00:00Thank you so much to my good colleague from Chicago, Congresswoman Ramirez, for her incredible advocacy and her sharing and
00:08vulnerability and expressing her lived experience or sharing her lived experience in this chamber.
00:13I'm proud to be the daughter of Palestinian immigrants.
00:16My father came to this country at 19 years old.
00:19He was the guy in the 70s that would pull up his arms and say, which watch do you want?
00:22He never felt any kind of human dignity ever in his life until he joined the Ford Mortar Company and
00:28became a member of the United Auto Workers.
00:30My mother, who was three months pregnant with me on the airplane here to the United States from Palestine, came
00:38here with eighth grade education.
00:39Both of them could have never imagined in their lifetime that their eldest daughter would be the first in the
00:44family to graduate from high school as well as achieve a college degree and then later become one of the
00:51first Muslim women elected to the United States Congress.
00:56These are the stories that I wish people would share more about our immigrant neighbors.
01:02I want to uplift those stories, the resilience, the contributions of so many of our immigrant neighbors across our country,
01:09especially in my district.
01:12I grew up in the Southwest Detroit where there's 20 different ethnic groups.
01:16It taught me diversity.
01:17It made me a better person to be able to be around that type of strength, all the different stories
01:24that were so similar to my parents' stories.
01:27What I also love about my current 12th Congressional District is you can go in a community and it's a
01:33huge, beautiful African diaspora, Caribbean community, Arab community.
01:40All throughout my district, there is so much love and so many of our communities with immigrants are centered on
01:46family.
01:49However, this Immigrant Heritage Month carries heavier weight as this administration continues to target our immigrant neighbors day after day.
01:58It has been incredibly painful, not just for myself and immigrants in our country, but the American people to watch
02:05our immigrant neighbors being abducted by mass DHS agents, our children being torn from their parents, and some even zip
02:13-tied.
02:15Our disabled seniors being left to languish in detention camps.
02:19The images have been horrifying.
02:22I do want to highlight one story.
02:25Mikel Durante.
02:26He was from Southwest Detroit.
02:28He was in high school.
02:30He was a high school student with only a few credits away from graduation.
02:35He was racially profiled by local police and handed over to ICE.
02:41He was on his way to a field trip, Mr. Speaker, with his friends, and now he was torn away
02:47from his loving community and deported to Columbia.
02:51These are real-life stories, heartbreaking consequences of policies of this administration, which is centered on cruelty.
02:59We must acknowledge and recognize that not all immigrant communities, though, are impacted equally.
03:05I want to take time to express my deepest, deepest, deepest fear that we're looking away in the impact of
03:13black immigrants, which is the fastest-growing immigrant group in the United States.
03:17Today, more than one in five black Americans are immigrants or children of immigrants.
03:22Many of them face a huge impact or harm within our immigration system.
03:26They are more likely to be detained, more likely to be deported, and more likely to be denied asylum and
03:32relief.
03:33These figures are not accidental.
03:35They are systemic and stem from racist administration that continues to target African and Caribbean communities with no end in
03:42sight.
03:42This administration continues to separate our families, strip protections from those who need it most.
03:48I ask my colleagues, do not accept this broken, inhumane immigration system that treats people differently based on their race
03:54and their origin.
03:56We must fight for fairness, dignity, and justice for all.
03:59So this Immigrant Heritage Month, and every month, we all must stand with our immigrant neighbors and share the stories
04:07that I know Congresswoman Ramirez shared her story and my story.
04:11This is the American dream.
04:13There is no such thing as Canadian dream, German dream.
04:16There's only the American dream, and all of us need to remember that we are a nation of immigrants.
04:21With that, I yield.
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