A Progress 2025 Vision for Immigration
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance admitted on national television that he spread false rumors about Haitian immigrants consuming people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. In an interview on CNN, the Ohio senator said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
The Republican presidential ticket has doubled down on these racist lies after former President and GOP nominee Donald Trump repeated them during the September 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, spurring bomb threats in Springfield and upending the small town that had been experiencing an economic revival thanks in part to Haitian migrants.
The extremist right-wing Heritage Foundation, which published the regressive Project 2025 as a transition plan for a conservative presidential administration, has also made immigration a top issue. But what would a progressive vision for immigration look like? As part of YES! Media’s Progress 2025 initiative, Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, Boston answered that question in a conversation with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali.
Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.
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