This new policy is stripping away healthcare, food security, and environmental protections for millions of Latino families while increasing the budget for border militarization.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 07/04/2025
MEDIA CONTACT: Edder Díaz Martínez, Communications Manager, 602-832-6039, [email protected]
WASHINGTON— Today, Friday, July 4th, the big ugly budget bill was signed into law. This policy will have a devastating impact on Americans nationwide, but will disproportionately impact Latino/a/e communities.
This new law includes steep cuts to essential social safety programs like Medicaid and SNAP, both of which are crucial to ensure healthcare and food security for millions of Latinos nationwide. Our families will also pay more in their electric bills due to the rollback and elimination of tax credits and other investments for clean energy production. Our federally designated public lands, oceans, and waters are now being given away for mining, drilling, and logging. There has also been a significant increase in funding for border enforcement, increasing money given to ICE and further militarizing our borders. To make matters worse, this bill substantially rolls back environmental protections, ensuring a public health catastrophe caused by the ongoing climate crisis.
Despite these brutal outcomes, our community rallied to stop several amendments that could’ve made this ugly bill worse. This includes removing Sen. Mike Lee’s amendment, which would’ve given even more federal public land away to rich CEOs, and ensuring there are no prohibitions on AI regulations that could’ve had a severe impact on our environment.
In response to this disastrous new law, GreenLatinos Program Directors release the following statements:
“GreenLatinos has demanded clean energy, a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, and respect for land, water, air since our inception because these are foundational to our liberty. This week most members of the Republican party restrained the freedom to benefit from your own work, to your health, to public education, and to honor your own cultures and traditions while respecting others. Their Big Bad Bill only enriches those profiting from healthcare debt, the death of countless species, militarized public lands, and incarcerating immigrants. They have dishonored future generations and the majority of people nationwide who spoke out and took civic action at record breaking levels. GreenLatinos is committed to inclusion, unity, and justice as we forge ahead to show Congress what a grave mistake they have just made.” -–– Olivia Juarez, Public Land Program Director, GreenLatinos
“The so-called 'Big Bad Bill' is exactly that — a reckless giveaway to Big Oil that sacrifices our health, our climate, and our communities for profit. It guts bedrock environmental protections, fast-tracks polluting projects in our backyards, and silences the voices of frontline Latine communities already choking on dirty air. We refuse to be collateral damage for an agenda that prioritizes corporate polluters over our right to breathe and thrive.” –– Irene Burga, Climate Justice & Clean Air Director, GreenLatinos
“As one of the most regressive pieces of legislation in United States history, this bill stands as a sinister monument to Congress choosing billionaires and corporate polluters over everyday Americans. For the Latino community, nearly every provision threatens to diminish our quality of life — from funneling funds away from food assistance to militarize our southern border, to defunding national parks, to fast-tracking nearly every form of outdated polluting industry. Furthermore, the same hospitals that have long treated our communities for extreme heat stress and pollution-related illnesses are now at risk of closing due to these reckless funding cuts.
The moral arc of the universe always bends towards justice and GreenLatinos will not stand down. Our collective advocacy was critical in defeating some of the bill’s most dangerous proposals — a powerful testament to our unwavering commitment to holding decision-makers accountable and striving towards the environmental liberation of our communities.” -– Pedro Hernández, California State Program Manager, GreenLatinos
“This horrific piece of legislation will have massive negative impacts for states like New Mexico. Not only will 112,00 New Mexicans lose their healthcare, but our public lands, sensitive natural habitats, and culturally invaluable places are all at risk. This bill will undermine the hugely beneficial growth of renewable energy projects in our state, and will give free rein to the extractive oil and gas companies who are poisoning our air, polluting our water, and destroying the health of our soil.
New Mexico, and much of the Southwest, have been considered a ‘sacrifice zone’ for many decades- our lands and people not deemed as valuable as corporate profits or the American Military-Industrial Complex. This reconciliation bill continues the tradition of stealing our resources, enriching a few at the expense of millions across our state and our nation.
Our people are being increasingly targeted by an agency that stands to see a tenfold increase in their budget. The sacred and ecologically important public lands along the US-Mexican border are being militarized without regard for the people, plants, and animals of the area. Rural communities will suffer losses of funding to support hospitals, senior care facilities, and other life-saving services so that the wealthiest Republican donors can pay even less than they already do.
We will continue to work for the health and wellbeing of our Latine and Indigenous communities here in New Mexico, even if this administration still views us as a sacrifice zone.” — Carlos Matutes, New Mexico State Director
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Acerca de GreenLatinos
VerdeLatinos (NOTA: GreenLatinos es UNA PALABRA) es una comunidad activa de líderes latinos, envalentonados por el poder y la sabiduría de nuestra cultura, unidos para exigir equidad y desmantelar el racismo, con recursos para ganar nuestras batallas ambientales, de conservación y de justicia climática, y motivados para asegurar nuestras políticas, Liberación económica, cultural y ambiental.
