Follow @UnitedWeDream on Twitter for Immigrant Youth Live Reactions to Rick Scott and Bill Nelson
Miami, FL—Immigrant youth and allies with United We Dream Action are looking forward to the first Senate debate between Bill Nelson and Rick Scott in Miami broadcasted on Telemundo at 7:00pm tonight.
“Rick Scott is showing a lot of fake love to immigrants, especially to Latinos, as he campaigns for U.S. Senate,” said Maria Bilbao, an organizer with United We Dream Action, the largest network of immigrant youth in Florida and across the country. “We see through the photo ops and know the truth. Rick Scott has always supported anti-immigrant policies and aligned himself with the likes of Trump.”
Rick Scott started his political career calling for Arizona’s “Show Me Your Papers” law to be enacted here in Florida when he campaigned for governor in 2010. At the time, it was the strictest and harshest anti-immigrant law in the country authorizing law enforcement to racially profile people they believed “look” undocumented. As governor, Scott opposed DACA when it was first issued in 2012, vetoed driver’s licenses for undocumented people in Florida when it passed in the state legislature, and praised his Attorney General when she joined the lawsuit to prevent the expansion of DACA and implementation of DAPA, preventing millions of immigrant parents and young people from being protected from deportation. Both programs would’ve improved the lives of 79,000 immigrant youth and 150,000 parents in Florida.
But Rick Scott is covering all that up this election year, and instead, panders to immigrant and Latino communities with fake smiles and photos-ops–like at a recent campaign bus stop with Puerto Ricans in Central Florida. While he pledged a personal crusade to rebuild Puerto Rico when talking to that community, he hid all the ways he is setting up Puerto Rican and other Latino students in Florida to fail.
This week, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos approved Rick Scott’s Florida’s Education Accountability Plan, which fails to include a requirement to offer students standardized testing in Spanish, making the test unnecessarily difficult for non-English proficient students.
Press is invited to watch the debate with United We Dream Action immigrant youth tonight.