“We’re here, propping up the country so the economy doesn’t crash,” said Haydee Zetino, who scrubs lavish hotel suites at Harrah’s Casino on the famed Las Vegas strip. She is an immigrant from El Salvador with only temporary protected U.S. status and can’t vote.
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Clark County, encompassing Las Vegas, is about 75% of the state’s population and includes a sizeable number of hospitality industry workers represented by Nevada’s powerful Culinary Union, which has endorsed Harris.
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And rounding up people in the country illegally may not even count people like Zetino..., nor the guest workers at Baker Ranch, all of whom are authorized to be in the U.S.
“These people don’t have any conscience,” she said of mass deportation supporters. “They believe they can lift up the country, move the economy forward, but they don’t think of those at the bottom.”
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Florisela López Rivera has seen that nuance firsthand and worries about politics overwhelming decency.
A dishwasher at Wynn Casino in Las Vegas, López Rivera is originally from El Salvador and got temporary protected status after Hurricane Mitch’s devastation in 1998. She recently gained permanent U.S. residency after her wife became a citizen, which means she’s unlikely to face deportation under any circumstances.
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López Rivera is a member of the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 60,000, majority-Hispanic workers in Las Vegas and Reno. A Harris supporter, López Rivera canvasses for her union to advocate for the vice president, stressing Harris being the daughter of immigrants.
She speaks Spanish while knocking on doors and says that she encounters some people who tell her, “I love Trump.” Even then, she tries to engage them rather than simply turning away.
“When we focus on the negative, we lose the human side of things,” López Rivera said.
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