Leon Rodriguez
Image by Getty Images
His grandparents fled a crumbling Ottoman Empire and rising anti-Semitism in Poland to seek refuge in Cuba. His parents left the island’s oppressive communist regime for a better future in the United States. Now, Leon Rodriguez, who grew up in a Cuban-Jewish enclave in Florida, has come full circle: 2015 is his first full year as America’s top gatekeeper for refugees and immigrants.
As director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Rodriguez oversees an operation dealing with thousands of asylum seekers from Central America, millions of undocumented immigrants waiting for relief and a growing push to accept masses of refugees fleeing war-torn Syria.
Rodriguez’s family history helps guide him. “I think about my grandparents; I think about my parents; I definitely think about the fact that nobody comes here because all they want to do is go to the beach,” said Rodriguez, who views himself as both Hispanic and Jewish, just as he is both Sephardic and Ashkenazi.
A civil rights lawyer and federal prosecutor, Rodriguez, 53, runs a $3.2 billion agency that employs 19,000 workers across the country. He can do little, though, about the key issues facing America’s immigration system. Attempts to reform it have been derailed by Congress, and a more modest effort to stay deportations is stuck in court.
Rodriguez’s biggest challenge is yet to come, if America dramatically increases the numbers of Syrian refugees allowed to resettle in the United States.
Welcoming immigrants, Rodriguez said, is part of his Jewish DNA. “Even as we are prosperous,” he said, “we still remember the suffering.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
