Republicans know immigrant votes matter. Don’t let them get away with suppressing our voice | Opinion

The Republicans know that the votes of Florida’s immigrant communities and people of color matter, which is why, election after election, they try so hard to suppress them. Our communities and allies now have less than two weeks to show that we, too, believe our votes matter.

Republicans suppressed enough of our votes in 2000 to give George Bush a 537-vote win in Florida, and the presidency. They purged 12,000 mostly black and Hispanic voters who, they claimed falsely, had felony records. Police intimidated voters at polling stations, and thugs disrupted the recount in Miami. In return we got the Iraq war and mass detention of immigrants after 9/11.

In 2012, Florida Secretary of State Kurt Detzner purged 182,000 “suspected non-citizen voters” using an obviously flawed database. More than 87 percent of the people on the purge list were minorities, 58 percent were Hispanic, and thousands of them were in fact citizens. But our communities came out and voted with such force that Barack Obama won anyway, in 2008 and 2012. In return, we got relief for DREAMers and reliable extensions of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) when justified.

In 2016, the Republicans suppressed enough votes to give Donald Trump a narrow 1 percent victory in Florida. President Trump has institutionalized anti-immigrant hatred. We’vie seen the forced sterilization of women in immigrant detention, detainees crowded into COVID-infected ICE prisons, traumatized children separated from their parents and the termination of TPS for more than 300,000 taxpayers from Latin America and the Caribbean. Trump left us defenseless against COVID, which has killed more than 16,000 in Florida and sickened over 750,000, disproportionately from immigrant communities that supply front-line workers to essential healthcare, transportation and food industries.

Our votes this year will matter more than ever, which is why our president, governor and the Republican machine are working overtime to suppress them. Trump cannot win the presidency — and continue his war against immigrant communities and people of color — without winning Florida.

The race is close; once again, polls predict the race will come down to turnout. So the president sabotaged the U.S. Postal Service and the Census. Republican operatives are spreading misinformation on television, radio and social media. On Election Day in our communities, we expect once again to see an intimidating law-enforcement presence near polling places, along with long lines, missing equipment and other snafus that will not plague polling places that deliver more Republican votes.

We can, and must, make our votes matter despite suppression attempts. But this will require an all-hands-on-deck community effort. We all need to either vote by mail if we have requested ballots, or even better, do early voting.

GOP suppression efforts target our most vulnerable community members — seniors, workers with jobs that make it hard to vote, people who struggle so much to get through the day that voting is a burden and people whose first language is not English. We are all called to do what we can — to encourage people to vote; to drive or accompany people to the polls; to translate the ballot for them.

We work too hard and contribute too much to the United States for our votes to be suppressed. Let’s do what we need to do make our votes count.

Alix Desulme is the vice mayor of North Miami.