A Political Operative on the Verge of Self-Deportation

One recent Sunday in August, Daysi González addressed a crowd of about seventy people in a sterile conference room in New York’s financial district. The people who were gathered at tables around her, eating buffet tacos and sipping cans of Coke Zero, were first- and second-generation Americans getting ready to run for office or to work on political campaigns. Some looked younger than thirty and were dressed casually, while others already looked the part of the candidate, in suits or high heels. González, a political consultant who’d come in from D.C., was there to give a seminar on mail—specifically, the postcards that get stuffed into mailboxes every campaign season. “People have to look at it,” González told the group. “Even if it’s just, you know, their mailbox to the recycling bin—they have to look.”

In an age of YouTube ads and paid political-content creators, the notion might seem quaint. But González, who’s thirty-one, has made it her job to figure out how to use the mail to help elect Democrats. On a projected slide deck, she flipped through examples of mailers that she and her firm had worked on: there was the familiar ALEXANDRIA ¡OCASIO! CORTEZ logo, a lotería-themed postcard that read “VOTE FOR OUR COMMUNITY, VOTE FOR RUBEN GALLEGO,” and another one, paid for by the Dolores Huerta Foundation and decorated with Día de los Muertos imagery, that read “VOTA PALOOZA.” González knows the rules of the game, and shared some loopholes that she’s learned along the way—for instance, that political-action committees cannot coordinate with campaigns, but that campaigns can post information, in hard-to-find corners of their websites, about what kind of advertising they happen to need help with. After González concluded her talk, an attendee asked about something she had mentioned earlier—that she was Salvadoran, and living in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” the person said. González, seeming impassive, said, “It’ll work out how it needs to.”

González is one of an estimated two hundred thousand Salvadorans whose legal immigration status is set to expire on September 9th, and one of about a million immigrants in the widening gyre of the Trump Administration’s delegalization drive. For González, who has lived in the U.S. nearly her entire life, the date is a brick wall of a deadline. “That’s when I sell my house, I sell my car, I buy a ticket, I pack everything I own, I get rid of everything I can’t take with me,” she told me.

Unlike most immigrants in America, González has a job that puts her in rooms with powerful people. As a partner at the consulting firm Solidarity Strategies, she tries to help Democrats win some of the most consequential races in the country, including James Talarico’s campaign for Senate, but also smaller names in red districts trying to flip the House. Her biggest client this cycle is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has paid her firm more than a hundred and eighty thousand dollars this year, according to the Federal Election Commission. {snip}

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González has fuzzy memories of El Salvador, which she left at the age of five to come to America. She remembers the day in December, 2000, that her family travelled to San Francisco, on tourist visas, and how her parents dressed her like a señora going to church: cardigan, frilly socks, and her nicest white dress, “to try to look as respectable as possible, I guess,” she said. In the next two months, earthquakes struck El Salvador, and the newly elected President George W. Bush created a legal status for Salvadorans who were then in the U.S. The family eventually settled in Tracy, in California’s Central Valley; many of the kids González grew up around were Mexican and Filipino, so they looked like her. {snip}

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González is planning to go back to El Salvador—a place where she has few relatives left, and where, although Rocha has offered to keep her as a remote worker, she’s not sure she’ll be able to keep her job. Then she’ll try to immigrate to another country, such as Spain. (Spain offers a digital-nomad visa, with a fast-tracked path to citizenship for Latin American nationals—“Like a sort of reparations program,” she said.) She’d started documenting her final month of T.P.S. on Instagram, initially hoping to catch the attention of someone in government, but she now thinks of the videos as more like “diaries.” In one, she notices that she’s out of rice, and laughingly considers whether she should bother buying another bag.

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