New York Times
By Julia Preston
October 8, 2013
As several thousand demonstrators rallied around them, eight members of the House of Representatives were arrested on Tuesday outside the Capitol in a protest to push Congress to pass broad immigration legislation that includes a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.
The protests came as most attention in Congress was focused on the standoff over the partial government shutdown and the partisan disputes over health care and fiscal policy, pushing immigration to the side.
The lawmakers, all Democrats, were detained by the Capitol Police after they stood silently in a line in the middle of a street that borders the Capitol lawn, blocking traffic. As the police handcuffed them behind their backs and led them away, a crowd pressed in, chanting, “Let them go!”
The representatives arrested were Joseph Crowley and Charles B. Rangel of New York, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Al Green of Texas, Luis V. Gutierrez and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, Raul M. Grijalva of Arizona and John Lewis of Georgia. More than 150 other protesters, many from labor unions and immigrant organizations, were also arrested after they sat down and linked arms in the same street.
The arrests came after a rally by thousands of supporters of an immigration overhaul held in the middle of the National Mall, with a stage and live music by the Tigres del Norte, a popular Mexican-American band.
In a storm of Twitter posts, conservatives questioned how the immigration groups could hold a demonstration on the Mall, which is a national park, when national parks and memorials are closed as a result of the government shutdown. House Republicans have tried to reopen parks and monuments while keeping most of the federal government closed.
Conservatives said the Obama administration was showing a double standard by allowing the rally a week after World War II veterans were blocked from entering their memorial on the Mall. The veterans went in despite barricades placed there. After that, the National Park Service said veterans would be allowed to enter the memorial during the shutdown.
In a statement, the Park Service said it had allowed the immigration rally as an expression of “First Amendment rights,” the same rationale it had provided for opening the war memorial.
“The Mall is supposed to be shut,” said Brad Botwin, the director of Help Save Maryland, an anti-illegal-immigrant group, who joined a handful of people at the Mall to protest the immigration demonstration. “Why is the Park Service helping illegal immigrant groups and desperate labor unions to have a rally today?”
From the stage, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, thanked the White House for giving permission for the rally to proceed.
At midday, House Democratic leaders broke away briefly from the tense debates inside the Capitol to tell the demonstrators that they would press for a vote on a bill in the House this year.
Ms. Pelosi said Democrats would support broad legislation with a “path to earned citizenship" for unauthorized immigrants. Democrats said they were confident there was a majority in the House, including Republicans and Democrats, to pass such a bill.
“Let’s get a vote on the floor,” Ms. Pelosi said.
Democrats are working to put their mark on the issue with the Latino and other immigrant groups at the rally. They introduced a bill in the House last week that closely matches broad legislation passed by the Senate in June. But that bill had no Republican sponsors and seemed unlikely to advance.
Several House Republicans — including Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, both of Florida, and Jeff Denham and David Valadao, both of California — appeared at the rally to call for bipartisan efforts to pass an immigration overhaul.
In an interview, Mr. Denham said immigration could be less divisive than the fiscal issues that led to the shutdown. He added that repairing the immigration system could be an “economic driver” that would help reduce the deficit.
But Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, said that given the raw feelings between the parties in the House, the prospects for action on immigration were not clear.
“A huge majority of the American people think we ought to fix the immigration system, and we have the votes to do it,” Ms. Lofgren said. “But there is no vote. There is a problem here with the American democracy.”
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