Marsha Blackburn

U.S. Senator (R-TN)

Blackburn served as a member of Congress in the U.S. House of Representatives for over a decade before being elected to the Senate in 2018. While in office, Blackburn has made multiple efforts to scrap the DACA program. In 2017 Blackburn, who is known to associate with extremist groups, celebrated President Trump’s inauguration with Rep. Steve King and the Austrian Freedom Party, which was founded by Nazis in 1956.

  • Senator Blackburn represented Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District from 2002 until she became the state’s junior senator in 2019. For years, Blackburn has advocated for legislation harmful to immigrants and refugees.
  • Editorials penned by Blackburn are regularly published by Breitbart.
  • The Tennessean holds an A+ rating from NumbersUSA and has a score of 100% from FAIR, whose annual “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” event she has attended.
  • In 2014, Blackburn was honored with an award from the anti-Muslim grassroots group ACT for America. ACT honors lawmakers who work to pass legislation aimed at disparaging both immigrants and Muslims.
  • Blackburn is one of three co-sponsors in the Senate to designate English as the United States’ official language.
  • Since President Obama announced DACA in June 2012, Blackburn has taken every opportunity to attack the program and its recipients.
    • In 2015, then-Congresswoman Blackburn introduced an amendment to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act that would have defunded DACA.
    • In 2014, Blackburn introduced a bill which would have prohibited federal funds from being used to process DACA applications. The bill passed the House by recorded voted on August 1, 2014.
  • During the 2018 midterm elections, Blackburn’s Senate campaign ads mentioned the caravan of asylum seekers headed for the Southern border almost 800 times, and described them as “gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists.”
  • Blackburn ran another ad in which she attacked her Democratic opponent Phil Bredesen for supporting ID cards for undocumented immigrants and for opposing the Muslim bans and the border wall.
  • At the height of the family separation crisis in the summer of 2018, Blackburn took the opportunity to assign blame to Democrats saying: “As a mother, my heart breaks for the families who are separated at the border, but we are in this position because liberals would not pay to enforce our immigration laws or build appropriate facilities for asylum seekers.”
  • The Tennessee senator has advocated for the construction of a wall along the Southern border, often depicting immigrants as criminals making their way across the country: “You have every town a border town, and every state a border state… these gangs and drug traffickers, human traffickers, sex traffickers are coming to a community near you.”