Seventeen Years and an Alphabet Soup of Visas: Pramila Jayapal's Long Road to Congress

Immigrant Trailblazers is a series profiling immigrants who have left a lasting mark on the United States.

The room was the old Immigration and Naturalization Service building in Seattle, and it was full: hundreds of people from around the world, each holding a small American flag. They renounced the citizenship they were born with and recited the oath together. One woman in the crowd, a nonprofit organizer in her thirties, could not stop crying.

Pramila Jayapal has since written about that day. The tears, she explained, were not only joy. Standing there, she understood that she would never again live on the same continent as her parents.

Getting to that room had taken 17 years. It had taken several degrees, a marriage and what she called “an alphabet soup of visas.” It had also taken one terrible choice in a hospital in India, a choice that cost her the green card she had spent years earning.

On Tuesday, voters in Seattle sent Jayapal back to Congress for a sixth term, by a margin of more than 80 percent in early returns. She is the first Indian American woman ever to serve in the U.S. House. She is also, still, one of the few people in Congress who can describe the immigration system from the inside of its paperwork.

Sixteen, alone, and on the family’s savings

Jayapal was born in Madras, now Chennai, in September 1965, into a Malayali family. She spent most of her childhood outside India, in Indonesia and Singapore, where she attended an international school in Jakarta. In 1982, at 16, she flew to the United States by herself to start college. Her parents, she has written, paid for it with the last of their modest savings.

Her early American life looked like a conventional success story. She earned an English degree at Georgetown and an MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School, worked as a financial analyst at PaineWebber and then sold medical products. In 1991 she left the private sector for public health and international development work.

Through all of it she was on temporary status. Marrying a U.S. citizen finally brought a green card, at about the same moment she won a two-year fellowship to live in India. She planned it carefully: she would come back to the United States near the end of the fellowship to give birth and protect her permanent residency.

Her daughter had other plans. She arrived in India at 26 and a half weeks, weighing 1 pound, 14 ounces. Doctors gave her about a 40 percent chance of survival. Jayapal would not leave. Staying abroad put her green card at risk, and she stayed anyway.

Her daughter survived. Jayapal’s institute helped negotiate the return of her green card through the U.S. embassy, but the years she had already counted toward citizenship were wiped out. She started the clock again, waited three more years, passed the tests and, in 2000, walked into that room in Seattle.

After September 11

The attacks of September 11, 2001, turned a development worker into an organizer. As Muslim, Arab and South Asian residents of Seattle faced harassment, Jayapal founded a group called Hate Free Zone. Its lawsuit against the Bush administration’s immigration agency helped halt the deportation of more than 4,000 Somalis. In 2008 the organization was renamed OneAmerica, and it grew into one of Washington state’s largest immigrant-rights groups. She led it until 2012.

In 2014 she won a seat in the Washington State Senate, where she passed a law creating pre-apprenticeship programs for women and people of color. Two years later, when longtime Rep. Jim McDermott retired, she ran for his seat and won. She was the first Indian American woman in the House and the first Asian American to represent Washington state in Congress.

174 women in a federal prison

The moment that defined her national profile came in June 2018, at the height of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy. On June 9 she went inside the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, south of Seattle, and spent nearly three hours with 174 immigrant women being held there. They came from 16 countries, most from Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. More than a third were mothers who had been separated from their children at the border. Most had not spoken to those children in weeks and did not know where they were.

She came out and called their treatment “cruel and inhumane.” Within weeks she was arrested at a sit-in protest in a Senate office building. For a woman who once risked her own status for her infant, the separated mothers were not an abstraction.

Power, and its complications

Jayapal rose fast. She co-chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus from 2019 and chaired it alone from 2021 to 2025, turning it into one of the most organized blocs in the House. She was the lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act. In 2025 she led opposition to President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill, which she dubbed “one big, beautiful betrayal.”

Her career has also produced moments that cut against the triumphant arc. In 2019 she introduced a resolution criticizing India’s crackdown in Kashmir; India’s foreign minister responded by canceling a meeting with U.S. lawmakers rather than sit down with her. The first Indian American congresswoman had been snubbed by the Indian government. In 2022, a letter she organized urging President Biden to pursue negotiations with Russia over Ukraine was withdrawn a day after it was released. In 2023 she called Israel a “racist state” at a caucus event, then apologized, and later voted for a House resolution rejecting that description. A 2021 BuzzFeed News report quoted former staffers describing her office as volatile; her office called the allegations sexist and lacking context.

Her admirers see a leader willing to take hard positions and own her mistakes. Her critics see someone whose convictions sometimes outrun her caution. Both describe the same politician.

The promise, revisited

This summer, as the country marked its 250th anniversary, Jayapal returned to her own story in an essay for The Nation. She described the naturalization ceremony, the premature birth and the lost green card. Then she argued that the American dream she lived is now out of reach for most people trying to follow her: legal pathways narrowed, detention expanded, and an immigration code that Congress has failed to modernize in more than 30 years.

It is the central tension of her career. She is living proof that the system can work, and its most persistent critic. She got through the door, and she has spent two decades arguing that it is closing behind her.

Somewhere in her past is that room in Seattle, the hundreds of small flags, and a woman crying because she had become an American and because of what becoming one had cost. Her essay ended on the idea that the promise of that day only survives if each citizen defends it. This week, her district handed her two more years to try.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds an LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Diego and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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