Welcome back to Woman of the Week. Today we will be discussing Pramila Jayapal, an Indian Congresswoman! Enjoy!
Pramila Jayapal is an American politician serving as the U.S representative for Washington's 7th congressional district. She is a member of the Democratic party and represents most of Seattle she is also the first Indian woman to serve in the U.S house of representatives and the first female district member of congress and in addition to that she is also the first Asian American to represent the state of Washington at a federal level.
Pramila was born in Madras, India in 1966 and spent most of her childhood in Singapore
And Indonesia. She immigrated to the United States at the age of 16 in 1982 and attended college where she earned a BA from Georgetown University and an MBA from Northwestern University. She, later on, worked for PaineWebber as a financial analyst after graduating from Northwestern and began to develop projects from Chicago to Thailand and in 1991 moved on to work for the public sector. She became a us citizen in 2000 and was the author of Pilgrimage; one woman returns to a changing India which was published in March of 2000. Pramila founded the Hate Free Zone after the 2001 September 11 attacks which was an advocacy group for immigrant groups. The Hate Free Zone registered new American citizens to vote and also focused on immigration reform they also successfully sued the Bush administration’s immigration and naturalizations services to prevent the deportation of over 4000 Somalis across the country. In 2008 the group was changed to OneAmerica and in 2013 Pramila was recognized by the white house as a champion of change.
In 2014 state senator Adam Kine announced his retirement in early 2014 and Pramila raced to succeed him; she was endorsed by Seattle mayor Ed Murray and won from more than 51% of the votes in the August primary elections she then won the elections after defeating Democrat Louis Watanabe in 2014. In the Washington State Senate Pramila was a primary sponsor of SB 5863 which directs the Washington State Department of Transportation to administer a pre-apprenticeship program targeting women and people of color the bill was passed in July 2015. Pramila was also a co-sponsor of a bill to test and track thousands of police department rape kits. In January 2016 Pramila announced her candidacy for Congress in Washington's 7th congressional district after congressman Jim McDermott announced his retirement. In April she received an endorsement from Bernie Sanders and on August 2, 2016, Pramila finished in the top two primaries alongside State representative Brady Walkinshaw who was also a democrat. Pramila later won the general election with 56 percent of the vote. On June 29, 2018, Jayapal participated in women's Disobey and the sit-in at the Hart Senate Office Building to protest the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance approach to illegal immigration. The protest arrested 500 people including Primary. In July 2019, Pramila voted against a House resolution condemning the Global boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement targeting Israel the resolution was later passed 39817. In April; 25,2018 Pramila and 57 other members of the house of representatives released a condemnation of Holocaust distortion in Ukraine and Poland. They criticized Poland's new holocaust law which would criminalize accusing poles of complicity in the holocaust and Ukraine's 2015 memory laws. In February 2019, Pramila sponsored and introduced the Medicare for all act of 2019 along with 100 cosponsors the bill would create a publicly financed comprehensive, universal, and guaranteed health care insurance system for every US citizen. In June 2019 Pramila became the first South Asian American woman to preside over the house.
On January 20, 2020, Pramila announced her endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders for president of the United States in the 2020 democratic presidential primaries. Currently, Pramila is working on spreading information about the dangers of COVID.