Nevada’s Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt has taken a hard-line stance against protecting the rights of DREAMers and illegal immigration despite the fact that his grandmother was undocumented and faced deportation, Axios reports.
Laxalt’s father, the late New Mexico senator Pete Domenici, revealed in a Senate floor speech in 2006 that federal immigration authorities once detained his Italian-born mother, who came into the U.S. when she was 3 and had no idea she was “an illegal alien.”
Domenici said he was a child when federal authorities came and took her away in the 1940s.
“They decided she had to be arrested because she was an illegal alien. So, sure enough, they came to do that and a neighbor had to come over to take care of us kids. I was about 9 or 10. I was pretty frightened,” he said at the time.
Domenici said his family paid for lawyers to fix her immigration status six months after she was detained. The lawyers amended her “certificate of arrival” to say she came in legally in 1907, according to Axios.
Astrid Silva, a DREAMer activist in Las Vegas, told Axios that undocumented immigrants today do not have the same opportunities, and are usually deported before they can fix their status.
Nevada is home to about 12,000 DREAMers. As attorney general of the state, Laxalt joined a Texas-led lawsuit against DACA, the Obama-era policy that protected over 800,000 immigrants, who were brought to the US as children, from deportation. He likened DACA to amnesty for illegal immigrants, according to Axios.
Laxalt also spent thousands on radio ads during the GOP primary touting his opposition to protecting DREAMers.
“Why doesn’t he want people today to have the same benefits that his own grandmother got?” Amy Maldonado, an immigration lawyer asked.
Last week, fourteen members of Laxalt’s family endorsed his Democratic opponent, incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.
