This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
News from the University of Southern California (USC). Drs. Manuel Pastor and Jody Agius Vallejo—in this October 14th op-ed in the Los Angeles Times— criticize the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence.” They argue that it imposes ideological constraints under the guise of reform.
They note that many of its provisions — such as restricting use of race or gender in hiring and admissions, freezing tuition, and capping foreign students—would harm universities’ financial and academic viability, especially for a globally competitive campus like USC.
The article also accuses the compact of borrowing language from conservative advocacy memos and delivering political intent with scant credibility. Ultimately, they urge USC and similar institutions to reject the compact in defense of academic freedom, fiscal responsibility, and institutional autonomy. Read on.
ByManuel Pastor and Jody Agius VallejoGuest contributors
The Trump administration’s recently released Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education has landed in the inboxes of nine universities, including our own University of Southern California. Included in the proposed terms — which, if agreed to, are supposed to loosen the spigots of federal funding for academic collaborators — is a warning that units should not “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
Threatening punishment and violence for contrary opinions is beyond the pale for any civic actor — a lesson that should be shared with Trump consigliere Stephen Miller, who recently labeled left-leaning advocacy groups and foundations part of a “vast domestic terror movement.” But the idea that one should not “belittle” seems a bit overheated coming from a set of political actors that have shared AI-generated memes of Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House adorned in sombreros and spouting fabricated quotes.
Plus, the compact itself invites more than a bit of skepticism. On Friday, MIT became the first of the nine universities to reject the terms, and it’s easy to understand why it would.
Consider the stern warnings against using race and gender in hiring and admissions. News alert: The use of race in both situations is already a settled matter for institutions taking federal dollars.
When it comes to admissions, the Supreme Court banned race-conscious decisions in a 2023 ruling. But in any case, USC’s approach to expanding access has been to invest in local recruitment pipelines through a highly respected Neighborhood Academic Initiative and to provide tuition waivers for low-income families, regardless of race.
As for the hiring side, USC’s diversity gains over the last 15 years have been incremental and reflect underlying trends. The share of tenure or tenure-track faculty at USC that is Black creeped to 5% from 3% between 2010 and 2025, while the Latino share edged to 6% from 5%, and the Asian American share rose to 19% from 17%. According to the National Science Foundation, that’s pretty much in line with the growth in recent PhDs by ethnicity — although we do seem to be lagging in hiring from the newly minted Latino professoriate. As empirical social scientists, we fail to see much evidence of a heavy affirmative action thumb on the scale.
The compact would also toss away once-cherished conservative ideas about the sanctity of markets. Even as the GOP tears into New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for daring to suggest a rent freeze, the compact seeks to prohibit tuition hikes over the next five years. It couples that with a sharp limit on foreign students that is sure to diminish the reputation of USC, a place whose steady reputational climb in the last few decades has included attracting a high-caliber student body that is now 27% “non-resident.”
The compact also seeks to alter what sort of education will be delivered. It proposes another market intervention in which tuition would be waived for those pursuing the hard sciences. Adding up the five-year freeze, the loss of revenue from foreign students (who often pay full freight and so help to subsidize others) and the selective tuition breaks, the proposal seems less like reform and more like a blueprint to bankrupt a university already experiencing financial distress.
So how would we grade the compact that the administration has submitted?
First: As professors, we warn our students that we run their papers through a plagiarism-checker — and this compact would have failed that test. As reported in the New York Times, many of the ideas and even some of the exact language — including what’s in the only two seemingly academic footnotes — were lifted directly from a memo drafted months earlier by a conservative group linked to billionaire Marc Rowan.
Second: When we grade, we always try to offer some positive notes — after all, one doesn’t want to belittle. One has to really scour the compact for praiseworthy nuggets, but here’s one: We wholeheartedly agree that encouraging military veterans to enroll should be an even higher priority than it already is at USC. We have experienced such students (as well as those in the campus ROTC) as dedicated, earnest and hard-working — and far more open to the benefits of diversity than the authors of this compact seem to be. After all, the military is far more diversethan the overall U.S. population (for now).
After praising the compact’s creators for that one worthy thought, we’re sort of at a loss. They correctly point out that grade inflation is a problem but propose no real solution. Most of the grammar seems correct, so that’s something? But this is a dismally researched — and often frightening — document that ultimately seeks to legislate ideology under the guise of academic excellence.
USC already stands for academic excellence, and we do it without ideological loyalty oaths. We hope our leaders will see this deal for the folly that it is and will have the courage to call it out as MIT did. That’s the way to stand up for academic freedom, fiscal responsibility and just plain common sense.
Manuel Pastor and Jody Agius Vallejo are professors of sociology at USC.
I was in California this past week attending a conference on education and justice and learned of this terrifying story of Rami Othmane, a 36-year-old Pasadena resident from Tunisia. On July 13, 2025, Rami was driving to the supermarket when he was suddenly surrounded by masked agents in unmarked cars. Despite showing proof of his pending green card application and following lawful procedures, he was detained and taken to B-18, the infamous “basement” of ICE’s downtown Los Angeles facility.
Rami spent 13 days there — 13 days that felt like an eternity in conditions so degrading they defy belief. No bed, no toothbrush, no soap. The air conditioning blasting like a freezer. The same soggy bean burrito, day after day. An open toilet shared with dozens of other men. Fifteen pounds lost in less than two weeks. And all this while he battled a brain tumor.
How can this happen in a democracy?
Rami’s story is not an isolated one. It is part of a broader strategy to normalize fear — to treat immigrants not as human beings but as disposable bodies. Facilities like B-18 are designed to operate in the shadows, where abuse festers unchallenged. As Rep. Judy Chu observed during her visit, the place was “wiped clean” before her arrival, staged to look good for inspection, while hiding the grim reality. This is how democracies drift toward authoritarianism: when we look away, when “processing centers” become prisons, when national security rhetoric becomes a pretext for erasing lives.
Rami himself says, “I’m not the same person. It’s traumatizing. I hope I go back to where I was, but it’s hard.” His words should haunt us, for he stands in the place of so many more whose suffering remains unseen. They remind us that ICE doesn’t just detain bodies; it breaks spirits.
We cannot allow this to stand. We must demand oversight, accountability, and — most importantly — humanity. Organizations like the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), the National Immigration Law Center, immigrant rights coalitions, and countless grassroots groups are leading this fight. They need our support.
A man who stayed at a downtown Los Angeles ICE facility described being sick, hungry, sleep-deprived and terrified of what might come next.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
By Jasmine Mendez, Staff Writer, LA Times Sept. 11, 2025
Rami Othmane recalls sharing an open toilet and sleeping on a concrete floor.
He said his wife, chief of medical staff at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, received death threats and racist comments while he was detained.
Days after her husband’s arrest, Alrashid and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network rallied outside B-18 to shed light on Othmane’s case. Rami Othmane was driving to the supermarket to pick up ingredients to make dinner when he noticed a car following closely behind.
Dr. Wafaa Alrashid and Rami Othmane were married in March.
(Dr. Wafaa Alrashid)
“I thought [the driver] was just being aggressive, but a few moments after, they blocked my way,” Othmane said. “They ordered me to leave my car. But I kept asking them — who are you?”
Othmane is a 36-year-old Pasadena resident from Tunisia, and his wife is Dr. Wafaa Alrashid, chief of medical staff at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, whom he was speaking with as federal agents descended.
“I was surrounded by like five or six masked people in unmarked cars,” Othmane told The Times. “I kept telling them I have my ID and I’m a green card applicant. … I was following the right procedure.”
Othmane spoke with The Times this month about his July 13 arrest and subsequent 13-day
detention in harsh conditions while suffering from a brain tumor. The experience, he said, left him altered.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to The Times’ request for comment on Othmane’s case.
Othmane said that prior to the arrest he was in the process of obtaining an I-130 petition, which would allow him to stay in the country by qualifying his marriage to Alrashid — a U.S. citizen. The couple wed in March.
Othmane said he provided the agents with a receipt of his green card application but was ignored and ordered to get out of the car.
“They took my wallet,” he said. “They just took me.”
He was brought to the downtown Los Angeles ICE facility known as B-18, or “the basement,” a temporary immigration processing center. According to the Pasadena-based Barcena Law Offices, “this is where people go to be detained for less than 12 hours ... [and] are either released or deported.”
But Othmane’s stay was many times longer than that.
The Pasadena resident said he waited 12 hours just to be processed into the facility. This is despite a 2009 lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The suit was brought to end “unsanitary conditions” in B-18, but in a settlement, it was agreed that ICE would not keep detainees for more than 12 hours on any given day or over a two-day period, with limited exceptions.
Further, ICE agreed to put a stop to “the practice of shuttling detainees back and forth to overcrowded local jails in an effort to avoid rules prohibiting long-term detention,” according to an ACLU news release.
“No longer can ICE stuff people into overcrowded cells or deny detainees their right to see a lawyer,” Karen Tumlin, then legal director at the National Immigration Law Center, said in 2009. “As this lawsuit shows, major national policy changes are desperately needed to safeguard against the terrible conditions that afflict so many immigrants held in detention centers across the country.”
After waiting hours to be booked, “the first person I spoke to didn’t understand why they arrested me,” Othmane said. “He said my application was legit.”
Othmane said he was later booked for overstaying his visa in 2015, although he’d since had that case dismissed by an immigration judge and had a green card application in process. He said he saw an ICE case manager the following day, who also questioned why he’d been booked.
Othmane said he sought to reassure the case manager. “This is how it is, you know, we’ll get through it and survive,” he said.
For 13 days, Othmane endured severe conditions. He lost sleep while sharing a cell and an open toilet with other men who would jockey at night for space to sleep on the cold concrete floor. (“The smell was horrible,” he said.) No bedding was provided. The facility is kept at 50 degrees, according to one Congress member who visited there.
He lost 15 pounds due to malnutrition. Meanwhile, he was fighting a growing tumor in his head.
“How many nights can you stay without sleep, or without proper food, without brushing your teeth,” Othmane said. “You can hurt your lungs in there because of the horrible AC; you feel like you’re in a freezer.”
Othmane said he was often fed the same finger-sized, wet bean burrito paired with chips and water. He began “to look forward to it,” though, as his quick weight loss began to worry him.
“He does not have a bed to sleep on,” Alrashid said at the rally in July. “My husband is 6 foot 7 inches, for those of you who have met him. He’s a very kind, nice person. But he’s also very tall.”
Othmane said that, while he was detained, his wife received death threats and racist comments on her social media and work email and in letters in the mail.
“People were telling my wife to leave even though she was born here,” he said. “It’s sad to see that humanity is gone.”
Due to hunger and severe headaches — a side effect of the tumor — Othmane fainted and was taken to a hospital.
“They gave me liters of IV, food and warm blankets,” he said. “It’s like if you got lost on an island alone for like two weeks or a month, but then they find you ... and try to bring you back to life.”
During the visit, his wrists and ankles were handcuffed, his chest tied down to the hospital bed.
Othmane returned to his cell on July 21. After almost two weeks, he was told he was being transferred to a facility in Arizona — prompting an emotional reaction as the uncertainty of his future in B-18 was coming to an end.
“I collapsed. I just started crying. It was the best news I ever heard,” he said. “The guards started hugging me; it was like a celebration.”
As Othmane’s transfer was underway, ICE was preparing for a scheduled tour of the facility. U.S. Reps. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks), Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles) and Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) visited B-18 on Aug. 11, days after Othmane was moved.
Rep. Chu represents Pasadena, where Othmane lives. She said the facility was “wiped clean.”
Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) waits at the entrance to B-18 in downtown Los Angeles on an occasion when she was denied access.
“They let us into the area where the detainees come in. They come in on a van, they are handcuffed and they take them in through this little hallway, where they take their things,” Chu told The Times. “Then we went where the processing desks are, which are surrounded by nine cells capable of holding 336 detainees. But the strange thing is there were so few detainees there.”
Chu later visited the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, which holds about 2,000 people, and spoke with detainees.
“Some of them told me the conditions [in Adelanto] are better than B-18. At least there was a jug of water in the middle of the room. They can talk on the phone, and engage in board games,” the lawmaker said.
ICE agents told Chu that detainees in B-18 are held for no more than 12 hours, but that they have specific waivers that allow them to keep people for 72 hours.
“As we can see,” Chu said, referring to Othmane’s case, “people are being held in B-18 for as long as 13 days. I’m searching if this has happened with others. But B-18 has been a mystery where few have been let in.”
Chu said that during her visit to the facility, she asked about the food and was shown the burritos Othmane was fed. “They told me people could just ask for more food or bottled water by tapping on the window,” she said.
Othmane said more food was provided “if you were lucky.”
As for hygiene in B-18, Chu said, “there’s no change of clothes, no toothbrush, no toothpaste or soap. They said, well, they’re only here for 12 hours,” she said, although that is not always the case.
Othmane was removed from the chill of B-18 and driven seven hours inside a truck with no air conditioning to the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona, according to Chu. He spent another 13 days in Eloy before being released on $20,000 bail. Alrashid drove to Arizona to pick him up.
Rami Othmane, shown performing in an undated photo, said his experience in detention was “traumatizing.”(Dr. Wafaa Alrashid)
"When I saw him, it was surreal, honestly,” Alrashid told Newsweek in an interview. “I couldn’t believe I finally could see him in front of me. I could touch him, I could hug him.”
He was released with an ankle monitor, which he said will be removed once he is a green card holder. While awaiting a court hearing in April, he is required to stay within a 70-mile radius of Los Angeles. He also is considering treatment options for his brain tumor.
For now, he remains shaken.
“I feel so bad for [my wife]. I’m not the same person,” Othmane said. “It’s traumatizing. I hope I go back to where I was, but it’s hard.”
Othmane, a classically trained singer, had a performance scheduled for Aug. 15, seven days after his release. Alrashid asked her husband if he was still up for it; he replied yes.
“I wanted to do it because it’s like therapy,” he said. “But it was one of the toughest performances I’ve ever had. I’m still weak, and I was sick, so I lost my voice.”
Despite his experience at B-18, Othmane said he is trying to stay positive — and is willing to accept deportation if that’s what it comes down to.
But, he said, “I still have faith in the judicial system. Hopefully everything turns out good.”
DACA is the progeny of in-state tuition bills that culminated in the Federal DREAM Act that still has yet to get passed by Congress. It has endured a lot of twists and turns, and remains in need of a legislative solution. As quoted herein, it would be harmful to the U.S. economy to lose workers, especially educated labor:
"DACA recipients from across the country will gather in Washington on Wednesday to make their case to members of Congress. Apple, Google and other large U.S. companies and business groups recently wrote a letter to congressional leaders warning that ending DACA would worsen the worker shortage and cost the U.S. economy $11.7 billion annually. Legislation would require at least 10 Republican votes to pass the Senate."
The economic impacts aside, I can only imagine just how unnerving it can be to always be in the situation of having a time-limited "membership" in this country when you've spent so many years here. I hope that this time around, the DREAM Act—together with Comprehensive Immigration Reform—will get considered and pass to make these 600,000 youth whole.
Tawheeda Wahabzada was tired of hoping she would ever have a permanent place in the country that had been home for nearly her entire life. So in February 2020, after hosting a “self-deportation party” where she said goodbye to her friends and family, she left the U.S.
Wahabzada, 32, moved to Toronto, where she was born to Afghan refugee parents before they joined extended family in Nevada, where she grew up.
She thought starting over would be exciting, that she’d be busy making new friends, exploring her new surroundings and traveling. Instead, the pandemic shutdown kept her indoors and Wahabzada had to face the full weight of her decision. Lonely and isolated, she wanted to make sure others in her position wouldn’t have the same experience.
“I basically had to confront the consequences,” she said. “But I made myself a promise: If I’m 30 and I still have DACA, I’m going to leave. I can’t wait for an idea. I spent my 20s in this survival mindset and I couldn’t really enjoy life.”
Since 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals has protected from deportation more than 800,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, allowing them to work, drive and travel legally. But the program, which now has fewer than 600,000 enrollees, never offered a pathway to citizenship. It was “a temporary stopgap measure,” then-President Obama said when he introduced DACA in 2012.
A decade later, the program and the lives of many of its enrollees are hanging by a thread. A small but growing number of DACA recipients, disheartened after years of instability, are voluntarily moving to countries where they can acquire permanent legal status. Some, like Wahabzada, are going back to where they were born; others have transferred jobs or applied for student programs in unfamiliar places.
Last year, Wahabzada connected with two other former “Dreamers”: Monsy Hernandez, who now lives in Germany, and Eun Suk “Jason” Hong, who lives in Spain. Together they formed ONWARD, or Our Network for the Wellbeing and Advancement of Relocated Dreamers. On Facebook, the support group has gained several hundred followers since its inception.
“It’s not that we’re encouraging them to leave,” Wahabzada said of DACA recipients. “It’s a big decision. It’s a scary decision. It kind of feels like a stigma to give up on our status. I felt alone on that journey.”
Requirements regarding age, when the person arrived in the U.S., education and criminal history excluded many immigrants when the program initially rolled out. More than 100,000 others have come of age without benefits because they were too young to qualify before DACA became embroiled in litigation and court rulings prevented additional first-time applicants, limiting the program to renewals.
Last month, a federal appeals court affirmed an earlier decision in Texas by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, a George W. Bush appointee, that found DACA to be illegal. But the ruling kept the protections in place as a lawsuit challenging the program was sent back to the lower court for further proceedings.
The case is anticipated to reach the Supreme Court, where legal experts believe the conservative majority will also rule that the program is illegal.
DACA earlier withstood the Trump administration’s effort to end it when the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the administration had failed to follow proper procedure to do so.
Meanwhile, the program’s beneficiaries have been on an emotional roller coaster, closely following each court hearing and ruling, and breathing sighs of relief every time the program survives another day. Negotiations on congressional efforts to establish permanent residency for DACA recipients haven’t advanced.
After the latest court ruling, advocates increased pressure on the Senate to pass legislation that would permanently protect Dreamers, seeing the lame-duck period after midterm elections as a new opportunity to act.
DACA recipients from across the country will gather in Washington on Wednesday to make their case to members of Congress. Apple, Google and other large U.S. companies and business groups recently wrote a letter to congressional leaders warning that ending DACA would worsen the worker shortage and cost the U.S. economy $11.7 billion annually. Legislation would require at least 10 Republican votes to pass the Senate.
Roberto Gonzales, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has extensively studied DACA, said beneficiaries are frustrated that while the program provided the possibility of upward mobility, their legal status has remained unchanged.
“If they had a choice to adjust their status, overwhelmingly they would,” he said. “Their roots are here, their education is here, their job experience is here, and they know what it would entail to move to another country. But it’s complicated because that’s not their choice. Their future may be more opaque today than it was in 2012.”
Gonzales, who has tracked the experiences of 500 DACA recipients since 2013, said the calculus has changed with the imminent threat that the program could end. Many have told him they are contemplating two separate futures — one in the U.S. and one elsewhere. A few people have already left.
“While many haven’t gone as far as to get visas or apply for jobs, what they’re doing actively is thinking about where they could live,” he said. “This is increasingly at the front of their mind.”
Selene Hernandez, 33, is among those considering a move. Hernandez, who is in a master’s program at Cal State Fullerton and hopes to become a marriage and family therapist, said it’s highly likely that she’ll move back to Mexico within a couple of years of graduating.
Hernandez was 10 when her parents brought her to the U.S. Before DACA, she paid her way through community college and then got a bachelor’s degree at Cal State L.A. She was unable to participate in extracurricular school activities, or apply for a driver’s license, a bank account or a tutoring job. Her first job as a cashier paid less than minimum wage.
The first time she considered leaving was in 2017. She had applied for a study abroad program through advance parole — a provision under DACA that allows beneficiaries to travel legally for school, work or humanitarian reasons — but when Trump terminated DACA and ended the travel benefit, her trip was canceled.
It would’ve been her first time seeing her mother, who had returned to Mexico after she divorced Hernandez’s father, since she was 18.
Last year, Hernandez finally was able to visit. Earlier this year, she went back again for two months.
She researched what her life could look like if she moved there. She visited the National Autonomous University of Mexico and was shocked to learn tuition is free. She pictured herself opening a therapy practice.
“I felt free. This is my country, this is where I was born, these are my people, they speak my language. It just felt very much like home,” she said. “That’s when it kind of hit me: I can live here.”
Coming back to the U.S., Hernandez said she felt trapped. She started saving money and asked her father, who also lives in Los Angeles, if he would sell her his house near Mexico City. She told her friends about her plan.
Hernandez said she feels fortunate to have a job she loves, a career she’s excited about and a generally happy life. But she misses her mother and younger brother in Mexico.
“I feel I’ve done my part,” she said. “I’ve been a good citizen, I’ve done things right, and yet here I am with a two-year membership to this country. I can’t keep fighting the system.”
Julia Gelatt, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said the rise of remote work expanded the possibility for many people to live far away from their jobs. But for DACA recipients, deciding to leave the U.S. involves considering multiple complicating factors, including cost, the possibility of a job transfer, personal connections to the other country and whether the recipient has U.S.-born children or other family to take into account.
Another significant factor is whether a recipient is able to return to the U.S. to visit loved ones. Immigrants who leave the U.S. after entering without authorization are penalized. For example, a person who has lived in the U.S. for six months to a year is barred from returning for three years, and someone who stays longer than a year is barred for 10 years. For the most part, Gelatt said, Dreamers have stayed put in the U.S.
Wahabzada is among those affected by the ban. She especially misses her mother, who is still hopeful for immigration reform, and the grandmother who helped raise her. She doesn’t know when she’ll see them next.
But she has no regrets about her decision to leave her home in Washington, D.C., and continue her work remotely for a global development organization. She said it’s a privilege to keep her job and stay in the same time zone in a city where she has extended family.
Before leaving, she wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times. The headline: “No need to deport me. This Dreamer’s dream is dead.”
“I was so jaded at that point,” she said. “A lot of my friends said, ‘You’re leaving right before the election — what if something happens after?’ But waiting for an idea is kind of self-destructive.”
Wahabzada said her status no longer feels like a burden. A few months after arriving in Canada, she came across an article about another Dreamer who had self-deported and reached out to him. It was Hong, who moved to Spain.
Hong became a DACA recipient his senior year of college at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he studied finance. He landed a job at a life insurance company and felt like he could finally start building a successful future. But when Trump decided to end the program, he said, “that’s when I first realized my life is actually not in my control.”
Hong had considered pursuing a master’s degree in the U.S., but he started looking elsewhere. In 2018, he found a business school in Madrid where he could enroll for a fraction of the cost he would’ve otherwise paid.
Realizing he knew of no one else in his situation, he got cold feet and deferred his enrollment for a year. Then he read Wahabzada’s op-ed, which provided the confidence he needed to leave.
Hong said he’s glad he can now offer support to others. But his feeling of fulfillment is mixed with unease.
“Every time I go into Facebook and see a notification that a person wants to join our group, it’s really sad,” he said.
“Usually when there’s a number-of-followers increase, it’s something to be happy about. Not for this one. We know exactly how that feels.”
This piece debunks assumptions and stereotypes about the Latina and Latino position on abortion. This concurs with another internal poll by The Hill that I had earlier read titled, Poll: Latinos overwhelmingly oppose abortion bans.
This piece identities an important nuance with Latina/o voters: “...they draw a line on having the government intervene.”
Now doesn't that make abundant sense?
I am in full agreement that dems should not shy away from this and take this issue of abortion rights and health care head on. We should all get out and vote our values lest we devolve into a wretched, dehumanizing world not unlike Gilead in the Handmaid's Tale (see on Hulu), that depicts an authoritarian, patriarchal government with supreme control over women's bodies and reproduction. You can and should view it on Hulu to view in vivid detail exactly what the dystopian vision is of the white, Christian fundamentalist patriarch.
This is not at all what Jesus would want. Diametrically opposite and the polls themselves indicate as much.
So folks, if you've not yet voted, be sure to get out this next Tuesday, Nov. 8th and vote your values. When we vote, we win.
Gabe Vasquez’s latest campaign ad is simple to the point of austere: Black-and-white portraits of women, a melancholic piano score, and a recitation of his opponent’s stance on abortion.
“I will always protect a woman’s right to choose,” Vasquez, a Democrat, vows, drawing a contrast with his Republican opponent, Rep. Yvette Herrell.
Such a commercial could be running in any number of contested congressional seats, where Democrats nationwide are leaning hard into abortion rights as the November election approaches. Most notable in Vasquez’s pitch, however, is that it is airing, in both English and Spanish, in New Mexico’s 2nd District — the most Latino seat in the state with the highest percentage — 47.7% — of Latinos in the nation.
Just as the reversal of Roe vs. Wade has scrambled Democrats’ overall midterm playbook, it has also prompted the party to rethink its long-standing approach with Latino voters. The party is putting the abortion issue at the center, discarding decades of conventional wisdom that it would be a political loser with a group of voters that is overwhelmingly Catholic and seen as socially conservative.
“These incorrect assumptions have lasted for a long time, and they have been incorrect for a long time,” said Gary Segura, dean of UCLA’s public affairs school and a pollster specializing in Latino voters.
The shift comes amid Democratic anxiety and Republican optimism over a small but significant rightward shift among Latino voters as a whole. November will test the two parties’ competing theories — whether abortion will give Democrats a reprieve or the GOP will build on its gains by emphasizing inflation and crime.
“Abortion is not the top issue. The economy is the top issue for voters across America,” said Danielle Alvarez, communications director for the Republican National Committee. “Democrats are talking about this because they don’t have anything else to talk about.”
The specter of the Roe reversal looms large in southern New Mexico from the moment drivers cross the state’s eastern boundary with Texas, which has three variations of abortion bans on the books. Two Planned Parenthood billboards, one in English and another in Spanish, declare “You are entering New Mexico, which supports abortion rights.” With Arizona, its western neighbor, reinstating a near-total ban last month, New Mexico solidified its status as a rare haven for abortion access in the Southwest.
The decision has reshaped politics in the area too, said Ruth Rodriguez, as she took in the wares for sale at the Mimbres Valley Harvest Festival on a recent Saturday. Featuring a pie contest and a petting zoo, it was a festive occasion for this community two hours northwest of Las Cruces; the fair was paused for two years because of COVID-19. But Rodriguez, leaning on her walking stick amid a row of ceramics vendors and voter registration booths, said politics in the area had become more divisive, and without the abortion debate, Democrats “would probably have a big, big problem.”
Rodriguez, a registered Democrat, is Catholic and personally sees abortion as “against God’s will.” But, the 80-year-old retired office worker said, it was not her business to decide if someone else should have the procedure.
“You never know people’s circumstances,” she said. “You say to yourself, ‘OK, I’m not the church. I’m not the judge.’”
Before the high court’s decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned national abortion protections in June, Democratic candidates were more likely to tiptoe around the issue. The assumption, held by strategists in both parties, was that Latinos skewed socially conservative and their religious faith shaped their antiabortion views.
That view misses some key nuances among Latinos like Rodriguez, said Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster based in Miami who specializes in the Latino vote.
“Hispanics are conservative on this topic personally, yes,” he said. “But they draw a line on having the government intervene.”
The Dobbs ruling pushed Latino Catholics more firmly in that direction, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. The poll, taken after the decision was released, found 75% of Latino Catholics said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with 51% who held that view in 2010.
Many Latino opponents of abortion rights now identify as evangelical, the group of Americans most opposed to legalized abortion regardless of race or ethnicity, said Melissa Deckman, chief executive officer of the nonpartisan polling group.
The Dobbs effect has been most pronounced among Latinas, particularly those born in the United States, said Mike Madrid, a California-based GOP strategist and expert on the Latino vote.
“U.S.-born Hispanic women basically feel toward abortion the way that every other woman in the country does,” Madrid said.
Their mobilization had appreciable impact this August in the Kansas referendum on abortion rights. An analysis by TargetSmart, a Democratic analytics group, found Latinos showed up in near record numbers in the state, behind only their turnout for the 2020 presidential election; of that group, 62% were women.
While polling shows support for abortion rights, it is less clear whether the issue will outweigh Republican advantages on the economy and crime.
Sometimes the mixed signals can come from the same survey. An NBC News poll of Hispanic voters found that just 4% ranked it as a top issue this election, far behind matters such as the cost of living. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that a candidate’s stance on abortion could single-handedly determine their support.
Cristina Uribe, director of advocacy and political strategy at the Gender Equity Action Fund, said it is up to abortion rights proponents — and Democratic candidates — to make sure Latinos consider the Dobbs ruling in the voting booth.
“Polling is a thermometer; we need to be a thermostat,” actively pushing the temperature up, Uribe said.
Republicans believe they can capitalize on gains they made in the 2020 election, where President Biden’s lead among Latinos (59%-38%) was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margin (66%-28%), according to a detailed study by Pew. In June, Rep. Mayra Flores, a Republican, won a special election for a historically Democratic House seat in south Texas, becoming the first woman born in Mexico to serve in the House.
More Latino GOP candidates filed to run this cycle than ever before, according to the national party’s accounting. The RNC has spent millions opening more than 30 community centers in Texas, Florida, Wisconsin and other key states and congressional districts.
Two of those centers are in Albuquerque and Las Cruces, opposite ends of New Mexico’s sprawling 2nd District. The district used to be a GOP stronghold, covering the rural southern half of the state. Through redistricting, the Democrat-led state legislature excised the conservative-tiltingoil and gas producing region in the east and stretched the seat’s boundaries from the U.S.-Mexico border into parts of Albuquerque. It is now one of the most competitive seats in the country.
At the RNC’s center in Albuquerque, located in a strip mall next to a paleteria selling Mexican ice cream pops, street snacks and aguas frescas, Herrell, the district’s first-term congresswoman, acknowledged the challenging political lean of the new district, which backed Biden by 6 points in 2020.
“Many Hispanics in New Mexico are Democrat — not all,” she said. “But they also are concerned, feeling as if their party may have left them.”
Herrell said the abortion debate was less relevant in her race, given that New Mexico state law protects access to the procedure. (Last year, the state repealed abortion restrictions that were on the books before Roe, in anticipation of the Dobbs ruling.)
“What I’m seeing and hearing in New Mexico when I’m traveling the district is it is converging more to the economy side of things, more about the open border, crime, education,” said Herrell, a 58-year-old former state legislator.
Herrell’s GOP backers have flooded the airwaves with ads hammering her opponent, Vasquez, a former Las Cruces city councilor, as too liberal on taxes and public safety. Recent commercials focus on comments he made in a local TV interview at a 2020 Black Lives Matter rally, where he called for “police reform,” adding “it’s not just about defunding police, it’s about defunding a system.”
The attacks have stung; Vasquez released his own ad featuring a sheriff vouching for his support for law enforcement.
On air, Vasquez and his allies have emphasized Herrell’s support for the Life at Conception Act, legislation introduced in the U.S. House before the Dobbs ruling that would impose a national abortion ban, with no exceptions for rape, incest or protecting the mother’s health. On the ground, Vasquez’s pitch is more varied. In a recent visit to Silver City he told a roomful of Democratic faithful that a win for his party in November is essential for enshrining Roe vs. Wade into law.
“People say, ‘Oh, well, aren’t you a Latino? Aren’t you Catholic?... Aren’t you male?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, but I was raised right!’” he said to a burst of applause and laughs.
Canvassing for votes in a heavily Latino neighborhood in Deming earlier that day, however, Vasquez, 38, spoke about the economy instead of abortion. Conversing largely in Spanish, he spoke about how his family came from Zacatecas, Mexico, and built their lives in New Mexico. His congressional campaign, he said, was about ensuring opportunity for the next generation.
The approach aligns with recommendations from Equis, a political research firm specializing in Latinos that said in a recent memo that Democrats “run the risk of seeming out of touch” if they emphasize abortion ahead of economic concerns.
In Mimbres, Vasquez circulated among the harvest festival crowd before stopping at the cafeteria to introduce himself to some residents and sample the enchiladas. At the end of his table sat Gloria Jaime, who credited Vasquez for showing up to the event, even though the registered Democrat said she’s undecided on her vote.
She had a long list of issues that weighed on her: drugs, the need for more police, the economic prospects for her children. Jaime said abortion was unlikely to sway her.
“That’s a touchy issue,” said the 70-year-old retired school worker from Silver City. She didn’t like hearing politicians talk about it too much.
Still, considering the surge of energy Vasquez has seen from core supporters, he said, abortion is likely to remain central in the campaign’s final weeks.
“We still would have had a shot at this even if Dobbs didn’t happen,” he said in an interview. But, he added, since the June ruling, “I can say that there’s a palpable change on the ground.”
Melanie Mason Melanie Mason is a national political correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, based in Los Angeles. She started with The Times in Washington, D.C., in 2011, covering money and politics, and she also covered state politics and government in Sacramento.
