The United States Represents Hopeful New Beginnings

Floor Speech

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Ms. TLAIB. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good colleague from Chicago, Congresswoman Ramirez, for her incredible advocacy and her sharing and vulnerability in expressing her lived experience or sharing her lived experience in this Chamber.

I am proud to be the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. My father came to this country at 19 years old. He was the guy in the 1970s that would pull up his arms and say: Which watch do you want? He never felt any kind of human dignity ever in his life until he joined the Ford Motor Company and became a member of the United Auto Workers.

My mother, who was 3 months pregnant with me on the airplane here to the United States from Palestine, came here with an eighth grade education.

Both of them could have never imagined in their lifetime that their eldest daughter would be the first in the family to graduate from high school, as well as achieve a college degree, and then later become one of the first Muslim women elected to the United States Congress.

These are the stories that I wish people would share more about our immigrant neighbors. I want to uplift those stories--the resilience, the contributions of so many of our immigrant neighbors across our country, especially in my district.

I grew up in southwest Detroit where there are 20 different ethnic groups. It taught me diversity. It made me a better person to be able to be around that type of strength, all of the different stories that were so similar to my parents' stories.

What I also love about my current 12th Congressional District is you can go in a community, and it is a huge, beautiful African diaspora, a Caribbean community, an Arab community. All throughout my district, there is so much love, and so many of our communities with immigrants are centered on family.

However, this Immigrant Heritage Month carries a heavier weight as this administration continues to target our immigrant neighbors day after day.

It has been incredibly painful, not just for myself and immigrants in our country, but for the American people, to watch our immigrant neighbors being abducted by masked DHS agents, our children being torn from their parents and some even zip-tied, and our disabled seniors being left to languish in detention camps. The images have been horrifying.

I wish to highlight one story of Maykol Duarte. He was from southwest Detroit. He was in high school. He was a high school student with only a few credits away from graduation. He was racially profiled by local police and handed over to ICE. He was on his way to a field trip, Mr. Speaker, with his friends, and now he was torn away from his loving community and deported to Colombia.

These are real-life stories, heartbreaking consequences of policies of this administration centered on cruelty.

We must acknowledge and recognize that not all immigrant communities, though, are impacted equally. I wish to take time to express my deepest fear that we are looking away from the impact on Black immigrants, which is the fastest growing immigrant group in the United States. Today, more than one in five Black Americans are immigrants or children of immigrants. Many of them face a huge impact or harm within our immigration system. They are more likely to be detained, more likely to be deported, and more likely to be denied asylum and relief.

These figures are not accidental. They are systemic and stem from a racist administration that continues to target African and Caribbean communities with no end in sight. This administration continues to separate our families and strip protections from those who need it most.

I ask my colleagues to not accept this broken, inhumane immigration system that treats people differently based on their race and on their origin. We must fight for fairness, dignity, and justice for all.

This Immigrant Heritage Month and every month, we all must stand with our immigrant neighbors and share the stories. I know Congresswoman Ramirez shared her story, and I shared my story.

This is the American Dream. There is no such thing as the Canadian dream, the German dream. There is only the American Dream, and all of us need to remember that we are a nation of immigrants.

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