Pramila Jayapal

(born 1965)

“A message to women of color out there: stand strong. Refuse to be patronized or minimized.”

Years in political office: 2015–present

Position: Washington member of the US House of Representatives, 2017–present; Washington state senator, 2015–2016

Party affiliation: Democrat

Hometown: Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Top causes: immigration, health care, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and college tuition support

Life Story

Jayapal was born in the megacity of Chennai, India. Her Malayali Indian family lived in Indonesia and Singapore, but young Jayapal decided at the age of sixteen to attend a pair of top-tier educational institutions in the United States—first, Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and then Chicago’s Northwestern University for her master’s degree in business administration.

Between academic programs, she worked as a Wall Street financial analyst. She realized from that experience that her life needed to take an entirely different direction. “I felt empty,” she remembers, “and looking at people around me, how they were empty.” After graduation, she tried a variety of jobs, including working for a nonprofit in Thailand and in sales and marketing for a midwestern company that made cardiac defibrillators. A position at an international public health NGO (nongovernmental organization, or nonprofit) meant she got to travel to developing countries to oversee loans for women’s health programs. One of her assignments sent her on a two-year stint in India.

But things got complicated when the baby she and her husband at the time were expecting came early. Her child, Janak, was in the emergency room for six weeks, preventing Jayapal from returning to the United States to take care of the necessary paperwork for renewing her green card in time. Though Janak was an automatic US citizen because of their father, these events put Jayapal’s future in the country at risk. She had to make a special appeal to immigration authorities to let her back in the United States, and even then the delay set her back three years in getting her permanent citizenship. Seeing firsthand how immigration bureaucracy has the potential to break up families like her own convinced Jayapal that she had a bigger role to play in national policy.

In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, in which Islamic militants hijacked planes and crashed into buildings in New York City and near Washington, DC, Jayapal grew concerned about the dangers and discrimination immigrants were facing after the tragedy. She started an organization called Hate Free Zone (later known as OneAmerica) that grew from a single-room office in Seattle to a $2.1 million organization with seventeen full-time employees. Hate Free Zone successfully sued the administration of President George W. Bush to stop the deportation of more than twenty-seven hundred Somali refugees. Jayapal became a nationally recognized voice for immigrants, and in 2014 she joined a hunger strike protesting the high numbers of deportations by the Obama administration.

What’s on Her Agenda

As someone so determined to make a difference in the world, Jayapal felt called to government. Jayapal’s first position was on the Washington State Senate, but within a few years she was representing Washington in the US House of Representatives. There, she showed her strong opinions right out of the gates, joining more than sixty Democrats who refused to attend Trump’s inauguration.

Jayapal has since developed a reputation as one of the House’s most progressive thinkers and also as someone with enough political savvy to get left-of-center ideas considered by her more centrist Democratic peers. After just two years in the House, she had risen to coleader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which represents almost half of her party’s members and places her in a prime position to bend House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (page 154) ear when it comes to legislative priorities.

During a floor discussion of a 2019 anti-LGBTQ discrimination bill, Jayapal even made a last-minute decision to share the story of her nonbinary child, Janak, to sway her colleagues to support the bill. She’s also spoken out about having an abortion after doctors told her the child would likely face a birth process as risky as Janak’s was.

Even though she’s a relative newcomer herself, Jayapal has taken a crucial role as mentor to the wave of young women of color who were elected to Congress in 2018. Some of her key advice has been to make the connection between broad policy issues and the ways they affect United States residents. She’s even been known to invite fellow Democrats to her house for dinner, as the world learned when she, House representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (page 140) of New York, and a box of tomato soup showed up on AOC’s Instagram feed.

As of 2019, Jayapal was one of the 13 percent of US congressional members who are immigrants or children of immigrants. In 2018, after the family-separation policy of US immigration enforcement agencies was exposed, she became the first congressperson to meet with people in immigration detention centers being held separate from their children.

Awesome Achievements

Quotables

“I think there’s a lot of people who, because I’m a woman, because I’m a person of color, and because I look younger than people think I am, they take me for granted. And that’s helpful sometimes, because you don’t always need to be loud from day one.”

“My beautiful, now twenty-two-year-old child told me last year that they were gender non-conforming, and over the last year, I have come to understand from a deeply personal mother’s perspective . . . their newfound freedom . . . to rid themselves of some conformist stereotype of who they are, to be able to express who they are at their real core.”

“It’s really important not to let the outside world define you, and to be strong in standing up for what you believe in, but also be strategic.”

“A fair and forward-looking immigration system must be at the heart of America’s moral imagination.”