Throughout her political ascent, Sylvia Garcia has been followed by the word “first.”
In 1987, she became the first woman and first Hispanic to preside over Houston’s municipal courts. Fifteen years later, after a stint as city controller, she broke those same barriers upon her election to the Harris County Commissioners Court. And yet again, in 2018—following five years in the state Senate—she became one of the first two Latinas ever elected by Texans to the U.S. House.
It’s a path she had to pave herself. A native of Palito Blanco (a speck of a South Texas farming community somewhat near Alice) and the eighth of 10 children of parents without high school educations, the 74-year-old grew up working the fields. Yet she made her way through both Texas Woman’s University and Texas Southern University’s law school, working as a social worker and legal aid attorney before becoming a Houston city judge.
Her South Texas roots have shown in both her advocacy for outdoor workers—she’s pushed legislation requiring rest breaks nationwide for construction laborers—and in her staunch defense of immigrants. She is a persistent champion of Dreamers, those migrants brought to America as children who’ve been neglected by our Congress for decades now, and she has also resisted the recent rightward shift on immigration among Democrats.
Garcia criticized a late Biden administration move to end humanitarian parole for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, and she’s opposed anti-immigrant legislation that some Dems have supported in an apparent attempt to protect their own reelections or cut into Trump’s voter base. Over the same time, she’s built a reputation as a representative deeply in touch with her electorate, earning ringing endorsements from her hometown paper for her work on issues that don’t grab many headlines, such as stalled and slow-moving trains endangering schoolchildren in her district.
A few days after Trump was sworn into office for the second time, the Texas Observer caught up with Garcia about border propaganda, the fate of the U.S. Constitution, and faith.
TO: The president just signed this raft of executive orders—shutting off asylum, the refugee program, ending birthright citizenship. These are going to be challenged in court, so things can change. But in the big picture, how do you see all of this affecting and changing the country?
You know, he always said that he was going to be a dictator on day one. These executive orders are just the first step in his quest to be the dictator of the country. He is trying to act like a king, although he is not one, so he’s doing the next best thing. Most of the orders will not be held up in court when challenged because they’re all unconstitutional, and the best example of that, of course, is the bedrock constitutional principle that all people born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States—that’s in the Constitution. He could issue 45,000 executive orders saying otherwise, but it doesn’t matter.
But it’s going to take a while before they regrettably work their way up through the courts, while the people who will be implementing his orders, because he does control the agencies, will do some damage. And it’s going to hurt no one more than the state of Texas. … So it’s a tragedy, and the losers are the American people because they’re worried about gas, groceries, their jobs. None of this is helping. In fact, it’s going to make it worse because if you cut off all immigration, you don’t have the workers that you need to maintain the industries that help put bread and butter on the table for people.
So, something like ending birthright citizenship, it’s unconstitutional. But he’s surely trying to send a message. I know you’re from South Texas, and there’s this history of people having their Americanness questioned, being excluded from what it can mean to be American. I wonder what you think about the symbolism and the message of the things he’s trying to do, even if they’re not legal.
For me, it’s just real hard to think of this [outside of] him trying to—remember what he said during the campaign, that he wanted to just tear up the Constitution. He can’t go in front of the cameras and get the Constitution and literally tear the piece of paper. But he’s going to puncture and take pieces. This is the first round of executive orders. I expect more. And he’ll take another little piece here, another piece here, so that ultimately, by the end of the four years, we would look at that paper and it’s going to look like our Mexican cut-up paper [papel picado]. Because he would have taken so much—and what he’s taken is the core of the American dream.
For example, the bill that just got passed, the Laken Riley bill, that’s been talked about by the media and everybody as an immigration bill, but it’s a criminal justice bill. And they’ve punctured the due process in criminal cases. They’re basically saying that as long as [immigrants are] charged … not even that they’ve been convicted or that they’re on trial, [that they’ll be deported]. You know, look at the January 6 people that he pardoned, those people were not just charged but convicted and sentenced by judges, and he’s saying, no, that’s okay for them; we’re going to let them go. But he’s saying, if you happen to be an immigrant, as long as you’re charged, you’re going to get deported. And to me, it’s just his way of wanting to pick and choose who can be an American, who can get the full justice based on whether or not he likes them.
Sylvia Garcia in February 2024 (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
You did a recent op-ed about mass deportations, and you talked about the economic costs, but you also wrote that those who will be affected “are our neighbors, our friends and our coworkers. They sit next to us at church and restaurants, and their children are friends with yours at school.” How have we gotten to where so many people, especially in Texas, have forgotten that?
I think that [Governor Greg] Abbott and Operation Lone Star for Texas has set the stage. They were in … Eagle Pass, they pretty much set a stage of taking one very small piece of a very long border, and having the troops there, having the buoys there, and having constant daily media attention. It was like a movie set because if you went just a mile down the river, none of it was there. It was a stage that was set, and the media filmed that as a clip and used those clips for every freaking story, so that’s all people see is that one clip of that one piece of the river. Well, then you’re gonna start believing it, if you keep hearing it on national news. So after a while, unless there’s someone else bringing up the other side of the story, and we worked real hard to get out those positive stories, to show Dreamers saving people’s lives working at hospitals, being nurses … during the pandemic, they were giving of themselves, the Dreamers that are teachers and firefighters that work to save people’s lives during storms, but they’re always just little clips.
You’ve been in the U.S. House six years. Do you have an understanding now of what is wrong over there that somehow the DREAM Act, any version of the DREAM Act, hasn’t passed in more than 20 years?
Well, that’s another long discussion for another day. I’m the sponsor of the Dream and Promise Act. This last session, I filed it, a bipartisan act, I had four Republicans who actually were original co-sponsors. … We’re going to file it again. And I’m not giving up.
I’m not giving up because when you poll this country, America loves Dreamers. They support Dreamers. It’s just that it doesn’t work for [MAGA Republicans]—again they don’t look for solutions. They want to keep the problem and create more chaos. Chaos at the border. They focus on sound bites; I focus on solutions. I’ll keep working to get this done till they have to roll me off the floor.
I know you’re Catholic. There’s right-wing Christian nationalism rising everywhere; how does your faith lead you to different conclusions on immigration, abortion, and LGBTQ+ issues?
Listen, that one I have not figured out. I mean, especially so many people who are full of cruelty and hate, even against immigrant children, unaccompanied minors, how they balance being a Christian and having those views, I don’t understand. I just know what my faith tells me to do. And I’ll readily admit I’m a social justice Democrat because I truly believe that everyone needs to be treated with dignity and respect. And that’s, to me, the bottom line. You know, we’re all God’s children. I really believe that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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