We’re Voting for VP Harris to Protect Our Immigrant Families

In our home state of Texas, young voters like us can already see the foundations of Project 2025 taking shape. With Governor Greg Abbott pursuing consistent efforts to attack immigrant communities—from bussing migrants out of Texas to using killer razor-wire buoys in the Rio Grande—one of his latest priorities to push forward Senate Bill 4 is far from a surprise. But the impact this legislation would have on the lives of our communities, our families, and the people we love most, cannot be understated.

Although SB4 is currently being challenged in the courts, it’s already inspired numerous copycat bills across state lines, from Prop 314 in Arizona, to SB2340 in Iowa, to  HB4156 in Oklahoma. Gov. Abbott, like Trump, has continued to legislate with hate, pushing bills that undermine basic civil rights and infringe on our freedoms to move, live, stay, and thrive in the state we’ve called home for our entire lives. As young people who grew up in mixed-status families, we know what living under another Trump administration would mean for our communities and our loved ones, and we know for certain we can’t go back. We also know that a core tenet of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda—mass deportations—is already in motion at the local level, and it’s going to require all hands on deck, up and down the ballot to defeat Trump.

Under Trump’s first term, many undocumented people in our community retreated into the shadows because nowhere felt safe. With the threat of SB4 granting unconstitutional and unchecked immigration enforcement powers to the state of Texas, it’s as if Trump never left. In our home state, Black and brown immigrants continue to be targets, with SB4 setting up the infrastructure to now scale up these attacks through mass racial profiling, detention, and deportation.

But we refuse to let the MAGA agenda win. Texas is OUR home.

As daughters who grew up in immigrant households, we know Trump and MAGA Republicans will use Project 2025 to hurt our community, scale up efforts like SB4 at the national level, and double down on the attacks carried out during Trump’s first term. Project 2025 is designed to tear apart families, strip legal status by ending DACA, TPS, humanitarian parole and other life-saving programs that have supported hundreds of thousands of people who already live and work in this country. As young Texan voters, we feel the responsibility to stop these extreme threats and policies that would deploy racist, fear-mongering tactics and jeopardize the lives, safety, and dignity of the people we love for cheap political gain.

We have two weeks until Election Day, and we are going all in to defeat Trump and Project 2025. But to do that, we have had to make difficult decisions about what our vote means this year and get real about picking the most strategic political target that will best position us to continue organizing and building independent political power to win big for our people.

No politician is coming to save us. As young people who have inherited compounding existential crises, from climate change to rampant gun violence to a government that uses our taxpayer dollars to enable genocide, we know better than anyone that politicians don’t have our best interests at heart. To get anything done to benefit our communities, we have had to push. Hard. 

We are confident in knowing Vice-President Kamala Harris is our most strategic target and we plan to vote for her as a chess move to defeat Trump and to set up the political terrain we will organize under for the next four years and beyond. 

Our votes for Vice-President Harris are votes that consider and honor the collective safety and dignity of many of our directly impacted immigrant loved ones and community members who we know will be in direct threat of being harmed, even killed, by Trump and his MAGA allies’ anti-immigrant assaults.

Let’s not forget how our progressive movement—led by many brave and courageous young people—has successfully pushed our political targets before. In 2012, we successfully pushed Obama to enact the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has protected hundreds of thousands of immigrant youth from the threat of deportation. This year, we pushed the Biden administration to deliver healthcare access to DACA recipients through the Affordable Care Act and protections for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens in order to keep mixed status families together.

Neither of these politicians handed us these wins without resistance. And even now, we continue to push for permanent protections as we witness Texas and other MAGA-led states carry out an onslaught of baseless lawsuits to try to dismantle our victories. 

Despite everything that has been stacked against our generation, young people continue to  relentlessly and strategically organize; that won’t change. Not now, and not in the future. We’re committed to fighting for a future in which our lives— and the lives of the people we love—are protected over political games.

As some of the first people in our families eligible to vote, we cast our ballots as a way to show care for ourselves, our community, our generation, and our country.

This year, UWDA has a goal to mobilize over 1 million young voters through its Here to Stay campaign to block the Trump administration and elect Vice-President Kamala Harris.