Andrew Romanoff pitches himself to Democratic voters as the proven progressive option in Colorado’s 2020 primary race for U.S. Senate.
But his record on immigration complicates that narrative. As Colorado’s House speaker from 2005 to 2009, he oversaw the passage of what at the time were considered among the most restrictive policies in the nation when it comes to people living in the U.S. illegally.
Romanoff has come under attack and been criticized for his role in a series of measures passed by the legislature in 2006, including during a special legislative session that year.
Senate Bill 90 was the most consequential of the 2006 measures, requiring local law enforcement to report arrestees to federal authorities if officers suspected them of being in the U.S. unlawfully. The bill was repealed in 2013. There were also policies restricting people living in the U.S. illegally from accessing government assistance programs and requiring business owners to provide proof of the legal work status of their employees.
“What is extraordinarily frustrating is that he’s never acknowledged the actual harm he helped create for the immigrant community – legislation that’s still impacting those communities,” said state Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Denver Democrat and longtime immigrant advocate. “I want to work alongside people to build the world that we all want to see. It’s hard to believe them when they were actively involved in building policies that harmed members of our community but who now say, ‘Trust me.’”
Romanoff says the measures produced unintended consequences that he deeply regrets. But at the time he maintained that the measures didn’t compromise his beliefs and told The Los Angeles Times that at least some of the policies were “tough, effective, enforceable and practical.”
Since then, Romanoff argues, he has worked hard to help immigrants by advocating for comprehensive policy reform – a goal he vows to continue toward if elected next year. He brushed off the idea that the legislation he supported in 2006 could hurt his standing with progressive voters.
“People can take anything they want into account when they are making a decision,” Romanoff told The Colorado Sun last week. “If they’re holding out for a candidate who’s never made a mistake, they probably won’t cast many votes.”
As for the criticism from Gonzales, who has spent more than a decade blasting Romanoff for his role in the 2006 bills, he said: “She’s definitely entitled to her feelings, but that criticism is at odds with the facts.”
Romanoff says he supported the repeal of Senate Bill 90 in 2013 and that he’s spent years trying to make up for the mistakes he made on immigration in 2006.
Romanoff’s 2020 U.S. Senate campaign platform includes support for a pathway to citizenship for those now living in the U.S. illegally. He also wants to expand visa programs for workers and protect people who are shielded from deportation under programs like Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
Finally, Romanoff said that crossing the U.S. border without permission should no longer be a crime and that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be done away with. “I think the agency has lost its credibility and needs to be replaced,” he said.
Romanoff has also been a fierce critic of President Donald Trump’s policies on immigration, saying Trump has demonized immigrants and is trying to divide the nation.
Romanoff’s record on immigration complicated his 2010 bid for U.S. Senate, in which former state Sen. Jessie Ulibarri accused him of demonstrating “that if it’s politically expedient for him, he’s willing to sacrifice the most vulnerable in the Latino communities,” according to a Denver Post article.
Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman used Romanoff’s immigration record as an attack point in Romanoff’s 2014 bid for Colorado’s 6th Congressional District seat.
“We’ve been having this conversation for 13 years,” Romanoff told The Sun.
Eric Sondermann, a Denver political analyst, agrees that the issue is “getting a little dated.”
“But in the Democratic party – in both parties – purity these days becomes even more important,” he said. “The true believers give you decreasing latitude to deviate from orthodoxy.”
Romanoff is one of nine candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for Colorado’s 2020 U.S. Senate race, including former Gov. John Hickenlooper.
Romanoff’s immigration record doesn’t remove him as the leading progressive candidate in the race, Sondermann said, but it is a mark on his record.
“It’s a strike,” he said. “It’s not strike two or strike three, but it’s a strike.”
In recent months, Romanoff’s rivals in the primary campaign for a chance to unseat Republican U.S Sen. Cory Gardner in 2020 have kept his immigration record in the spotlight, seizing on the issue at recent candidate forums.
Candidate Lorena Garcia, in a campaign fundraising email, accused Romanoff of trying to “sugarcoat some truly terrifying parts” of his voting record on immigration. She also said at a campaign event that Romanoff allowed for the passage of the “nation’s harshest anti-immigrant laws.”
Michelle Ferrigno Warren, another Romanoff rival in the 2020 primary who has long worked on immigration issues, said she hasn’t forgotten what happened in 2006 – “and neither has the Hispanic community.”
“There are consequences when people make decisions,” she said. ”There was harm done then. I’m not speaking for the Hispanic community, but I have heard over and over again — they’re remembering that and also just how painful it was.”
The 2006 bills targeting people living in the U.S. illegally in Colorado, however, didn’t happen in a vacuum. That same year, there were more than 550 bills concerning immigrants introduced in legislatures across the nation. Immigration was also a hot-button issue in Congress, where legislation was being considered that would have turned millions of people living in the U.S. unlawfully into felons and made it a crime to aid a person living in the U.S. illegally.
Romanoff has in the past argued that the bills passed that year in Colorado were in response to the lack of congressional movement on immigration.
He also says that measures targeting people living in the U.S. illegally passed during a rare special legislative session in 2006 called by then-Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, were more tolerable than policies being pushed by immigration hard-liners.
<PARAGRAPH style="Body text">“We kept getting bill after bill,” said former state Rep. Fran Coleman, a Latina Democrat who represented Denver in the legislature at that time. “Most of them were pretty draconian.”
The political dynamics — Democrats had only recently retaken power in the House — were such that they couldn’t just say “no” to everything without risking their power at the legislature, she said.
Owens called the special session after the Colorado Supreme Court rejected a citizen ballot initiative seeking to amend the state constitution to bar people in the country illegally from accessing government assistance programs. Owens wanted the legislature to refer the measure to the ballot and demanded that lawmakers either do that, Romanoff says, or come up with a statutory alternative.
“I thought at the time that the compromise we passed during the special session in 2006 was less damaging than the constitutional amendment we killed,” he said. “If I had to do it over again, I would have adjourned the session and dared the governor to call us back.”
Instead, Romanoff says, the special session served to “indulge — and by extension legitimize — the Republicans’ premise.”
The result of the special session was that the policy barring people in the country illegally from accessing government assistance programs was put in statute. But, Romanoff said, since the statute duplicated federal law, it had little to no effect.
Polly Baca, a former state lawmaker who in 2006 was fighting the ballot initiative in her role as president and CEO of the Latin American Research and Service Agency, said she still supports Romanoff today because of his willingness to work with her organization.
“The laws that were passed, which I never liked, were passed in order to prevent a constitutional question from being placed on the ballot and create harm that we could not repair,” said Baca, who has endorsed Romanoff’s 2020 campaign. “We didn’t like any of the laws that were passed, but it was about the lesser of a number of evils. People misunderstood his role, and yes it did harm him because of the misunderstanding of the role that he played.”Bill Vanderberg, who worked for Colorado’s Progressive Coalition in 2006, now known as the Colorado People’s Alliance, says he thinks Democrats gave up too much.
“I know that they believe they made difficult decisions to compromise in order to fend off some of the nastiest populist ballot initiatives at that time, but in doing so I think that they compromised fundamental democratic principles of fairness and equality,” Vanderberg said. “I think they could have fought harder. And I think that they took immigrant communities for granted.”