Protesters briefly closed the Golden Gate Bridge, calling on Democrats to support undocumented migrants

Traffic gathered on the northbound lanes of the bridge as protesters denounced Democrats’ lack of action to pass meaningful immigration reform, stopping morning commuters for 20 minutes to symbolize “20 years of broken promises”.

“We are stepping up our actions and our undocumented families risk arrest and possibly deportation to send the message that we can no longer wait,” said Luis Angel Reyes Savalza, DACA recipient, himself an immigrant without documents. papers.

Morale was high among the few dozen who stopped the morning bridge commuters, despite potentially painful consequences if one was stopped.

Some protesters received citations on Thursday morning, but civil disobedience on the bridge does not appear to have led to any arrests.

“The immigrant community has endured a politics of fear on the part of Democrats and Republicans over the past 20 years, from horrific family separations to for-profit detention that has skyrocketed beyond recognition, inhuman treatment in detention centers and caging children at the border, ”Reyes told Savalza.

Traffic on the bridge resumed circulating shortly before 8 a.m. as the protest ended.

The protest, organized by the Movement for Citizenship for All (Papeles Para Todos) and the Bay Area Coalition for Economic Justice and Citizenship for All, also focused on climate and racial justice issues. They demanded a fairer economy.

“We were called essential workers and yet the Trump and Biden administrations excluded undocumented families from stimulus measures,” Reyes Savalza told The Chronicle.

The early morning car traffic blockage was timed to coincide with a possible congressional vote on the budget reconciliation bill, demanding Democrats bypass the Senate parliamentarian who excluded immigration provisions from the bill. $ 3.5 trillion law.

Activists’ frustration with Washington has an obvious antecedent: Immigration reform is an eternal goal of lawmakers and presidents that always fails, sometimes dramatically.

There have been attempts over the past 20 years that have come closer, most recently in 2013, when the Senate passed what has become the “Gang of Eight” Immigration Compromise. The massive bill to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants, overhaul the legal immigration system and strengthen border security was passed with a non-veto majority of over two-thirds of the Senate, a level of overwhelming consensus.

But he died in the House, where Republicans have grown fearful of anything seen as an “amnesty” for undocumented migrants. This position within the GOP has calcified with the rise of former President Donald Trump, who injected uncompromising anti-immigration policies into the mainstream of the party.

Even popular policies like providing a path to citizenship for the so-called Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, have been difficult to achieve, as the widely supported idea tends to get bogged down by other political interests trying to take a turn.

With Democrats in full control of Washington, supporters hoped the left would have learned its lesson during the Obama administration, when immigration reform was not a priority in the key early years in power.

So far, President Joe Biden has based his immigration hopes on a procedural tactic that would allow Democrats to tie legalization to a budget bill and bypass the required standard for 60 votes in the 100-member Senate. to advance legislation. The outlook for the plan is extremely bleak, as the Senate Rules of Procedure arbitrator has now ruled twice, most recently on Wednesday, that the Democrats’ proposals are not accepted to qualify for the maneuver, known as reconciliation name.

Defenders on the left have called on Biden and Senate Democrats to simply cancel the parliamentarian and pass it anyway or remove the 60-vote threshold requirement altogether, but Biden, a former senator, resisted.