WASHINGTON — There is a word for what Maria Elvira Salazar is doing on Capitol Hill, and it isn’t leadership. It isn’t reform. The word, as Mike Fernandez — a Cuban-American billionaire who knows something about exile and something about cowardice — put it plainly in the Miami Herald, is this: “They may talk tough, but that is really to cover their cowardice.”
Salazar, the Miami Republican who represents one of the most immigrant-dense congressional districts in the country, has spent years marketing herself as the reasonable face of immigration reform — a daughter of Cuban exiles who understands the stakes. Her vehicle is the Dignity Act, a bill she has promoted with the fervor of a televangelist and the conviction of someone who voted, in the same breath, to make its core promise illegal.
That’s not a typo.
In May 2023, Salazar voted for the Secure the Border Act, a piece of legislation that would have gutted the very parole authority that kept hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans — her constituents — lawfully in the United States. The bill passed 219-213.
