What’s the best way to advocate for immigrants? Vote for candidates who support them.

“We need to take away children.”[1]

The details around the policy to separate children from their families, including breastfeeding infants, broke in a New York Times piece this month. And, though these words were horrifying, they were largely unsurprising to most immigration advocates. The details we learned in this story are just a continuation of the last four years of inhumane immigration policies instituted by our federal government.

Because I’m an immigration attorney and it’s one month out from the most important election of our lives and because more details around family border separation are just now coming to light, many people have been asking me lately how best to advocate for immigrants.

I have a simple answer to that question. Vote for federal candidates who support immigrants and have shown that support. That’s it. That’s the full answer.

The President himself has more power in immigration law than nearly any other area of law. He sets immigration enforcement priorities, like whether we deport murderers or mothers working without authorization trying to support their families and whether we send immigrants caught at the border to live with family while their case is adjudicated or to live in cells separated from their children.

The President alone determines the number of refugees we allow in each fiscal year. In President Obama’s last full year in office, we admitted 85,000 refugees. President Trump just set a refugee cap of 15,000 refugees for fiscal year 2021.

The President has the power to set or end executive orders to protect immigrants. President Obama issued DACA, which included protections for children who were brought to the United States as children, an executive order version of the Dream Act. Included in DACA is a provision that allows recipients to work lawfully. Trump has tried repeatedly to end those protections and put over 640,000 DACA recipients at risk of deportation and out of the workforce.

And we also must vote to flip the Senate. There are plenty of legislators on both sides of the aisle that support immigration reform in whole or in part. However, we have a Senate Majority Leader, our own Mitch McConnell, who refuses to bring these bills to the floor of the Senate for a vote. If we have a Senate Majority Leader who will never bring these bills to the floor, it does not matter how many bipartisan immigration reform bills we have.

When people ask how to best advocate for immigrants, I think they envision sending letters and making calls to their legislators, and this is how our legislative bodies should function; they should respond to the voices of their constituents. However, in immigration reform, letters and calls to your legislators truly do not matter. Your legislator’s support for a bill that will never be brought for a vote is entirely irrelevant.

We must vote out our President as a vote for our immigrant neighbors and we must flip the Senate so that bipartisan immigration bills can be brought to the floor and voted on by the people we have elected to represent us.

Sarah Eads Adkins is the Executive Director of Neighbors Immigration Clinic in Lexington.