Ana Ramirez is still in limbo.
Three months after the Associated Students vice president for Governmental Affairs was supposed to assume her position, not much has been resolved.
“I still don’t have keys to my office. I’m still not supposed to have access to my emails,” she said, speaking to over 40 people crowded into the Ethnic Student Center on Friday, Sept. 29.
Ramirez, who is undocumented, has been prevented from assuming her position by administrators due to her lack of work authorization. She is currently waiting for her DACA application to be approved after it was expedited by Sen. Maria Cantwell and Rep. Rick Larsen. (DACA is program created by President Obama to allow undocumented people who came to the U.S as children to obtain temporary work authorization.)
In the meantime, the AS Board has created a new, unpaid volunteer position for her as “consultant for governmental affairs.” This means all the work of her position is being done by the other AS Board members while she “consults” on how it should be done.
The biggest issue she has faced is a lack of communication from administration.
“I guess they think they’ve done enough,” she said.
The Office of the Attorney General which serves as Western’s lawyers said they will stop looking into ways to resolve her case, and administrators have refused to release any legal documents relating to her case despite repeated requests, the most recent being two weeks ago.
This is emblematic of her relationship with administrators in the AS and university so far. Although the university was aware of her situation as early as April, she didn’t receive any official communication about her position till June, when she was kicked off a search committee by an AS adviser who told her that she couldn’t assume the position due to her lack of work authorization.
When the AS Board met to discuss her situation with Western’s lawyer she was also barred by an AS adviser who said it was because she was not on the payroll.
Emails requesting to meet with administrators went unanswered until she sent out a press release explaining her situation.
She says she now kind of regrets going public, not a whole lot, because she got what she wanted in still being in the AS, but because of the hate directed towards her father.
“I don’t care how people feel about me. I care about how people feel about my dad,” she said with emotion in her voice.
When her parents came to drop her off at school this fall she made her father order pizza instead of going out for dinner, because she was worried about his safety.
The situation is has impacted her parents in other ways too. Since she can’t receive her pay they have had to support her financially.
However, Ramirez is less concerned about her pay than actually getting the position. She plans to introduce a resolution at the next board meeting to distribute her back pay of $4,013.94 equally between the ESC and Representation and Engagement Programs.
“I don’t care about the money, it’s about something more,” she said.
In the meantime, she is trying to figure out how to move forward. Including deal with all the extra stress, attention and work involved.
“I decided to hold this forum because people keep asking me, and I’m just trying to live,” she said.
In the room there was broad support for taking action to support Ramirez. Students and faculty proposed letter writing campaigns, or protests targeting administration. Also discussed was including supporting language in the Associated Students legislative lobbying agenda to assist undocumented students in similar situations, like is currently in effect in California.
Another issue raised was that Eastern Washington University was able to successfully compensate an undocumented member of their student government who didn’t qualify for DACA through scholarships and tuition waivers. Western’s administration has been in contact with Eastern, but has failed to explain why they can not do the same
Associate professor of history Ricardo Lopez said he would raise Ramirez’s situation in meetings between the faculty union and administration — at the executive committee meeting on Tuesday and with President Randhawa the week after.
In the meantime, Ramirez is relying on her friends and trying to figure out what to do next. She will make any further announcements over Facebook, she said.
“They treat me like shit,” she said. “Because I see it as a bigger issue, I’m going to stick with it.”
[Photo: Ana Ramirez poses for her portrait in June. Hailey Hoffman // AS Review]