Political Quotes

“I rise today to speak about a constituent of mine. Ilse is a 23-year-old graduate of the University of Washington who works at the Seattle Children's Hospital and is studying to become a nurse. She has faced a lot of challenges in her 23 years, not the least of which was being diagnosed with cancer when she was a teenager, going through treatment, and working to put herself through college. And if the outstanding costs of cancer treatment weren't difficult enough for her, Ilse was brought to the United States by her mother when she was 6 months old as an undocumented immigrant, which makes navigating our health care system even harder. Ilse persevered through her cancer treatment. She worked her way through high school with an impressive list of extracurriculars and went on to earn a scholarship that eventually got her to the front steps of her dream school, the University of Washington. When I met Ilse in 2013, she told me that after 15 years of waiting for her petition to obtain a visa, she lost the opportunity to obtain legal residency when she turned 21 years old. But thanks to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, she had a second chance. She said she doesn't know where she would be now without that second chance. She told me that DACA opened doors that were previously closed to her.…”