plan-
ning to go back to the Senate
parliamentarian in the coming
days with Plan C, which is still
being discussed, but could in-
clude five-year renewable work
permits, according to lawmakers
and advocates for immigrants
working on the plan. Another
possibility is making green cards
accessible to specific groups,
such as undocumented farm-
workers and immigrants who
arrived in the United States as
children.
But on Wednesday, more than
40 House Democrats wrote Sen-
ate Majority Leader Charles E.
Schumer (D-N.Y.) urging him
to“disregard” the parliamentari-
an’s findings and go for citizen-
ship, saying she is an “unelected
official” and is “denying the eco-
nomic impact of such legisla-
tion.”
“This is a critical moment for
our nation’s histor y, and we
strongly urge the presiding offi-
cer to use their authority to
disregard the Senate Parliamen-
tarian’s ruling,” the le tter said.
Padilla, in an interview in his
Senate of fice, said he has tried to
negotiate with Republicans and
is still willing to do so. He
recounted one conversation with
a fellow senator, whom he would
not identify out of respect.
He said the senator told him,
“I li ke immigrants. My state is
pro-immigrant. We need immi-
grants. Meat processing. Agricul-
ture. This industry, that industry.
I get it. Immigrants come here
and they work hard to provide
for their families. And they have
kids and their kids do very well
in school and they grow up to be
maybe teachers or a firefighter or
even a manager at the plant
where their parents work.”
Padilla leaned in. “You know
what else is possible?” Padilla
said he asked the senator. “One
of those kids can grow up to be a
United States senator.”
[email protected]The first Latino senator from California is on a mission
KARLA GACHET FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTAlex Padilla wants to
help undocumented
immigrants stay hereTOP: The Ballet Folklórico performs at Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church in Sun Valley,
Calif., this month. ABOVE: Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) poses with his father, Santos Padilla,
across the street from Mary Immaculate Church in the Pacoima neighborhood near Los
Angeles where he grew up. BELOW: Marilu Perez, a citizenship class teacher, prays in front of
a statue of San Judas Tadeo outside Mary Immaculate Church in Pacoima this month.