‘Very much a pragmatist.’ Maria Elvira Salazar threads a needle as she seeks reelection

As the Republican Party’s rank and file have embraced increasingly conservative positions on issues like immigration, government spending and abortion access, Maria Elvira Salazar is performing a high-wire balancing act as she seeks another term in Congress.

The Miami congresswoman has boasted about federal funding for her district that she voted against. She has kept her distance from a fight over Florida’s six-week abortion ban and a proposed constitutional amendment that would override it. And she has elevated the issue of immigration reform and amnesty – while also defending Donald Trump as the “the only guy who could fix” the country’s immigration system.

As Salazar puts it, she’s doing her best to represent a wildly diverse constituency with a vast array of political interests and priorities.

“I serve the people who put me here,” Salazar, 62, told the Miami Herald in a recent interview. “You do what you need to do. Period. And I serve [District] 27.”

Salazar’s record in Congress hardly looks like that of a Trump diehard. She was among a small group of House Republicans who voted in 2021 to establish an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. She sided with congressional Democrats on a bill to raise the age to buy an assault-style rifle from 18 to 21.

And she has repeatedly pushed a sweeping, bipartisan immigration-reform measure that would set aside tens of billions of dollars for enhanced border security while also granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least five years.

Democrats have described Salazar as a hard-right Republican “pushing an extreme and dangerous MAGA agenda.” But an analysis of Salazar’s voting record by the conservative advocacy group Heritage Action shows that, in her most recent term in Congress, she only voted in line with the group’s positions about 53% of the time.

Salazar told the Herald that she does not ask for “permission” from anyone but the voters who put her in office, and pointed to her nearly 15-point victory over former Sen. Annette Tadeo during the midterms as proof that she has their endorsement.

Salazar’s majority-Hispanic congressional district – which stretches from Downtown Miami and Key Biscayne to Kendall and Cutler Bay – stands as the last remaining House battleground in South Florida. It’s also among the most diverse districts in the country, home to Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans and many other Latino communities with a wide array of political backgrounds.

As she seeks a third term in Washington, Salazar is facing a challenge from Lucia Baez-Geller, a Democrat who’s hoping to leverage her reputation as the most progressive member of Miami-Dade’s school board and political fervor over a push to protect abortion rights in Florida to unseat Salazar.

Salazar appears to be heading into the election on solid political footing. Her campaign has nearly $1.7 million in the bank, according to its latest federal filings, while Baez-Geller’s campaign has just shy of $46,000. There’s also the name-recognition factor; Salazar is well-known in South Florida from her years as a television journalist working for Telemundo, CNN En Español and Mega TV.

Kevin Cabrera, a Miami-Dade County commissioner whose district partially overlaps with Salazar’s, said that Salazar’s record in Washington reflects both her own values and those of her district, which is “one of the most diverse in the country.”

“I don’t think anyone can argue that she does whatever the party tells her,” Cabrera said. “She has her own values. I think her votes reflect that.”

Salazar isn’t immune to scrutiny. She came under fire earlier this year after she touted millions of dollars in federal funding for her district that came from legislation that she voted against, including a bipartisan infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act that expanded manufacturing and semiconductor research in the U.S.

Her claims about federal funding in Florida’s 27th congressional district became the subject of a contentious interview with CBS Miami’s Jim Defede , in which the congresswoman said that she couldn’t remember how she voted on certain bills.

In July, during a panel discussion at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Salazar stirred controversy when she said that the U.S. should “kill” some members of the Venezuelan gang El Tren de Aragua who illegally enter the country. Her office later walked back those remarks, saying that she believes gang members should be deported.

Former U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Republican who represented a vast swath of Miami-Dade County and the Florida Keys until 2019, said that Salazar is “definitely a conservative,” but “she’s very much a pragmatist.” In that way, Curbelo said, Salazar bears a resemblance to former U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who represented Salazar’s district for 30 years before retiring in 2019.

“Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen was very conservative on foreign policy issues -- Cuba, Israel, Latin America -- and more of a pragmatist on domestic and social issues, and I think Salazar has a similar profile,” he said. “She’s been a bit more conservative, but that reflects the changes in the district over the last six-plus years.”

Salazar also has a reputation as a staunch opponent of abortion rights – an issue that is front and center in Florida this year as voters weigh a proposed constitutional amendment that would create broad protections for abortion access and effectively overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban.

Salazar didn’t say whether she would vote for or against that proposal – dubbed Amendment 4 – in November, but said that the language of the amendment, which protects abortion access up to “fetal viability,” is “so vague.” At the same time, she said, Florida’s current six-week abortion ban is “complicated.”

She said that she was glad the decision will ultimately be made by Florida voters.

“Democracy is at its best when people are voting,” Salazar told the Herald. “I don’t even know how this is going to turn out. But I do know that I’m happy that the Floridians are going to make a decision and then we’ll have to live with it.”

Bipartisan immigration reform

Salazar has made international issues that affect South Florida a focus of her time in Congress. She’s a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, where she serves as the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee chairwoman. At hearings, she has criticized Biden’s policies towards Venezuela and Cuba, denounced thos e two countries’ governments , introduced bills to set more sanctions and proposed stronger partnerships between the U.S. and its Latin-American allies.

On a domestic level, Salazar says she is also trying to fix the migration crisis that has come with the hemisphere-wide issues that she addresses as a member of the committee.

In February 2022, Salazar first introduced legislation focused on overhauling the immigration system. Over a year later, she and Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar from Texas introduced a bipartisan version of the “Dignity Act,” an immigration system overhaul. The bill would allot tens of billions of dollars for border security, hire 3,000 plus new border agents, enact tougher penalties for smugglers and build new walls. It also cracks down on undocumented labor by requiring businesses nationwide to use E-verify to check a new hire’s ability to work.

But it also proposed creating pathways to legalization for people who came here as children or are from countries in turmoil and currently have federal immigration relief under certain programs – expediting asylum case processing and giving eligible undocumented immigrants work permits and renewable legal status if they pass criminal and background checks and file taxes. Eventually, they could even be able to get permanent legal status under the program after a certain amount of years.

“While we are a nation of laws, we have also historically been a nation of second chances. This provides the undocumented living in the shadows a second chance to get right with the law,” Salazar’s office wrote in a statement about the legislation, which would not use taxpayer money but fund itself through the restitution payments made by undocumented immigrants.

She has also advocated that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas give parole to hundreds of thousands of recently arrived Cuban immigrants who cannot get green cards under the Cuban Adjustment Act because a court decision made them ineligible due to do so because of the kind of paperwork they received at the border. If the federal government granted them parole, they would be eligible for permanent residency after a year and a day of entering the U.S. through the decades-old legislation.

Salazar’s immigration proposals, including the bipartisan bill, stand in stark contrast to Trump’s vision to deport over 13 million undocumented immigrants that live in the U.S., most of whom have been in the country for a decade or more.

In her interview with the Herald, Salazar didn’t directly criticize Trump’s call to deport all undocumented immigrants, but said that the focus should be on removing “criminals” from the country.

“Start deporting them and then start taking care of those who have been here for more than five years, who have American children, who do not have a criminal record, who are cleaning the toilets or cutting up the jalapeno peppers or in Homestead picking up the tomatoes or the oranges,” she said.

Salazar also said that she would have supported the bipartisan immigration bill that fell through this year in the Senate after Trump urged the GOP to reject it, because it was “better than nothing.” But she called it “too little, too late,” and criticized former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden for not taking aggressive-enough action on immigration during their time in office.

When the Herald asked Salazar about whether she ever felt at odds with the hardline immigration stances at the top of the GOP ticket, Salazar said that the “only” candidate who could fix immigration was Trump.

“Let’s give him a chance because Trump could be for immigration what Nixon was for China,” Salazar said. “I am going to be the #1 voice within the GOP to tell him: Mr. President, this is your moment, why don’t you just grab it, period.”