Member (AZ-07)

Raúl began his public career as a community organizer and continues to be an advocate for underrepresented constituencies in Tucson and Southern Arizona. In the 1970s he joined with other advocates at El Rio Community Health Center, (a once small local community health services clinic that Raúl and several others established in Tucson), to encourage local governments to invest in older and minority neighborhoods.

A CHAMPION FOR CHANGE

As a member of the Committee on Education and The Workforce, Raúl helped to fund early childhood and preschool programs within our nation’s consistently underfunded education system. He successfully worked to improve funding to Migrant and Seasonal Head Start and to enhance outreach and services to Limited English Proficient children and their families. Raúl continues to improve the quality of life for working families by promoting minimum wage increases, supporting legislation to prevent intimidation, and pushing to help employees organize and represent themselves in the workplace. As Ranking Member of the Committee on Natural Resources, Raúl played the leading role in creating a permanent National Landscape Conservation System within the Department of the Interior and fought successfully to address the maintenance funding shortfall of American public lands. Recently, Raúl introduced the  Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act to permanently protect Tonto National Forest, also known as Oak Flat, from foreign mining operations that will permanently desecrate the area and destroy its tribal cultural and religious heritage sites. Raul has and will continue to fight   to uphold Tribal sovereignty and our federal trust responsibility to Native Americans.