'Guerilla Storytelling' and Joyful Resistance: Rep. Teresa Leger Fernndez and the DWC's Plan to Combat Project 2025
(lengthy, informative read)
‘Guerilla Storytelling’ and Joyful Resistance: Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández and the DWC’s Plan to Combat Project 2025
PUBLISHED 12/12/2024 by Kathy Spillar
Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM) is joined by Rep. Nikema Williams (D-GA) (2nd from L), Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA) (4th from R), Executive Vice President of MomsRising Donna Norton (2nd R) and Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC) (R) as she speaks during the the Mother’s Day Press Conference calling for action on Care and Reproductive rights on May 08, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for MomsRising)
The Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC) this week announced the election of Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) as DWC’s chair for the 119th Congress, which starts in January. Leger Fernández served as the DWC vice chair in the 118th Congress and will now lead the largest ever DWC, which includes a record-breaking 96 members in the new Congress. Leger Fernández is a 17th-generation daughter of rural New Mexico. She served on the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession, and as a public interest lawyer, she helped secure nearly a billion dollars for Head Start and healthcare clinics in New Mexico and solved jurisdictional issues that contributed to the abuses of Native American women.
Ms. executive editor, Kathy Spillar, sat down with Rep. Leger Fernández, to discuss priorities for the DWC—both to fight back against what will be repeated attacks by the Trump administration on women’s rights and programs benefiting women and their children, as well as strategies for moving forward toward equality.
Kathy Spillar: It’s so wonderful to meet you, and congratulations on being elected chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus! I have followed your work and the work of the DWC, and am very excited to talk with you today.
Let’s start by telling me a little bit about the Democratic Women’s Caucus, why it was formed, and why it’s still needed.
Leger Fernández: The Democratic Women’s Caucus is made up of all the Democratic women who serve in Congress. In the last four years, we spent a lot of time looking at policy that we could get passed, and we did great things in the 117th Congress—from the child tax credit, to looking at how we address reproductive healthcare. We also pushed the administration, the Biden-Harris administration, to take action that supports women. And I think there are some key pillars to that, that support women’s economic prosperity, that support lowering costs for women and families, that support women’s reproductive healthcare and freedoms. We actually have a fourth pillar: protecting women against sexual violence, because in this moment we are in, we recognize that that is also an important pillar to the work we must do, like the Violence Against Women Act, which is key to women’s safety. But right now, we have nominees to the cabinet who would not honor the Violence Against Women Act and would be likely charged if the allegations [against them] are true, under some of the provisions that the Violence Against Women Act is intended to cover.
Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) at a news conference on the Wildfire Response and Drought Resiliency Act inside the U.S. Capitol on July 28, 2022. (Nathan Posner / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
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Rep. Leger Fernandez with Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) (second from left), Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) (fourth from right), executive vice president of MomsRising Donna Norton (second from right) and Rep. Kathy Manning (D-N.C.) (right) during a Mother’s Day press conference calling for action on care and reproductive rights on May 08, 2024. (Jemal Countess / Getty Images for MomsRising)
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Leger Fernández: Well, there’s going to be a lot of legal issues. It is both unconstitutional and against existing law to separate families, as the incoming president has suggested. How cruel is it to say that we will deport citizen children because their parents might not have their documents? So, one strategy is to appeal [to the courts], both how mean these policies are, and they are unconstitutional. You cannot deport citizens from the United States, and when they do roundups, they will be rounding up American citizens who are adults as well, because that just is what happens when you try this. When they’ve tried this in the past … you happen to look Chinese, you happen to look, you know, Mexican or Salvadoran, you happen to look like somebody who you don’t think should be in the country – you are violating, you will violate American’s civil rights.
But a more important aspect of this is the economic perspective. Immigrants perform some of the most essential tasks in this country, from caring for your children in daycare centers to caring for your grandmother and grandfather in nursing homes. They are doing those difficult jobs of picking our food, of [working in] poultry facilities that are difficult, that are smelly, that are dangerous, so they are doing jobs that we rely on. And if we engage in mass deportation, we are going to impose an incredible penalty on American families where they’re going to be paying more for their childcare, for their elder care, for their food, for their construction, all of the things that Americans said we wanted to address our economic condition is going to get worse – an unabashed betrayal of the reason why certain people said they voted for [Trump]. They said we’re concerned about the economy, yet every time he speaks or his billionaire bros speak, they talk about policies that will impose an economic hardship on regular working families, right? Elon Musk was just here [at the capitol] saying, oh, there’s going to be hardship, but don’t worry about it. Right? That hardship might be something he doesn’t have to worry about with his billions. But working families, and especially families that are headed by women, are going to suffer. So, it’s a complete betrayal of the trust that voters placed in Trump, and he hasn’t even started yet.
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https://msmagazine.com/2024/12/12/rep-teresa-leger-fernandez-project-2025-republicans-trump-congress-democratic-women/