Former Congresswoman and former Florida Senior Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was the first Latina elected to the US Congress and the first Republican in Congress to publicly support the Marriage Equality Act.

She was born on July 15, 1952, in Havana, Cuba, where she spent the first part of her childhood. At the age of eight, she and her family fled Cuba under Fidel Castro and settled in Miami, Florida.

After graduating from Southwest High School, she attended Miami-Dade Community College in 1972, where she earned her Associate of Arts degree. In 1975, she received her bachelor's degree, in 1985 her master's degree, both from Florida International University, and she obtained her Ph.D. in Education from the University of Miami in 2004.

Her upbringing inspired her to become a teacher and later the principal of Eastern Academy in Hialeah, Florida. She was elected to the Florida State House of Representatives in 1982 and to the Florida Senate in 1986. During her time in the Florida State House of Representatives and state Senate, she worked to ensure that more than one million people in Florida could send their children to college by introducing the Florida Prepaid College program, which helps students pay tuition to attend college.

According to the official website of the United States House of Representatives: 

“In her three decades in the House, she left her mark as a foreign policy leader and human rights advocate, most especially from her position on the Foreign Affairs Committee”.

“As an educator, Ros-Lehtinen routinely served as a liaison for immigrant parents needing assistance translating forms and navigating the complexities of the U.S. government. This outreach led her to seek political office to expand her level of assistance beyond individual cases. In 1982 Ros-Lehtinen won a seat in the Florida House of Representatives, making headlines as the first Hispanic woman to serve in the state legislature. Four years later, she won a seat in the Florida senate. In the state legislature, she met and married her husband, Dexter Lehtinen, who also served in the Florida house and senate, and who went on to serve as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida”.

“Ros-Lehtinen used the strong community ties she developed in the state legislature to run an effective grassroots campaign. After easily defeating three opponents for the Republican nomination, she faced Gerald Richman, a Miami Beach lawyer and former chairman of the Florida Bar Association, in the August 29, 1989, special election”.

“For the majority of her career, Ros-Lehtinen won re-election with comfortable margins of victory, including several cycles where she ran unopposed. In her final election in 2016, Ros-Lehtinen prevailed with 55 percent of the vote”.

“When Ros-Lehtinen joined the House in 1989 there were no open seats on the Foreign Affairs Committee. But she enlisted the help of Dante Druno Fascell, the Democratic chairman of Foreign Affairs, who represented a neighboring Florida district. Fascell went to the House leadership and convinced them to change the committee’s party ratio, creating a vacancy specifically for Ros-Lehtinen. As a member of Foreign Affairs, she fulfilled her campaign promise to oppose the communist regime in Cuba by backing a strict economic embargo of the island nation. In 1992, she helped build support for passage of the Cuban Democracy Act, which restricted subsidiaries of American companies from trading with Cuba. During her more than three-decade career in the House, she continued to push economic sanctions against Castro in an effort to isolate his regime”.

“Ros-Lehtinen earned support among her Cuban-American constituents for her tenacious approach to the Castro government and her larger commitment to human rights”.

“The wife of a Vietnam veteran and stepmother to children in the Armed Forces, Ros-Lehtinen defended the nation’s military and sought to bolster veteran’s health care and educational opportunities for veterans. Her district also had a sizable LGBTQ population, and she advocated for equal rights and marriage equality. Ros-Lehtinen’s passionate support for LGBTQ rights was also personal. She and her husband devotedly supported their transgender son, Rodrigo, making public appeals to parents to accept and support transgender children”.

“In 2017 Ros-Lehtinen, by then the dean of the Florida delegation, announced her retirement from Congress. […] After leaving the House at the end of the 115th Congress in January 2019, Ros-Lehtinen returned to Florida, where she lives with her husband. In retirement, she writes a column for the Miami Herald and works as a senior advisor for a major lobbying firm”.