Pramila Jayapal: From Privilege, to Activism, to Leader of the Far-Left House Democrats

Even if Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is still the main power broker for House Democrats, she is not without noteworthy challenge from the leader of the House Progressive Caucus and one of the most far-left lawmakers in Congress, Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).

Jayapal, who jumped from the financial world to activism to politics and is now serving her second term, has become if not the head of but certainly the loudest voice for the far-left, including pushing to pass the alleged $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” bill ahead of $1.5 trillion legislation that at least contains some funding for real infrastructure.

The two bills represent almost every bullet point of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” wish list for an expanded federal government and socialist agenda.

“It’s not the infrastructure bill THEN maybe the Build Back Better package down the road,” Jayapal tweeted on Tuesday. “That wasn’t the deal.” 

“Progressives won’t back down,” she tweeted. “We’re fighting the people’s fight and we’re going to deliver the entire Build Back Better agenda.”

“Why do we need to pass the Build Back Better Act?” Jayapal said in another tweet on Tuesday. “Because we can’t leave anyone behind. Not parents who need child care. Not our children and grandchildren facing this climate crisis. Not immigrants on the frontlines. Not people who need health care.”

“Not anyone,” she tweeted.

This rise to a national figure welding power over the political direction of the United States of America is remarkable given Jayapal’s journey from her birth in southern India, one of two daughters of educated parents who had professional careers. 

The Indian publication First Post reported on Jayapal’s road to Washington, DC, through an interview with her mother, a 75-year-old writer, Maya Jayapal, and her father, 85-year-old MP Jayapal, who worked in marketing:

Born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, Pramila spent her childhood in Jakarta and Singapore and went on to pursue her undergrad studies in America when she was just 16 years old. She became a civil rights activist, serving as the executive director of OneAmerica, a pro-immigration advocacy group, formed after 9/11. Like her writer mother, Maya too leaned towards literature and has written the book Pilgrimage: One Woman’s Return to a Changing India, about her sojourn in India in 1995 and even now, writes articles and poetry. Pramila is the younger of the Jayapal’s two daughters. Susheela, 54, their older daughter, is a lawyer and works in Portland. Pramila took up English literature and economics for her Bachelor’s degree at Georgetown University and did her MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. She worked in a banking company on Wall Street for a couple of years, before stepping into activism and then into politics.

About Pramila’s years as an activist, Maya says, “After 9/11, people were ringing Pramila up and telling her ‘Why don’t you do something?’ and she started the Hate Free Zone, later changed to OneAmerica. She wanted to publicize the fact that all aliens were not terrorists, nor dangerous and that they were individual human beings. She ran this organization for 10 years, then she got tired of fighting from the outside and wanted to see what she could do from the inside. She came into politics only two years ago. I don’t think any of us thought that she would become a politician. She was always interested in social justice, always was forthright. Maybe in a subtle way, as parents, we fostered it, by giving them permission to do what they wanted to do.”

Asked whether they had seen in Pramila the making of a politician, Maya says, “Pramila was always a good organiser, was very good at persuading people to her point of view. She’s always been very forthright. The other day a friend who had worked with my father, Balakrishnan Menon, who was the director, vigilance and anti-corruption in Tamil Nadu, was saying, ‘Pramila is beginning to look like your father.’ My father had a reputation for being blunt and not giving in to pressure. He used to tell the grandchildren that you have been given a pack of cards when you were born and you have no choice there. But what you do with it, is important. My father was impactful, sought social justice, spoke what he felt, was frank to the point of bluntness.”

The Hate Free Zone lobbied to increase immigration to the United States and successfully sued the George W. Bush administration’s Immigration and Naturalization Services to prevent the deportation of more than 4,000 Somalis across the country.

The group changed its name to OneAmerica in 2008 and Jayapal left the group in May 2012. In 2013, the Barack Obama administration honored Jayapal as a “Champion of Change.”

In June of 2018, Jayapal took part in a Women’s March protest inside the Hart Senate Office building to protest the Trump administration’s effort to secure the border and Capitol Police arrested some protesters, including the Congresswoman.

“I’m proud to have been arrested with them,” Jayapal said in a video posted on social media.

Jayapal stands on the far left of the political spectrum on almost every issue, including immigration.

Jayapal is a fervent supporter of homosexual rights and “fluid gender” ideology, including for her “non-binary” grown son Janak whom she referred to as “they” as she pushed for transgender rights in Congress in April 2019:

I came to understand what their newfound freedom ― it is the only way I can describe what has happened to my beautiful child, what their newfound freedom to wear a dress, to rid themselves of some conformist stereotype of what they are, to be able to express who they are at their real core … My child is free to be who they are. And in that freedom comes a responsibility for us as legislators to protect their freedom to be who they are and to legislate … behavior towards all people in our society.

“Jayapal’s demand and her tearful celebration for her adult son’s ‘freedom’ came during a hearing about H.R. 5, the Democrat-drafted bill that would require federal agencies to pressure Americans into agreeing that men and women can change their sex by declaring an opposite-sex “gender identity,” Breitbart News reported.

“Far fewer than one percent of people claim to be members of the opposite sex, and even fewer undergo cosmetic surgery. But the Democrats’ legislation would force all women to submit whenever men claimed the legal right to take women’s places in sports and showers, in shelters, scholarships, and business set-asides; in culture, commerce, and language, such as in the use of male or female pronouns,” Breitbart News reported.

In an interview with Bustle magazine in July, 2020, Jayapal spoke of her “enlightenment” about gender:

In “How I Learned Gender,” Bustle talks to cultural hotshots about their journeys with gender identity, expectations, fluidity, and the ways that pink and blue blankets inevitably shape our lives. First up is Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a stalwart progressive who’s serving her second term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

How has having a nonbinary child, Janak, changed how you understand gender?

“They’ve shifted everything. I was an early supporter of LGBTQ rights, but I didn’t understand gender fluidity,” Jayapal said. “When they told me they were nonbinary, it [opened] a door into a new set of gender politics for me.”

Janak is also an only child because Jayapal, who supports abortion on demand, aborted his sibling and wrote about it in the New York Times in June of 2019.

The oped justifies her abortion because Janak was born prematurely and had numerous health problems for a number of years: 

Those were rough years. Some years later, I met a wonderful man, who is my husband today. I wanted more children, but in numerous conversations with my doctors, they told me that any future pregnancy would be extremely high-risk and could result in a birth similar to Janak’s.

I knew that I simply would not be able to go through what I had gone through again. Janak was far from out of the woods, and I needed to preserve my strength for them. I hoped there would be a time in the future when I could be ready again for children, but for the time being, my husband and I diligently took precautions to make sure that I did not get pregnant.

But pregnancy methods are not foolproof. I got pregnant and I had to decide what to do.

Ironically, while she decided to abort her second child Jayapal wrote about how her living son beat the odds the aborted child never had the chance to do.

“The fact that Janak survived this extraordinarily dangerous birth and thrived (indeed, just graduated from college!) is something for which I give endless thanks to the remarkable doctors, nurses and caregivers — in India and later at Seattle Children’s Hospital — who took such good care of this fragile being,” Jayapal wrote. “I prayed multiple times a day to any being above that was listening that my child would live. And by all measures, we were incredibly fortunate.”

Jayapal also erased women in defending her abortion in a further nod to biological women who live as men but can still become pregnant in a tweet about her abortion.

“I have never spoken publicly about my abortion. I’m speaking now because of intensified efforts to strip Constitutional rights from pregnant people and to criminalize abortion,” Jayapal tweeted.

Jayapal also has been a consistent reporter of Black Lives Matter and the defunding police movement.

She spoke about it in an interview with Elle magazine in July, 2020.

“I’ve had the honor of working with the Congressional Black Caucus leadership as they put together the Justice in Policing Act, which we just passed off the House floor last week. It is an important first step. It bans chokeholds. It bans no-knock warrants, like the kind that killed Breonna Taylor. It ends qualified immunity, which allows us then to have some accountability for police officers who do murder Black people. It establishes a national misconduct registry so that a police officer who has committed terrible misconduct in one department can’t just leave and go to another department and get hired and not even have anyone know about it. Most importantly, it puts money into Black and brown communities in the form of grants to actually lead the conversation on what transforming community safety looks like, transforming police looks like.”

According to her House bio, Jayapal was born in India, and grew up in India, Indonesia, and Singapore. She received her MBA from Northwestern University, worked in a number of industries in both the public and private sector, and published her first book in 2000, Pilgrimage to India: A Woman Revisits Her Homeland.

Jayapal is married to Steve Williamson, a labor union activist and organizer.

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