Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez has probably had her fill of DREAMer activism for the week–and it shows! On Monday, a trio of OC DREAM Team activists staged a sit-in protest at her D.C. office until they were arrested by U.S. Capitol police.
After that bad look, a Dream Action Coalition member squared off with a clearly unnerved Congresswoman Sanchez at a rally.
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According to our sources, everything was going fine for Sanchez until Erika Andiola–whose story has received national attention–called her out alongside several people whose loved ones are in detention and deportation proceedings. That's when things got a little testy.
Congresswoman Sanchez rushed to Andiola as she spoke through a microphone about the sit-in protest. Hurried, the lawmaker said she had places to go, but the activist refused to give up the mic asking her about the arrests of OC DREAMers and if she would support a new hunger strike that began outside the White House against deportations. Sanchez desperately reached for the mic twice before Andiola finished.
Once someone gave the congresswoman a mic of her own, she ripped into the DREAMers. “These young people decided they wanted to go to jail,” Sanchez said, referring to the undocumented activists arrested at her office. She emphasized the notion by emphatically pointing to the ground numerous times.
“Will you ask for their release?” another woman asked. Sanchez responded saying she would but that they're already in the system. With that, she high tailed it out of the tent mid-sentence after dropping the mic!
As for the Orange County DREAM Team that's gotten under her skin? They put out another statement in response to the lawmaker. “We are disappointed that Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez continues to see immigration reform and publicly pushing the President to take action on deportations as two unrelated issues,” the group says. “In fact the two are not separate. The path to immigration reform begins with a stop to deportations and an expansion of Deferred Action for all. We came to her office to ask her to lead on the issue and still would like her to do so.”
“We hope that she realizes this and speaks up before President Obama deports another two million people.”
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Gabriel San Román is from Anacrime. He’s a journalist, subversive historian and the tallest Mexican in OC. He also once stood falsely accused of writing articles on Turkish politics in exchange for free food from DönerG’s!