by Andrea Bazan, Monica Lozano, Ramon Murguía, Daniel Ortega & Jose Villarreal
As former Board Chairs of UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza), we applaud Cecilia Muñoz’ appointment to the Biden transition team. Latinos could not have a more qualified, authentic, and effective voice at the Biden transition table than Cecilia Muñoz.
For two decades Cecilia represented our community with distinction before joining the Obama Administration in 2009. She left UnidosUS with a distinguished record, having led the advocacy that preserved family-based immigration and created Temporary Protected Status for 800,000 Central Americans in 1990, restored billions of dollars’ worth of safety net benefits to millions of legal immigrants after they were eliminated in the 1996 welfare reform, ensured inclusion of Latino and other English Learner children in 2001 education reforms that nearly closed the White-Hispanic high school completion gap by the late 2000s, and helped hundreds of thousands of previously undocumented immigrants achieve lawful status through the “245i” program in the mid-2000s.
Unsurprisingly, her service as Domestic Policy Director in the Obama Administration has led to some controversy about her appointment to the Biden transition team. To be clear, we strongly opposed the Obama record on immigration policy, but some criticism we’ve seen of Cecilia’s selection is ill-informed and incomplete at best and reflects either ignorance or demagoguery at worst. Those who equate her official public statements on behalf of the administration with her internal views (a) weren’t in the room and couldn’t possibly know what she said privately; and (b) don’t know the first thing about how government works in the real world. And to invoke her name in the same sentence as Stephen Miller’s is outrageous. It reflects either willful ignorance of the totality of the Obama Administration’s domestic policy achievements or worse, a deliberate and cynical conflation of the track records of the Obama and Trump Administrations, just to get a clever soundbite. That’s the textbook definition of demagoguery.
Cecilia Muñoz has defended the Latino community for a professional lifetime and we believe that our highest traditions are best preserved by modeling the behavior we ask others to follow. And, in the transition to the next Administration we couldn’t ask for a better model than our longtime friend and colleague Cecilia Muñoz.
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Andrea Bazan is Chief Development Officer for the Los Angeles-based After School All Stars
Monica Lozano is former CEO of Los Angeles-based La Opinion
Ramon Murguía is at attorney in private practice in Kansas City, MO
Daniel Ortega is an attorney in private practice in Phoenix, AZ
Jose Villarreal is an attorney in private practice in San Antonio, TX and Washington, DC
All formerly chaired the Board of Directors of the National Council of La Raza (now UnidosUS)
