Yadira Caraveo, seeking reelection to Congress, navigates politics of abortion, immigration as some positions shift

Abortion access has become a winning issue for Democrats, and U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo knows it.

As the freshman Democratic congresswoman campaigned on a recent weekend, abortion rights were never far from center frame, whether her audience was on the sixth floor of an office building in Denver’s congested northern suburbs or in a quiet backyard in rural Larimer County.

Caraveo invited Dr. Rebecca Cohen, a self-described Colorado abortion provider, to warm up about 100 volunteers at her Northglenn campaign headquarters before a day of canvassing. Caraveo, a pediatrician and former state lawmaker, told the volunteers about a 14-year-old girl who came to her office with a stomach ache.

It turned out the girl was pregnant — a situation that has since become more fraught in many parts of the country following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision ending Roe v. Wade.

“I never thought I would be in a country where I couldn’t have that conversation (about abortion),” Caraveo said, even if Colorado has been on the forefront of protecting access to the procedure.

While the congresswoman’s comments prompted whoops and hollers of support in the room, abortion is not the only driving factor in the tight 8th Congressional District race between Caraveo and Republican Gabe Evans. The economy, immigration and housing affordability are far more pressing for voters in the heavily Latino district, according to a recent poll, and Caraveo’s political foes have launched millions of dollars’ worth of ads to highlight what they claim are her failures on border security, crime, oil and gas jobs, and the fentanyl crisis.

She has also upset allies on the left by moderating some of her more progressive past positions — most notably on immigration and energy extraction — as she negotiates a race where polling shows her locked in a tie with Evans, a state lawmaker. It’s viewed as one of the closest and most important House contests in the country in the Nov. 5 election.

At a gathering of three dozen or so friendly voters earlier this month in a backyard in the Riverglen neighborhood, south of Berthoud, Caraveo said she was chasing the 12% of voters who have yet to make up their minds.

“We’ve gotta keep the seats we have now that are very close,” Caraveo said of House Democrats, as guests wolfed down empanadas hot off the grill. “That (House) majority is going to run right through the middle of the 8th District.”

Sitting down with The Denver Post, Caraveo, 43, hearkened back to her roots growing up with three siblings in south Adams County. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. from Chihuahua, Mexico, and her father supported the family with construction jobs. That modest upbringing motivated Caraveo to go to college, to earn her medical degree and, eventually, to enter politics.

As a doctor, Caraveo found that two-thirds of her patients were on Medicaid, a reality that she has said gave her a close-up view of the struggles working-class and immigrant families regularly face.

“The biggest issue is cost of living, right?” she said. “In Colorado, we’ve had issues around affordable housing for a very long time. Inflation is cooling, right? We just saw good numbers, in particular for Colorado — but people are still worried about making ends meet.”

Given voters’ ambivalence on economic issues, Colorado State University political science professor Kyle Saunders said there was little use for stridency on either side in a race this tight. He’s not surprised Caraveo has steered toward the middle.

“The path for both of them is to be as moderate as possible without demobilizing their base — that’s political skill, that’s political acumen,” he said.

Health care as motivator

The 8th Congressional District, drawn in 2021 after Colorado gained another seat in Congress, knits together the northern suburbs of Denver with the farms and oil fields closer to Greeley. In the first election to represent the new seat the next year, Caraveo won by a whisker over Republican state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer.

Caraveo, a fluent Spanish speaker who learned English by watching Sesame Street, made history as the state’s first Latina representative to Congress.

This time, she has the benefit of incumbency: She’s outraised Evans more than 3-to-1, with a nearly $7 million haul so far. But even as allies have supported her with millions of dollars in outside spending, she’s faced an onslaught of negative ads fueled by $6 million in spending by Republican-aligned groups, making Caraveo attack ads a mainstay on local TV newscasts.

Caraveo connects with her profession as a pediatrician to steer through the criticism.

“Affordability of prescription drugs is one of the reasons that I decided to run for office in the first place — and making sure that health care is accessible and affordable for the people like the ones that I saw in clinic,” she said.

Caraveo, who lives in Thornton, graduated from Regis University with a biology degree and earned her medical degree in 2009 from the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. She completed her residency in Albuquerque, then worked in private practice in the north Denver suburbs before running for the state House in 2018.

Now in Congress, Caraveo speaks fondly of a bill she spearheaded that directed the National Institute of Standards and Technology to focus its research on existing and emerging illicit drugs containing xylazine, or “tranq,” a powerful and potentially lethal animal tranquilizer. Despite being in the minority party, her bill made it to Biden’s desk to be signed — “one of only 44 in one of the least productive Congresses since the Civil War,” she said.

Her focus for a second term, Caraveo said, will be trying to get bills out of the House that address her constituents’ bread-and-butter concerns.

“So whether it’s health care as a whole, whether it’s prescription drugs, whether it’s food, focusing on affordable housing, looking at utilities — everything that people need to get through every day,” she said. “Making sure we vote on it is going to be a priority.”

Former state Rep. Susan Lontine, a Denver Democrat who served with Caraveo on the Colorado House’s Health and Insurance Committee, said she always “associates her with kids’ health.” She called Caraveo, who served two terms in the state legislature, “really smart and a really determined person.”

“She was a great believer in the fair treatment of others,” Lontine said, a point echoed by Denver City Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez. She ran for the state House in 2018 alongside Caraveo and fondly remembers their time in the Latino Caucus.

“We were doing what we could to ensure immigrants had the ability to be members of our community,” Gonzales-Gutierrez said. “She was very strong in advocating for immigrant rights and protections.”

But Caraveo’s increasingly public work has not always been easy. She shared her own health care challenge this summer, announcing that she had checked into the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier in the year to get treatment for depression.

In her recent interview with The Post, the congresswoman said she has struggled with depression since she was a teenager.

“You don’t really know when it’s going to rear its head, but the important thing is getting treatment,” she said. “And because of the position that I’m in, I’ve had access to incredible doctors at Walter Reed, at Johns Hopkins (University). … And because of that, I’ve gotten better. And so the reason I decided to speak out about it is because everybody should have access to that level of care.”

Immigration in focus

As Caraveo has moved into the general election, a myriad of issues beyond health care have intruded on the race, complicating her prospects for reelection.

Chief among those is immigration, one of the most salient discussion points in the top-of-the-ticket presidential matchup between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Migrant encounters at the southern border surged after Biden took office, though they have declined sharply in recent months, since Biden put in place a new rule restricting asylum claims at the border.

Her political foes claim Caraveo’s past positions make her unfit for Congress. Notably, as a state lawmaker, she signed on to a letter urging both Biden and Harris, along with congressional leaders, to “divest” from agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee supporting Republican candidates, launched a stinging ad last month that blamed Caraveo’s stance for the surge of fentanyl into the country and for migrant impacts on hospitals and public services in Denver.

“Yadira Caraveo is making her party’s out-of-control illegal immigration crisis even worse, and her constituents are paying the price,” CLF spokesperson Courtney Parella wrote on the organization’s website.

Rob Preuhs, a political science professor at Metro State University of Denver, said it is no surprise that Caraveo’s position on immigration has evolved.

“The big picture for Caraveo on immigration is that she’ll want to distance herself from the Biden administration as much as she can, and not embrace the (potential) Harris administration as well,” he said.

Caraveo did just that this summer, signing on to a Republican-sponsored House resolution “strongly condemning” Harris for the Biden administration’s “failure to secure the United States border.”

Her move to the right on immigration infuriated members of the left flank of her party, prompting former state Rep. Joe Salazar to post on the social platform X this summer that Caraveo owed Latinos in her district an explanation for her “hypocritical public support of racist, conspiratorial right-wing immigration stances.”

“Compromising principles is not leadership,” Salazar told The Post nearly three months later. “That’s being a damn politician.”

Salazar said he was particularly disappointed because he sees Caraveo as a good person who “leads with a kind heart.”

“I think her first term in Congress has been trying for her,” he said.

Representing a “very divided” district

Caraveo said she represents a district “that is very divided,” and she is “voting and speaking to topics in line with what my constituents want.”

“Immigration is an issue that they are concerned about,” she said. “I hear that from the Latino community, in terms of people having been here for 30, 40 years, and they can’t legalize their status — and they’re upset about the process that they’re seeing at the border right now.”

For decades, she said, neither party has been able to fix the U.S. immigration system.

Caraveo supported a bipartisan immigration bill that Trump pressured Republicans to kill earlier this year. She then unveiled a package of bills that aimed to break the logjam, so far unsuccessfully, by providing law enforcement with more resources, helping cities like Denver deal with the mounting costs of assisting migrants, and shortening those migrants’ wait for work authorization.