One hundred forty Planned Parenthood volunteers came to Arizona to fight against defunding the organization, but in the immediate aftermath of the Trump administration's decision on DACA, they ended up fighting for its immigrant patients and staff instead.
In a windowless hotel conference room in Phoenix, Arizona, Norma Jimenez stood before 140 Planned Parenthood volunteers, a majority of whom were white, and told them that she was a DACA recipient.
“I will try not to cry, but I’m being vulnerable with you all,” she told the rapt crowd.
“I came to this country from Durango, Mexico when I was one year old,” she said. “Up until I was applying for college, I had never even heard of a social security number.”
Jimenez, 26, is now a professional organizer for Planned Parenthood’s Latino outreach program, Raíz (“root” in Spanish). Just days before she was going to help lead the first of Planned Parenthood’s national summits to train volunteers for the 2018 elections, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration would rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (President Obama’s 2012 initiative temporarily protecting some immigrants who arrived in the US as children from deportation).
This very program enabled Jimenez to get her education, get a job with Planned Parenthood, and remain in the country she grew up in. But instead of staying behind to fight against President Donald Trump’s decision on DACA alongside immigration activist groups, she chose to stick with the health care organization.
The event at which Jimenez shared her story was a three day #IStandWithPP Southwest Organizing Summit, the first of a series of “bootcamps” to train the future leaders Planned Parenthood’s 600 organizing “armies” centered around each of their clinics.
Initially the conference was to be focused on the campaign the name implied: preventing Congress from defunding Planned Parenthood and repealing Obamacare. But after Sessions made his announcement, the focus shifted to DACA.
“The directive shifted because we know that our communities are scared they’re in danger,” Raquel Cruz-Juarez, a Planned Parenthood organizer from Nevada, told BuzzFeed News. She and other organizers said that leading up to the conference, many of their volunteers expressed concerns about DACA, and asked how they could help.
The organizers told BuzzFeed News that addressing DACA at the summit was a “no brainer.”
“This is a way of showing that we actually do this work, that we’re not just talking about being allies, we actually are allies,” Cruz-Juarez said. “We knew it was important for us to change our focus because once again, these are our people.”
So Planned Parenthood staff scrambled to change the action of the summit at the last minute, typing up new scripts for the one-hundred-plus volunteers to read over the phone to strangers. Instead of asking them to fight against the GOP’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they were now asking them to call Arizona Sens. Jeff Flake and John McCain to ask them to support legislation to protect DACA recipients.
Immigration might seem a bit out of Planned Parenthood’s wheelhouse, but the many Latino organizers at the summit begged to disagree.
“Millions of people that we serve in our health centers are immigrants themselves, are undocumented, or have mixed status families,” Cruz-Juarez told BuzzFeed News. Even our own staff is going through this.”
Planned Parenthood does not ask for any documentation from its patients and organizers say undocumented people they know see Planned Parenthood as safe place for them to go. The states represented at the summit — as well as the state they were in — have some of the highest Hispanic and undocumented populations in the country: Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and California. Besides Jimenez, a handful of other people present at the summit were DACA recipients, and many others have undocumented family members.
“Our communities are scared, they’re in danger,” Cruz-Juarez said. “For Planned Parenthood to not take a stand on this would be standing on the wrong side of history.”
