MIAMI — Not three weeks had passed since Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis made headlines all over the country after taking credit for sending planes full of mostly undocumented Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard when U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar — a Cuban American freshman congresswoman from Miami — addressed a small group of migrants in Doral.
“I assure you, these people would kiss the floor because no other country has given them the opportunities that the United States has given them as residents and now as citizens,” Salazar told the couple of TV cameras that showed up at the Tuesday night event earlier this month.
It had all the makings of an intimate campaign event as Salazar seeks reelection for Florida’s newly redrawn Congressional District 27 against Democrat Annette Taddeo, a Colombian American state senator.
Except the handful of people sitting inside the Republican National Committee’s Hispanic Community Center in West Miami-Dade were not citizens yet. They were celebrating the conclusion of a GOP-led civics course as they prepared to take the U.S. citizenship exam. After brief off-the-cuff remarks, Salazar took selfies with the soon-to-be citizens, all of whom said they were Cuban. She finished by leading them in a chant: “Long live the United States of America.”
“We have a very big problem … the border, which is a total area of absolute irresponsibility from the Biden administration, and it’s affecting us tremendously,” Salazar told reporters afterward. “’Us’ meaning the Hispanics because we do not want illegals. We don’t want fentanyl. We don’t want child sex traffickers. We don’t want coyotes.”
The battle for Florida’s Congressional District 27 — where now 73% of the voting age population is Hispanic, the highest in the state — is pitting two Latinas against each other in what has become a nationally watched race and an indicator of where Hispanic voters stand on immigration and democratic systems at home and abroad.
While Salazar, a former TV journalist, has made speaking against communist regimes in Latin America her political brand, Taddeo has tried to cast Salazar as a Republican extremist akin to deniers of the 2020 election results as proof Salazar does not defend democracy in the U..S.
“You hear me over and over and talk about democracy right here, you have to defend it here,” Taddeo said during an event last month.
Salazar, 60, defeated former U.S. Rep. Donna Shalala in a surprising small-margin win in 2020, in a district that voted for President Joe Biden over Donald Trump by less than 3 percentage points that year. Now, with all of liberal Miami Beach out of the district, Florida’s CD-27 is slightly more Republican, with polls indicating Salazar has a slight advantage.
Months after winning her election, the congresswoman suggested on Spanish-language radio there might have been fraud in the Pennsylvania elections, a false claim peddled by former President Donald Trump.
And while she supported the initial proposal for a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, she did not support the version of the committee that ultimately passed in June in a largely party-line vote, and has attempted to discredit the commission as being “in the hands of Democrats.”
The RNC event on Oct. 4 mirrored Salazar’s message on the campaign trail. The “browns,” as she often refers to Hispanic voters, are fleeing to the Republican Party in South Florida because Democrats have failed them repeatedly on immigration, she says. And her district, which after the once-in-a-decade redistricting process has shifted from blue to purple, is ground zero for the Miami-Dade County red wave in the 2020 election.
Taddeo’s Colombian American story
Enter Taddeo, 55, who owns her own language services business called LanguageSpeak. After ditching a brief bid for governor that never gained traction, Taddeo said she was shifting to a federal campaign because she though she would receive more support from Democrats for a challenge to Salazar than a Democratic gubernatorial primary bid against Charlie Crist, with whom she campaigned in 2014.
She said she wanted her campaign to focus on affordability, gun safety in schools and access to abortion.
“We’re going to highlight anything and everything that is going to show a huge contrast between someone that is actually a public servant and respected across the aisle, that’s going to work together with everyone, like I’ve done in Tallahassee, versus someone who’s performing,” Taddeo told the Miami Herald last month.
The first Latina to be elected to the Florida Senate, Taddeo has often been an effective surrogate for Democrats communicating to Miami’s conservative-leaning Hispanics, many of whom have direct experiences under communist, socialist and autocratic regimes. She has at times broken ranks with her party, including with Biden, on foreign policy issues regarding Cuba, Venezuela and her native Colombia.
She was recently endorsed by Al Cárdenas, a Cuban American businessman and the former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. In his endorsement, he said he was backing Taddeo because she “puts her country and her state above herself.”
Taddeo also argues Republican’s “socialist” attack on Democrats does not work on her. Taddeo often retells her story of being forced to flee Colombia after her father was kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — a Marxist guerrilla force — as a child. She first lived in Alabama and moved to Miami after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to help her South Florida family.
“We know what happens when people hear my story,” Taddeo said. “They come overwhelmingly towards me.”
In mailers and ads, Democrats have even tried to turn the “socialist” attack against Salazar. One such mailer distributed in the district and paid for by the Florida Democratic Party read, “Two Candidates for Congress. One is a Capitalist... The Other Is Not.” And pointing to her stances on abortion restrictions and voting against the “Build Back Better” bill in the U.S. House, it adds: “Maria Salazar Talks Like a Conservative... Votes Like a Socialist.”
Before the DeSantis-backed flights to Martha’s Vineyard, Taddeo also countered it was hypocritical of Salazar to advocate for immigration reform and say Democrats politicize immigration, when people in her own party were vowing to send migrants to other Democratic states to make a statement.
“We have the Republicans in Florida actually talking about busing immigrants to Delaware, which is extremely political,” she said. “So if we want to throw stones, don’t have a glass house.”
Salazar’s ‘Dignity Act’
Still, Salazar’s main message on the campaign trail has focused on inflation, the economy and her efforts to pass an immigration reform law, which she introduced in February and called the “The Dignity Act.” The law promises to overhaul the U.S. immigration system by offering a path to legal residency to migrants who have been in the U.S. since at least July 2016 or earlier.
Participants in the Dignity Program would have to pass a criminal-background check, pay taxes on wages and pay $10,000 in restitution over 10 years to the federal government for entering the country illegally. The bill also promises to reinforce the U.S. southern border and create an expedited process for asylum seekers.
“Democrats have used Hispanics as well as African Americans, but I’m not going to speak for them because I am brown, I’m Hispanic, I know what my lane is. They’ve used us vilely, by using the siren song ‘Vote for me and I will give you immigration reform,'” Salazar said during an event in April with the LIBRE Initiative at El Atlacatl, a Salvadoran restaurant in Little Havana. “Citizenship can come later. Right now it’s about dignity, which is what a lot of people want.”
But critics of her bill — from both the right and the left — have argued it doesn’t go far enough or is too lenient with undocumented immigrants. Asked about the chances the long-shot bill would pass before the end of the year, Salazar said it would only pass if voters gave Republicans control of the U.S. House. And despite promising high-level Republicans would back the bill, the legislation has faced blowback from right-wing pundits.
“The GOP has realized that the Hispanics are coming to the party,” Salazar has insisted. “So you know that I am one of the loudest voices within the GOP, telling my own people that it’s time to welcome the browns.”
In response to a question about whether she supported DeSantis’ efforts to send mostly Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and how she reconciled the action with her own bill, Salazar diverted attention to Biden’s own immigration failures.
“You see, that’s the problem, that you only concentrate on what DeSantis is doing and I’m concentrating on what caused it,” Salazar said. “I’m going to be the loudest voice within my party and with the Democrats that is time to pay attention to the browns, to Latinos, the Hispanics, the largest minority in the country.”
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