S1E1: Neidi Dominguez on “not listening to DC” & embracing disagreement in the fight to win DACA

In this episode, you'll hear an inside account of the campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which today protects nearly a million immigrants from deportation and gives them the right to be legally employed, beginning with the fight to win undocumented student protections in California that came before the Dream Act and DACA (11:04), the decision to separate the campaign to win protections for immigrants brought as children from a broader legislative campaign that caused "all hell to break loose" inside the immigrant rights movement (23:37), using "inside" and "outside" strategies to force the Obama Administration's hand (33:26), and how leaning into disagreement ultimately helped organizers stay focused and win their campaign (28:28).

Neidi Dominguez is the Executive Director of Unemployed Workers United (UWU), a movement project to organize precarious and jobless workers. Neidi is a national immigrant and worker's rights activist, and organizer. Most recently she was the National States Deputy Director of the U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, and previously worked for multiple labor unions, and in Los Angeles, was co-director of the CLEAN Carwash campaign that successfully unionized hundreds of workers in the country. Formerly undocumented herself, Neidi was a central leader in the campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge: https://forgeorganizing.org/article/lessons-campaign-win-daca.

Transcript

Andrew Willis Garcés: In this episode, we'll hear an inside account by Neidi Dominguez of the campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which today protects nearly a million people from deportation. From 2000 to 2010, the national focus was on winning comprehensive immigration legislation. But after a national legislative push in 2010 failed, yet again, Neidi and other youth organizers, asked how they could pivot their strategy. Neidi was a leader in the Los Angeles-based LA Dream Team, one of many youth-led immigrant formations impatient with the plodding lack of urgency displayed by national immigrant rights groups, which were led almost entirely by older Latines with citizenship status. Across the country, over a dozen of these formations began targeting President Obama in 2011, demanding that he use his power to protect them from deportation, rather than continuing to claim he had to wait on Congress to act. They disrupted his speeches and fundraisers half a dozen times over 2011 and 2012, and risked arrest shutting down streets and highway offramps near local offices of the Department of Homeland Security. Beginning in 2012, they even blockaded his reelection campaign offices in several swing states. Obama was eager to look to his base like a friend to immigrants, and shirk the “deporter in chief” label Neidi and others wanted to tag him with. Their actions made it harder for him to do that, and dramatized the harsh reality facing undocumented immigrants. By making themselves both incredibly vulnerable - after all, risking arrest could get them deported - and becoming the heroes of their own stories in national media coverage, they shifted public opinion in their direction. 

Neidi, the Dream Team and others like them faced pushback from others on the Left – from DC-based national organizations who wanted to keep the focus on a broader comprehensive immigration reform bill, rather than limiting the focus to younger immigrants, and who wanted to protect the president, who they considered an ally. They also didn’t understand that disruptive rebel energy was an essential missing ingredient keeping their organizations from playing more effective roles as inside-game advocates. The heat created by these dramatic actions eventually led the White House in the spring of 2012 to enlist a few of the younger organizers, including Neidi, to help them craft a policy that would end the public pressure campaign. 

When I think about this story, it brings to my mind the images of undocumented immigrants occupying Senate offices, interrupting a president at his speeches all over the country, and it makes me think of a funky and truly essential word: leverage. It was because they built leverage, the power to force Obama to do something he had promised not to do, that they won this campaign. Leverage is what pushes our targets to give in to our demands. And many organizers believe we build only one kind of leverage at a time - we’re only organizing enough voters to win an election, or exclusively mobilizing enough public protests to shame someone in power. But as this story shows, we often have to build many kinds of leverage at once - policy and legal strategy leverage, the leverage applied through shifting public opinion and in shaping a reelection campaign narrative, even the leverage to physically blockade campaign offices from functioning. 

The campaign Neidi talks about was led during a ‘movement moment,’ where many immigrant youth organizations were making demands and using direct action independently, but with opportunities for synergy, as we’ll hear about in this conversation.

They decided to take one piece of the legislation – deferred action for childhood arrivals – and push Obama to take executive action. They faced huge pushback from the left and the right, and were called selfish for narrowing their focus on youth, but Neidi and her fellow organizers believed that by passing DACA, they would open the door for more comprehensive immigration reform, including DAPA, deferred action for parents of americans and lawful permanent residents, which they eventually won but was quickly repealed. Neidi tells us about the split from the national immigration movement, the decision to narrow the focus to DACA, and how leaning into disagreement was an essential part of their success.

Neidi is the Executive Director of Unemployed Workers United (UWU), and is a national immigrant and worker's rights activist and organizer. Previously she worked as the National States Deputy Director of the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, for multiple labor unions, and as the co-director of the CLEAN Carwash campaign that successfully unionized hundreds of workers. Formerly undocumented herself, Neidi was a central leader in the campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

AWG: Neidi Dominguez. Thank you so much for being with us on the Craft of Campaigns. Really, really, really excited for you to be here and to hear this story. Can you give us the trailer for the movie that we're about to watch. If this story of DACA, of Dream Act, if there were a trailer for the movie, what’s the trailer?

Neidi Dominguez: Yeah. Well, hi Andrew. Good morning. I'm so happy to be here with you too. The trailer of this movie? It would be something like, 10 years of struggle of undocumented youth… come to a moment where there's a possibility to win. And it's not through Congress. And now our clear target is the president, and will we get President Obama to actually protect undocumented youth in the United States?

That would be the headliner of the trailer of this. It's really crazy to think about it now, but like 20, 22 years later here we are, you know? But it was a 10 year fight to just win DACA. And now 10 years after DACA, we have a lot more to do. That's the trailer. Can these young people get Obama to do something?

AWG: Can't wait, can't wait to see this movie, hear this narrated movie. So can you tell us about how you came to this story and in this whole fight? Who you are? 

ND: Yeah. Yeah, sure. So, you know, soy Mexicana I was born in Cuernavaca Morrelos Mexico in 1987. When I was nine, almost ten, my mom, my sister, and I migrated to the U.S. to Pasadena, California in 1997. And during that time in California, people were really in the fight actually for keeping bilingual education in California. For coming out of the fight to defeat Pete Wilson and a very anti-immigrant sentiment in California. And I think for my mom and us to come into that state in this new country in that moment shaped us immediately, shaped our experience as immigrants.

My mom has always been an organizer. I don't think she would've used that word for herself, but even in Mexico, she was the person that would talk to the neighbors about getting pavement done in the streets and making sure everybody had water and electricity. She's been an organizer, I think since I could remember. But in the United States, her organizing became even more sharply focused, and really advocating for herself and her two daughters as a single mom of immigrant kids. 

When I started school into the fifth grade here in the United States, they had just gotten rid of bilingual education across the state. And now it was more of an opt-in kind of program. And so, my first year of school, I was put into this like English only class with the idea of a full immersion program. It's just gonna be the best thing for this new kid that doesn't speak English. And it was a terrible experience. 

So my mom immediately started getting involved with school district work and advocacy for English learner students like her daughters, and immigrant families, and quickly was meeting a bunch of other moms like herself, right. That were fighting for us to be treated with justice in school and then realized like, well, there's the struggle of our children, who we're advocating for, but we're also going through a lot of shit, as undocumented mostly domestic workers, all of them, right. Cleaning houses, cleaning offices. 

And so my mom pretty quickly found the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), which was one of the very first founding organizations of the National Day Labor Organizing Network that now we know as the largest network of day labor and worker centers across the country. And my mom was part of that fight in the late 90s and early 2000s where we opened up the very first job center in LA County, in Pasadena, California.

And so I'm sharing all of this because I grew up with that. I feel like I've been in training since I was like 10. I grew up around a bunch of popular educators and organizers. And I grew up knowing that I was undocumented, seeing my community and my mom fighting to change things, being really active myself. I started the IDEPSCA youth group when I was 14. And that was all the children of the parents that were organizing right? Of the day laborers and the domestic workers. And we started doing a lot of the advocacy in California to pass AB540, which was the in-state tuition bill that would let us pay the same as any student that resided in California. So I was very aware since I was very young, unlike a lot of undocumented youth, in the Dream movement or the youth movement that learned about their status later. I knew it very young. 

But it wasn't really until I left home to go to college that I feel like I really found my own voice in this fight. Both because now it's like, I am a student in college dealing with this, and it was really immediate. I had been advocating to get in-state tuition. We won that fight in 2001, in California. I graduated from high school in 2005 and I started college at UC Santa Cruz that fall. And when I got my first bill from the campus, they were charging me as an international student. They were charging me like $30,000 back then. I didn't have that. I could barely make it with my scholarships and you know, my community fundraising for me to go. 

So I knew immediately like, wait a minute. I know I'm gonna fight this and I know I'm gonna not be charged this. But how many other students on campus are getting this letter and don't know that they shouldn't be paying this money? Right. And so immediately, in my first quarter, I got some of the campus advisors and staff members — who I had been communicating with since my senior year and was very clear with them that I was undocumented about my situation, why I was declining to live on campus, even though that was their recommendation, blah, blah, blah. They helped me a lot. But I really pushed them to be like, I think you guys are charging people wrong and we need to find out how many of them are, and we need to start talking to them. 

And they were actually helpful. We did a forum my first quarter on campus and I was shocked by the number. It was hundreds of students that came. And that very first forum, the university was so afraid. I remember somehow the media found out about it, like Univision and Telemundo locally — which is like, central coast, not a lot of big news happened there. So this was big deal. The university was getting calls about this event and being asked, “can we come and film it”? And they were freaking out. I remember I had to lie about my name. They got my mom on the phone. Of course my mom was like, “what are you doing already? You haven't even been there two months”. But she understood and she was with me, but it was gonna make the university more comfortable. So these are things that you learn. I, I wouldn't now at 34, like, of course I would've said like, fuck that. But at 17 in that moment, they were basically like, “if you do the interviews, can you just not use your name? Can you be anonymous”? And so I conceded that and I said, fine, as long as we can share the information, it doesn't matter. I won't use my name, even though I had no problem. I had been public about being undocumented by then. 

And so we found out that there were dozens of students that were — for years before, the law had been in place for four years at that point — had been wrongfully charged as international students. Of course you try the nice thing at the beginning to get the university to just give them their money back. But of course they didn't. The UC Regents refused to acknowledge that that was a possible mistake across the whole UC system. So my very first little campaign was actually to threaten to sue them, to sue the UC Regents on behalf of students to get their money back. The very first year, dozens of students on campus at UC Santa Cruz got money back. Students that — they didn't even know that they had been wrongfully charged for this. 

Fast forward, all of that makes it clear. We need an on campus group to organize undocumented students. And so we formed Students Informing Now (SIN Verguenza), that was the name. And it was a combination of both undocumented students, and immigrant students that had papers at that point but were very connected to the fight, or even U.S. citizen students that their parents were immigrants, and they wanted to be part of this fight.

We won a lot of things on campus. We won a whole resource center, a resource fund. A lot of things that came into fruition after I graduated, but they’re still a lot of the reason why right now a lot of students are able to still go to UC Santa Cruz and have more built in support. You know, back then we had nothing. 

Our parents were obviously our biggest supporters. You could not believe the mountains of toilet paper and paper towels that they just — whatever they could do, the things that they could do, they did. But we quickly started realizing obviously all the other connections, like, well, there's us being undocumented students on campus, but there's also a bunch of undocumented workers on campus. Some of whom are union members. So even within the first year, we connected very heavily with the fight to renew the union contract on campus for the cafeteria workers and the cleaning service workers. And they were all like our tios and tias, you know, like it was like we were family. That's how even myself included I got — I would feed myself, is because we made these relationships with the cafeteria workers. So they'll just let us come in, you know, and eat for free because we couldn't afford to pay the cafeteria money. And we shut down the campus to help 'em win their contract.

For me, the connection of organizing from a working class angle was how I came to organizing. Like even before I took the identity of being an undocumented student, to fight for the Dream Act and all these things, I was doing organizing with workers. That really shaped and informed the way of my own engagement in the immigrant rights movement, because it always came from a worker perspective. 

 And so, we launched SIN and then at the same time in the mid 2000s, we weren't the only ones. Across the whole state, so many students were organizing to create these support groups on campus. And eventually there were about 32 different groups across the state, and we decided to create a network of all the on campus groups, and like youth groups. And back then with the support of CHIRLA, that had resources, they were able to pay for one state coordinator and we launched the California Immigrant Youth Network. 

It was hard. Even then there were already different political trends within the immigrant youth movement in California. You had groups that were very focused just on getting services and money for undocumented students. Other groups that were focused on systemic change. Other groups that were seeing the connection to the immigrant rights movement. This is like 2006, right? So it's right before we have this big boom of all the big, the biggest mobilizations we have seen in the country for immigration reform. And so there were, you know — we didn't all agree on everything, but we knew that we should be communicating with each other and SIN was definitely in the organizing, we gotta work with other people, it's not just about the money side. And so we were big troublemakers in that space. 

But we did a lot of work with the community in Watsonville, which is the farming community right next to Santa Cruz. And so in 2006, when the big mobilizations were happening, we helped co-lead a big marcha from Watsonville to Santa Cruz, where we had thousands of people in the streets. And there was this beautiful moment where there's like hundreds of students coming down the hill — the campus was on this hill — and meeting with all the farm worker families that had walked all the way from Watsonville over in this little plaza and just the joy of like coming together. Santa Cruz had never seen anything like that. My mom was helping organize the LA action and I was up in school helping organize this one. And it was happening all at the same time. So we were just seeing Milwaukee, Chicago, across the country. And Santa Cruz wasn't left behind. 

AWG: So you've been organizing on campus with both students and workers for lower tuition for a fair contract, and then you become involved with the fight for the Dream Act. Tell us more about the fight for the Dream Act up until this point, and what happened once you got involved.

ND: I graduated in 2008 and we had been fighting for the Dream Act since 2000, 2001. This is one of the things people forget is that there had been a lot of work in 2000 to get the Dream Act to be passed in 2001. And there was a lineup vote for September of 2001 and 9/11 happened and everything changed. Whether Bush would have signed it or not, I don't know. I can't tell you we would've won for sure. But there was enough indication that this was something that we could've done. And then 9/11 changed everything. We don't need to revisit that history. We know exactly what happened after, but that was a big moment. So when people think about the Dream Act, the first time it got introduced was in 2000. And then in 2001, it was gonna be actually moved on the Senate side. So we're in 2022. So the first time this piece of legislation ever saw the day of light in Congress was 21 years ago. I remember being a ninth grader watching what happened 9/11. And what I knew the week before was that there might have been a possibility of a bunch of us having to travel to DC because the Dream Act was gonna be introduced. I was 14. 

So I just think about the fact that it's been a long fight, and fast forward again into 2010, right? So this is now nine years after the Dream Act has been introduced and there's been different iterations of it. This is where the climatic moment of the movie gets to — one of the very first strategic pivots as young people that we saw and we named for the very first time in this movement, where we chose not to just be seen as token poster students or young people, but like actually make calls on our strategy — was in 2010. When, after mobilizing for immigration reform, right in 2006, 2007, 2008. Being part of the larger immigration reform movement, I think the more and more we got ourselves into the middle of that kind of tornado, we were learning a lot of things.

We were learning how dishonest people that spoke for us in DC were about the information that would trickle down to wherever we were, in California and Santa Cruz. How we were really just seen as poster children, not really having any space for decision making or strategizing. And we got tired of it. We got tired of seeing things that didn't make sense and just kind of continued to go along. And a lot of the times, in a way, being guilt tripped into it, a little bit of gas lighting for sure. 

AWG: You're tired of having your stories used and your input ignored. And you all think that a different strategy might be more successful. You ask yourselves, if we broke off one part of this comprehensive legislation, the DREAM Act, a measure focused specifically on youth, would we get more traction? So what do you decide to do? 

ND: Yes. Well, we decide, we don't think we can win immigration reform the way that you guys are thinking about it. We don't think that politically there's enough votes or power to win the whole enchilada . But we actually think that we have a shot at passing the Dream Act as a standalone bill and all hell broke loose. It was incredible, that immediate backlash that young people were getting all across the country for making that decision. At that point, we had lines of communication with other groups in other states, but we had never actually come together in person. United We Dream was already in existence, so we had spaces. But again, even within United We Dream, even though we were part of it, we had a lot of disagreements about the approach of the work. So we got a lot of backlash. We got backlash from the right, from the left, from the middle. There were articles out there back then calling us petulant children that only cared about ourselves. Getting calls from international unions,  and to other immigrant rights leaders or advocates on the ground to talk to us, to talk to us down. 

So it was really intense. But we continued to do the work, and once we realized, well, we're on our own on this, I think we said, okay, so then what does it look like? And the thing that I think I have to name in 2010, it was that moment for us. But there were other things happening in the country that I also think really created this moment of possibility for us. 

One, we had Obama in the White House. And we had the highest numbers that we had seen then of deportations. You had SB-1070 in Arizona. You were seeing anti-immigrant bills coming across the Southwest and Southeast. We would travel to Arizona all the time to march with Puente and others. And take the risk every single time of crossing state lines, as being undocumented, to go be in solidarity. So these things were not happening completely in silos. We were contributing to these things. But they were happening at the same time. And I think they gave us the political conditions to actually be able to paint the picture that led to DACA. 

So in 2010, we're still pushing for the Dream Act. We win in the house. But we were seeing new tendencies. We were seeing our communities be more emboldened to take direct action. We were more emboldened to take direct action. We got that vote in Congress because we did dozens of sit-ins in both congressional state offices in our own states, and then took over the Hart building to demand a vote in the Senate for the Dream Act. And that has been one of the biggest civil disobedience actions in at least the last 10 years, inside the Hart Senate Building where we had 52 undocumented youth. We shut down the building. We sat-in in six different offices and in the main lobby. 

And we did all of that on our own. Raising money on our own, taking risks on our own, traveling across country in vans to meet there, meeting other people and then seeing what had been happening in other places. I remember my very first time meeting Danielle Suerta and Ray in Chicago, when we were driving to go to DC for this action in the Senate Hart Building. And then we had known of them as the young people that came up with like Undocumented and Unafraid, and the coming out of the shadow actions that we gathered a lot of inspiration from in Los Angeles. 

So it was the very first time we were meeting in person, on our way to do this scary thing. We were as much prepared as we could be to fight for each other, but it was still scary. Right? There were conversations that we were having with our parents, all of us of, of like, okay, if we get deported, who's in Mexico that we can go to? Where do we send money? It was really hard. We didn't know that we weren't gonna get deported. These were the very first actions. We had to have real conversations about our safety. This is how we started having communication with Mexico groups, of like, what support do we have back home in other countries?

And then we lost the Senate vote. Not only because Republicans didn't vote for it, but because Democrats also didn't vote for it. But we had created this momentum though. So now we're in 2011 and there was no kind of putting the genie back in the bottle. That was very clear. We had lost the Dream Act, but the movement that had been created, the moment that we were living in, there was no going back. We were fighting on all fronts. We were pushing for the Dream Act, but throwing down against SB-1070. We were really trying to expose Obama as the Deporter in Chief.

That was actually when the Not One More campaign and other groups, Puente, NDLON. It was actually the fact that they were doing the fight around deportations — also that helped us even get more sharper about, well, could we win Obama to protect undocumented students and not deport young people? And in conversations with those same folks we knew, if we win young people, then what's the argument for not doing it for our parents? And if we take one step, then we can then go from DACA to DAPA, This was all part of the thinking. 

AWG: So at this point, the Dream Act has failed to cross the finish line, but you all are asking yourselves, could we get Obama to take executive action to move through one piece of the legislation?

Get our foot in the door. So you've shifted your target from Congress to President Obama and your demand to be really laser focused on DACA, and you all hope that once you get that you can move forward with components of the larger bills like DAPA, protecting parents, millions of parents. Tell me what happened next.

ND: And so in the spring of 2011, we launched the Right to Dream campaign. And ideally we would've wanted that campaign asking for executive action to protect undocumented students or undocumented youth to be really a national campaign from the gate. But a lot of people thought we were crazy. We had talked with United We Dream. We had talked to other allies across the country, and people just thought it was impossible. And some people even went as far as “it's not constitutional, it's not legally possible”. In Los Angeles, we put our own team of lawyers together to do the legal research. “Is this possible, can this be done? What would it look like? What would be the right thing?” And we found that it could be, and our legal team put together a whole memo with a list of different ways that it could be done. Not just deferred action, we thought about other ways of doing it.

And then in the spring we went public. We did the very first sit-in inside a DHS office. That's when I did my first civil disobedience action. In the actions before my role was the police liaison. I was the one always negotiating with the cops, but this was the first time I was the one sitting down, risking arrest. It was six of us that took action. From there, I think people saw the momentum and we got a lot of media attention around this action, around our demand. 

But what happened almost a month after our action, there was a leaked memo from the White House where Mayorkas had written to President Obama years before, before the last iteration of the Dream Act vote in 2010, and before we went public demanding for Obama to take action. Mayorkas, who was inside the Obama administration and at USCIS in DHS wrote a memo to the president pretty much outlining that there were ways to protect young people from being deported. And that memo, the New York Times made public. And that was another moment where we had this demand. Now we had this major leak that said, you all have known that this is possible. You had your own people write a memo about it. What do you mean it's not possible? 

So there was this momentum being built. And then later in that fall, we had over a hundred law professors from pretty Ivy League law schools — many of whom were the professors of people working in the White House, and [professors of] some of the lawyers for the White House, that kept on saying publicly “This is not possible, this is not possible” — write a letter to the White House, signed by a hundred immigration law professors of all these fancy schools saying, “We know that this is possible.Here's the law about it. You can do it”.

 And so now we have new allies, getting in motion and organizing themselves to say, no, this is possible. And then there were all these young people taking action across the country. And then it is the year before his reelection, 2011, we fast forward to the fall/winter. We had been picking up momentum, we see things shifting. NIYA, the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, they take it to the next step. We knew of each other, but there was not a single person that was coordinating every single action. That's the beauty of movements. When people believe in what you're doing, that they take action on their own and you can't control it. That is what a movement should look like. It’s people really believing this is possible and getting in motion however they think makes sense for them. So they did. And they decided to do sit-ins at Obama for America offices, at the campaign offices. They made that jump of like, we're not just gonna now hit you inside the infrastructure that you're in as the president, we're gonna also hit you on the campaign side. That freaked the fuck out of them. Those folks stood at all those actions we were watching, and we were obviously supporting and uplifting them. We weren't coordinated, but they were happening and we were very ready to support them. 

And we get a call. I mean, I didn't [laughs], but some of our people who have been communicating get a call from the White House that they wanna meet with us. They wanna meet with youth, immigrant youth, about this whole demand for the president to take action. This is spring of 2012. When finally, you know, things are escalating. More people are taking actions in different DHS, in Obama for America offices. There's more public support now for us on this demand. Now more people are kind of getting on board. So the spring of 2012, we get a call that the White House wants to meet with us. And there's a scrambling of trying to figure out, do we say yes? Do we say no? This is the first time in California that we actually get asked to come to DC. Not just us crashing the party in DC, but now officially being invited. 

And they wanted to meet with our lawyers. And at this point there were two active legal teams working on this with us. The one in LA that we had formed in early 2011. And then there was another one in Massachusetts, out of the Yale clinic there. Erika Andiola, who is from Arizona and had been doing a lot of great work then too, is part of that meeting. Gaby Pacheco, who comes out of Florida, is part of that meeting. Lorela, who comes out of Massachusetts and was doing that work, is part of that meeting. And then I am the west coast representative. I'm part of that meeting. And we're all undocumented at that point too. So we cannot even meet with the White House lawyers at the White House, cuz we wouldn't even have passed the background check. So they had us meet them at this townhome next to Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. And they wanted their lawyers to talk to our lawyers. They wanted us there and they knew they had to invite us. But really this was supposed to be a meeting of the lawyers. We were working with really amazing lawyers. Big shout out to Jessica Carr, Betty Hung, a lot of amazing movement lawyers that understood that we weren't gonna let that happen. 

We had a whole plan. We met the day before that meeting at a hotel in DC, all four of us plus the lawyers. And then we were like, alright. Number one, all the lawyers are gonna sit behind us. If we let them have this conversation only about the law, we're gonna waste time and we're not gonna get anything out of it. We already know what they're gonna say. They're gonna say this is legally not possible. So you don't talk unless we ask you to talk, you know, and they were all down. Yes. 

We had two other little mobidas in our back pocket in that moment. One was, we had an updated memo and we already had the professor's letter that they had sent to the White House, but we hadn't made public at that point. We had that. And then the second mobida that was Gabby, you know, was like, look, they're gonna have this meeting with us. And then they're gonna say it never happened. Because if they were really gonna do something, they would've already done it, we all agreed. So we have to do something where they have to know, everybody knows we had this meeting with you. And so we landed our story with La Opinión and they were gonna go live with the story of us meeting with the White House as we were sitting down meeting with the White House lawyers, and the White House didn't know that that was gonna happen. 

At that point I was also working with the car wash campaign, so I had learned a lot about union contracts and negotiations. And so I remember in that prep meeting breaking down, somebody's gonna be the good cop. Someone's gonna be the bad cop. We all have to have roles. We need to lean into that, you know, and we divided up those roles. And my role was definitely to be the bad cop. And so I was the one to end the conversation, to be like, “we're giving you a deadline”. 

That was another thing that I learned from the labor movement at that point — we can't go into this meeting and not give them a deadline. Because we need to set a timeframe where then they can't say like, “we don't know why you turned up”, you know, because it's like, “well, you didn't meet our deadline. That's why we're turning up.” So we gave them two weeks. So we're in the meeting and of course they wanted to make it about the law. We said, “we are not here to talk about whether or not this is legal. We absolutely know this is legal. Here is a letter of all these law professors, your professors. And that's not the conversation we wanna have.

We know that this is clearly a political willingness conversation. So are you gonna do this or not?” 

And they danced around it, blah, blah, blah. And then, I can't remember if it was Gabby or Erika that was like, and you need to know that like, our community's gonna know we were here, here's the link to the story to La Opinión. And that really was like, this was supposed to be like a confidential meeting, blah, blah, blah.And we're like, well it's not, this is not a confidential fight. This is a fight of millions of us. And we were gonna come here and speak for all of them.

They were really worried about the way that this was impacting President Obama. They weren't saying it because they were staffers. They weren't saying it so clearly, but we knew that that was why they were really feeling that they needed to figure out how to neutralize us. Right. So we said, you know, there is no controlling it. We can't call no one and tell them, don't go do this action. People are gonna do it because they know that you can do it. And so the only one that has control to make this stop is you, by doing the right thing. If you want this heat to go away, you need to take action. And then we gave him a deadline. We said, you have two weeks to go public on this and take action. Or if not, what we can tell you is that we will escalate our efforts. 

And then we left. We were like, it was definitely like if there was ever gonna be a movie that scene has to be done so well, because we did our job really well. All these four Latinas from different backgrounds, from different parts of the country that were all undocumented and super scared of course. We fucking did it. We did it and we did a good job. And I remember the lawyers just like walking right behind us, you know? 

And the two weeks passed and then more actions started happening at the Obama for America offices. This was the first time that there was like a concerted effort, where there were like eight at the same time, a week after we met with him at the White House. So then we got another call and then they were really upset, they're like “you said, we had two weeks and it's only been a week and now there's all these young people”. And then we were like, we told you we can’t control it. We are not gonna call anyone and tell 'em to back down. You are the only one that can diffuse this. And they were so upset. 

And then we won! You know, two weeks and a half later — we met with them May 24th, 2012. It was my mom's birthday. I know the date. Never gonna forget it. They announced DACA, what, June 10th, publicly. There was a rose garden announcement, but then there was the napolitano laying out. So it was three weeks after. We gave them a deadline, they were a week late, but then they delivered, you know? And that's how we won. 

The day that we won when the rose garden announcement was happening, we had in LA 150 undocumented youth that were on the ground sitting in and outside of the detention center in Los Angeles that morning. Because they were all part of the DREAM summer internship that we had been creating in partnership with the UCLA labor center. And I remember we had been getting calls since 5:00 AM, because of the time zone difference, that something was gonna happen, something was gonna happen. And everyone was like, should we still do the action or not? And I remember saying, “Well it’s not true until it's true. So we're doing the action. We're going”. And we're sitting down, shutting down, like the main freeway exit in Los Angeles. There was already reporters there, but then a bunch more reporters arrived. And then we're on the street and they start telling us, “The president just made an announcement at the rose garden that, they're gonna protect undocumented youth. What do you guys have to say?” And we're sitting down in the pavement and they're giving us the mic and everyone's looking around like, what do we say? Cuz we, we're processing that we actually had won. And then we huddle — there's a picture in LA Times, I remember, where a few of us get up and we huddle to figure out what's our line, you know?

And then we say, okay, we say, this is a good first step. Now it's our parents. That was our celebration line. That was from gate was like, so why not do our parents? You know? And the next year we win DAPA. We keep fighting and we win DAPA, which we lost. That was literally the pivot, with the Not One More campaign and everyone. We knew that now we had opened up the door and we had to push for more.

AWG: Okay. If I can just summarize also. The Dream Act is introduced 2000, 2001.

September 11th happens so nationally there's not a play. You all start fighting in a few places in state tuition fights. Other kinds of undocumented youth or adult-led fights leading up to the 2006 mass marches, and everybody focuses on immigration reform. We're gonna win this nationally. It's getting introduced, boom, keeps getting beaten. Doesn't pass the Congress. And then there's this next phase, that 2009, 2010, you all start to break off from the mainstream immigrant rights movement, which was very adult dominated, very much like we either win the whole enchilada or not, as you put it.

ND: Yeah. 

AWG: And you all are like, actually, I think we have some thoughts about strategy maybe that you all should pay attention to.

Okay. You're not gonna pay attention. Well, we're gonna start going in this direction in 2010, really turning up the heat, taking all kinds of dramatic risks, and forcing a vote on the Dream Act towards the end of that year. That fails, and then the movement is in some ways in chaos, — in the sense of not there isn't unanimity about, well, we just abandon the Dream Act and we just focus on Obama, but some of you are like 2011, we're focusing on Obama and that's a point of leverage. And then some of you are even like, and there's legal leverage that we can bring to bear. We can even invent it. We can have our own lawyers, we can bring our own, we don't even need to be lawyers to really figure out what the leverage is, we can read. 

ND: Yeah. 

AWG: And it's about political will, no matter what. And so, can we create the political will and have quote unquote good legal arguments into 2011 and be pushing from the outside. Also be figuring out how do we reach on the inside to give them a lifeline if they were to have one, and then — another point of leverage, there's a reelection happening. Can that be a point of leverage? If we can threaten. To get to like, to make the reelection work harder. 

And then into 2012, so kind of turning up, it seemed like to me, those were the points of leverage that you were most focused on and just watching that play out. And I, and if you have anything else to say for us in this moment about finding points of leverage, when either the consensus is — that we were gonna have this one point of leverage Congress and that's off the table, but then still trying to figure out how do we find what our actual leverage is and where we can really push hard. Where it combines our strengths with where they're weak or where they're sensitive. 

ND:  I think in the points of leverage, some of 'em were naturally happening, right. In just the conditions of the moment and some of them we had to manufacture. And that was fine. That is part of the fight. You have to create that leverage yourselves. The letter from the law professors,that created leverage — it exposed them completely from the inside. But the other leverages that were happening, thanks to the larger, broader movement. We were all using Deporter in Chief as the title for Obama. Right. And thebroader movement to fight back deportations also gave us leverage because, the deportation stuff was — in their minds, so left, that the demand to protect undocumented youth was a good middle ground. 

But we wouldn't have had that be a good middle ground if we wouldn't have been doing — and the people in our movement hadn't been doing — all the work to expose the criminalization of our communities and doing all the deportation defense work, you know. And they created that spectrum that then made it possible for the White House to be like, well, we're not gonna not deport anyone, but maybe we do this. Maybe we'll like, bring back some juices for us. So I think that's another thing that I really wanna name. I am very clear that we leveraged the hell out of that. And it was the same leverage we used for DAPA too. And that was a part of our movement that in the mainstream immigrant rights world was constantly being demonized and constantly being isolated and constantly being dismissed and undermined. But it was absolutely the part of our movement that gave DACA a real shot and possibility. And I'm very clear about that. 

AWG: Thank you for sharing that. And that is something that I think a lot of us in 2022 could take to heart more. What else do you think — if you're thinking about us as campaigners — what lessons we can be drawing away, especially in this moment, 10 years on from this fight. What are wishes do you have for us? 

ND: I think number one is don't believe the operatives from DC about what's possible and not. We were told from day one, this was impossible. And now 11 years later, those same people are the ones taking the mic and taking the space, defending that guy and like doing all the big press events around the Supreme court, blah, blah, blah. So that's number one: don't let the operatives from DC dictate what's possible for our movements and dictate what would you think is possible when you're organizing on the ground.

I think number two is like the collective consulting around how to make these concessions, cuz we didn't win everything we wanted right. At the end of the day. And those conversations were really hard, you know, but I think the thing that gives me peace of mind is that I never made a single decision about who would be covered or not covered or how, and you know, how would this program work, by myself ever. We would have meetings to talk about that criteria and what were our non-starters and what we were willing to concede with hundreds of us. We would facilitate consultations with hundreds of us and spend six hours in a building, just talking through every single piece. 

And it was painful and it was hard cuz we were negotiating against ourselves. I'm never gonna forget that commitment and discipline that my peers and I had to take that as seriously as we did, because it really gave so many of us so much grounding to know that we had made that decision together. Even if we weren't happy about it. And even when people disagree that we could have the disagreement in open air and be able to move forward, which — I see less of that now, honestly. I think that's another thing. It is okay to disagree, but you have to hold strategic line together, you know? There were moments where that didn't happen, but I would say for our, for our folks in LA, we did hold that together, even when it was really hard.

And then I think the third lesson is, you know, when I go down memory lane about these moments, some of the most painful parts really are our own internal conversations about, who were the right spokespeople, you know? We have way more language now than we did back then to really understand the made up dichotomy that we were dealing with about good immigrants and bad immigrants. Debates and conversations amongst ourselves about , should we wear cap and gowns when we do the sit-ins or not? Should we have so, and so be the speaker because they're got accepted to Harvard, you know. I'm saying this, being really sincere that when we were having these conversations back then, we already knew and felt that that was so wrong and unfair, but we didn't have the political maturity to know at that moment that our movement was gonna be able to be so strong and withstand actually pushing beyond that and being okay with having our friends that had gotten caught with the DUI be spokespeople or our friends that were queer folks or trans folks that were part of this fight and putting them forward.

Those are some of the most painful parts that I think, lessons learned. I know we are in a very different moment that wouldn't even be a question now, but those were real questions back then that we had to deal with. But we didn't let that get in the way of what we knew that had to be done. It was some of those moments, those hard moments, that then gave the path in life to familia. Queer liberation movement, and many of us, including myself, feeling really committed to making sure that that space was gonna exist and that we were gonna do whatever I needed to do in the back to help that happen, you know?

And then the pivots that the California American Youth Justice Alliance did, coming out of this fight to be like, the fight really is to shut down these detention centers, and really let the “bad immigrants” really take lead. Like we are not bad. Right. That was an evolution,  I never thought of us as woke. I hear that now, and sometimes I wonder how much of that rhetoric and those identity politics actually do get in the way of us doing the hard work, because I know that I was wrong. I knew that I made mistakes. I know that we weren't as bold as we could have been, but I think that was part of us growing and evolving. And I think that's what made space for a lot of what we see now, which I'm really happy about and a hundred percent support. But if we would've let that shape the rest of our movement, then that would've been a mistake.  We didn't. And we knew that and we struggled with it, but we also made space for new things. 

AWG: Well wrapping up as we often do — thinking about the different organizers you're in community with and the different people who craft campaigns or might think about them, beyond electoral campaigns even… You're in community with labor, immigrant organizers, all kinds of people. And even, I'm thinking about, I know undocumented people who are almost all under the age of 24, who don't qualify for DACA, are not protected at all like DACA recipients are. 

Is there a final wish or offering that you'd like to make to them, to us? Thinking about where we're at in 2022 as movements, as a constellation of movements. 

ND: My wish is that…I hope young people — and I say younger than me, you know, I'm 34. So I'm talking about those 24 and under — By hearing this, you know, realize that, like we didn't know either, you know, and this has been a fight for over two decades. And my wish for them is for them to see that they are the next chapter of this book. It's not over. We never thought it was over. We never thought this was the final, the final thing. It was definitely not. And that, we didn't see a way either. We made a way of no way. But we knew what was happening in the country. And we could see different political things, like the economy, seeing things move. And I think for young immigrant people right now, like I think what they're probably watching is a lot of actual uprising around workers fighting. This is the first time in my own trajectory that I see so much excitement about people wanting to have a union and fight for better working conditions.

And I know all those young people are not just undocumented young people. They're also workers. And my wish is that they could see this wave as part of theirs too. And see the wave of how do you ride the wave around the issues of economy and economic justice, and make the connections to why we need to continue to fight for immigrant rights in this country. And that they get to write the next chapter, you know, and that they get to find the new levers and that they're not gonna be alone. I now spend a good chunk of my time training and supporting up and coming young organizers into economic justice work.

And for me, that is the best thing I can do. How do I pass on all the things that I've learned so far and learned from them too. I could say right now that, if there was a group of young folks that decided to take action to really push the administration on — even expanding DACA, like it was such a disappointment for them to actually reannounce it but then make no changes to the original criteria.

And I know people are taking action and I'm not minimizing that, but I can tell you that if there was this moment that I was seeing from afar of mass action, I would be the first one to figure out how to get in contact with those people and say, how can I help? Because I know that in this iteration, my role is actually to be in the back and support, and I'm good with that.I'm really excited for that. That would be my wish and offering for that for them.

AWG: Neidi Dominguez, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate you.