The Firsts by Jennifer Steinhauer

Author:Jennifer Steinhauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2020-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Six

Crisis at the Border

I will never stop speaking truth to power.

—Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)

Katie Porter stood on the House floor, about to strike one of her grievous blows.

A group of freshman Democrats had gathered nearby, embroiled in an intense discussion focused on what to do about the crisis at the southern border of the United States. For months, migrant workers from Central America had been pouring into Texas, seeking asylum, and immigration officials had been detaining them en masse, a “zero tolerance” deterrence policy that had divided the nation. Several children who had been in detention camps after being captured and separated from their parents by US agents had died. Just that week, in late June, a heartbreaking photo of the corpses of a man and his toddler daughter who had drowned in the Rio Grande had surfaced, and newly published reports attested to horrific conditions at some of the centers.

Democrats, with strong advocacy from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, had passed a spending bill that would fund the agencies maintaining the shelters, helping to alleviate the squalid, unsanitary conditions. With a push from the Progressive Caucus, the bill included a number of conditions on the money, such as forcing the Department of Homeland Security to draft and implement standards of care and to allow unannounced inspections by members of Congress. Left-wing advocacy groups mounted a campaign to block the bill under the banner “Not One Penny,” but only four Democrats opposed it: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—a.k.a. the Squad.

Until that moment, the Squad had not really been considered a legislative bloc akin to the Republicans’ Freedom Caucus, which voted together in a cohesive force great enough to upend its party’s agenda. In the beginning, the group had seemed more like an ongoing progressive sleepover party, but with Audre Lorde poetry readings and kombucha making instead of face masks and Truth or Dare. The name “the Squad” originally came about when Ocasio-Cortez shared a photo on Instagram, captioned simply “Squad,” of the four newly elected women during an orientation event, and it stuck.

Unlike the female veterans, who had campaigned together extensively during the election, these four did not really know each other, Ayanna Pressley told me, but she said, “We had an immediate kinship in that experience of being women of color challenging twenty-year incumbents,” she said.

The Massachusetts congresswoman had bristled at first when lumped together with three other nonwhite women, and she was irritated when media reports would evince surprise when they did not vote or legislate in unison. “I used to say, please do not publicly challenge and pit us against each other,” Pressley said. “This is not a sorority. What are we? Thought leaders and policy makers. So please give us bandwidth and runway to uniquely govern ourselves.”

During their initial few months in Congress, the four women often sat apart on the floor and did not always vote the same way. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, was one of only two members of the House

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