By Erasmus Baxter
Former Associated Students Vice President for Governmental Affairs Ana Ramirez will return to her position Wednesday after the AS Board decided to set aside the bylaws and give her the position back.
The AS Board made the decision on Friday, April 13 after discussing it in closed executive sessions during their meetings that day and the previous Friday. Ramirez sent a letter asking for the position back to the board that they read during the second executive session.
“I’m very excited, it doesn’t feel real honestly. I’ve waited so long for this,” she said in an interview.
Ramirez, who is undocumented, stepped down February 5 after being prevented from fully taking the position due to her lack of work authorization.
She cited a lack of support and the stress of trying to do the job in the face of institutional resistance as reasons for stepping down, in a statement at the time.
AS President Simrun Chhabra said they are excited to have Ramirez back.
“This is our chance to do right by this community who’s been severely marginalized,” they said. “It’s an opportunity and I hope we will use it to its full advantage to be able to create a space where these students who hold undocumented identities or, even like, marginalized identities find themselves being empowered.”
In making the decision, the board decided to ignore the process set in the bylaws to fill an AS Board vacancy. Chhabra said in a Facebook message that she will issue a press release later this week explaining why they decided to ignore the bylaws.
The board had previously decided to ignore the bylaws by leaving the position open. They did so to recognize that students had elected Ramirez and that there were structural issues preventing her from filling the position, they said in a statement at the time.
According to the bylaws, a vacancy on the board is supposed to be filled by holding a widely publicized 10-day filing period to solicit applicants, and then waiting five days for the AS Board to pick from at least two of the candidates that the AS President picks to bring to the board.
Since Ramirez resigned she has been approved for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program that allows undocumented people who arrived as children to obtain work authorization that she applied for after being elected.
Ramirez said a conversation with another undocumented student at “Beyond HB1079”, a conference for undocumented students in Washington where she was a keynote speaker in March, helped convince her to retake the job. The student asked Ramirez if she should still transfer to Western after what Ramirez went through.
“I kind of became a symbol for undocumented students,” Ramirez said. “I felt really bad for leaving in the first place, because I felt it showed if you do push undocumented students away long enough they will eventually leave and stop trying. And I didn’t want other people to think they could do that to undocumented students, and I didn’t want other undocumented students to think they should also give up.”
The other reason she wanted to come back: she loved her job.
While she pointed out it took till the next AS election for her to finally fully assume her job, she’s still excited to help coordinate federal lobby day (she wants to end up in congress one day) and work on the Washington Student Association’s legislative agenda for next year.
Both federal lobby day, and the upcoming local lobby day will feature items supporting undocumented students, Chhabra said.
Now that she has work authorization Ramirez isn’t worried about any pushback in taking her role she said, but she sees the fact that it took getting DACA to allow that as problematic. She said the university should support all undocumented students, or at least try to.
Despite all she’s been through she’d still encourage undocumented students to run for the board, even without DACA, she said.
“I have seen changes in the AS and across the university just from me alone,” she said. “…That’s happening because even though I didn’t have DACA I still wanted to try.”