Raised in El Paso by a Mexican immigrant mother and a father who worked as a truck driver, this first gen college student started her career at the Republican National Committee. Then dual tragedies, the September 11, 2001 attacks and the sudden death of her father, changed everything. Olivia describes her career pivot to national security; her choice to work for Vice President Pence, her decision to leave and the fall out; and why she, a lifelong Republican, is now openly campaigning for Kamala Harris.
Alicia Menendez: Olivia Troye is a lifelong Republican. She worked in the Trump administration as a Homeland Security and counterterrorism advisor to Vice President Pence and as his lead staff member on the COVID-19 response. Then in 2020, she resigned and she became a whistleblower, calling out the Trump administration's response to the pandemic. Now, Olivia is not only speaking out against Trump's bid for a second term, she's voting for Kamala Harris and encouraging her fellow Republicans and her fellow Latinas to do the same.
Olivia and I have been on TV together many times, but today, we're having a different conversation about how a Mexican-American border kid who goes to kindergarten speaking only Spanish rises to the highest rungs of the US government, what she saw on the inside and how it's informed her own political evolution. Hi, friend.
Olivia Troye: Hi.
Alicia Menendez: I am so excited to talk to you without needing to hit a commercial break, six minutes ... You entered kindergarten only speaking Spanish. You're the first person in your family to go to college and not any college. You go to an elite institution. You go to Penn and then you work inside the US government. Each of those leaps is unbelievable in and of itself, itself and almost more unbelievable when you put them all together. How does a border kid with no connections end up at the Republican National Committee straight out of college?
Olivia Troye: Look, my family was not political at all. They had no connections to the political apparatus. I ended up at Penn interning at the Republican National Committee and I sought out the Republican congressmen in Texas and different foundations and I ended up being an Eisenhower intern. I remember this because I was like, "Am I the token Hispanic here? And by the way, I'm still artsy, I'm still wearing my black goth leaning platform shoes walking into the RNC every day. I'm sure they are like, 'What is going on here?'" Because everyone around me was with these nice polo shirts and I'm over here just being me, but I'm a conservative me because I was raised in a conservative Catholic family and so that's what I identify with. That's how I ended up at the RNC and start my career there.
Alicia Menendez: There are two major traumas that mark your 20s, 9/11, which is a trauma that we went through nationally and then the loss of your father. Which happened first?
Olivia Troye: It was 9/11, and then right after, two months later, I lost my dad. I was already living in DC. I had started my career on The Hill. I walked home all the way to Arlington, Virginia that day. So I walked past the burning Pentagon. I remember picking up coffee and taking it to people that were sitting there watching the building, wondering if their loved ones were going to be found alive. And that really just stayed with me. I ended up choosing my career in national security right after that because I was like, "What can I do to prevent this from ever happening again?"
And then I remember my dad being worried about me. My dad is typical fashion, he's like, "Do you have a car? You need to have a car. You need to be able to get out." And this is coming from a truck driver, right? "You got to get out. You got to be able to drive on the road." And two months later, we're grieving all of this, thinking about what's happening here in the country and I get a phone call and they tell me that my father died in his truck on a trip. That devastated us, because at the time, it was just me and my mom. I'm an only child. Well, that's a complicated story that we can get into, but at the time, I was an only child.
And my mom, she'd been a housewife for most of her life until she had to step up and work and she stepped up during college, but now ... Whenever you're on The Hill, you're not making a lot of money. And my mom was like, "How are we going to make it together?" And I just remember my mom essentially got a job at a maquiladora in El Paso. She was working at a manufacturing plant because she didn't have a college education. She was the youngest out of four. She was the only girl in Mexico. So she was like, "I got to get to work. How are we going to support each other?"
Alicia Menendez: It makes sense to me now that you have such a serious and focused career, given how young you are when the stakes both for you as a family and for us as a country come into focus. As I read through your resume, you can almost see the click where you lock in and decide, "This is my life's work." And I'm curious what that required of you to take yourself from that political path and put yourself on to the national security service path.
Olivia Troye: I was a Bush appointee starting out in the Pentagon. Being around the military and serving around them, it really was about country over anything else. Politics just wasn't really entering the conversation in that it was really service for the greater good. And I always tell people, "I feel like I grew up in the Pentagon," and I wasn't military, but I was a civilian at a very young age and so I ended up actually deploying as a civilian. I spent time in Baghdad, which was just an eye-opening experience for me. And I mentioned that because I just remember calling my mom, this is about two years after my had passed away and she gets a phone call from me and I tell her, "Mom, I'm going to Baghdad."
She was scared and worried out of her mind and I said, "I just have to do this. I have to serve. And when else will I get the opportunity? I'm not a military person, I'm a civilian. How do I make a difference and really get this on-the-ground experience and also do whatever I can in this situation?"
Alicia Menendez: I know that everyone who is listening is like, "Did she mention that being an only child is a complicated story?" As you said to me before we started recording, you are a 23andMe statistic. What happened?
Olivia Troye: Yeah, I sure am. So I covered the United Nations portfolio for Vice President Mike Pence. I went to the UN General National Assembly for two years and I can't even tell you, it is one of the hardest, most stressful things to do because you're chilling with all the diplomats, all the world leaders and it's constantly changing and you're doing the prep memos and it's just super chaotic, never mind adding Donald Trump into the mix. So I've survived another UNGA, I remember this so vividly and I wake up in my New York City hotel room just exhausted to a message on social media and it's pictures of my dad. It says, "Hi, I think your dad was my grandfather."
And honestly, I was like, "Am I being kind of catfish from a foreign adversary, foreign delegation here?" This is my thinking, right? As a national security person, I'm like, "I'm being played. Someone's trying to get information from me." It's one of those phishing scams like, "Don't click on the link." I screenshot it. I sent it to my husband and I call him. And he picks up the phone and he's like, "What is this? And how do they have that photo of your father?" And I hadn't even processed that because he was right, that photo sits in our living room at my mom's house at the time and we have it here in our home today. And I was like, "That's a valid point."
So then I look and I have several missed calls from one of my cousins and she'd been trying to contact me the night before, but I was working. So she was trying to give me a heads-up, so it wouldn't just hit me out of the blue that this person had contacted her too. And not only had they contacted her, they had pictures of my cousin and her mom, which is my dad's sister. She had left messages saying, "It's urgent. I really need to talk to you about something." And so I called her back and she's like, "Yeah, I think this is true. Apparently, your dad had a son."
I've been an only child for 20 something years by this point and I was in shock. I get in touch with them. She connects us. Latinos were like, "What does he want? What do they want from you?" That's what my family and my cousins are super protective and they're like, "He wants money. He knows where you work. He knows you're in the White ..." I mean, all these conspiracies start going and they're super protecting me and guarded. And so I just say to him, "Look, there's a really way to resolve this. Can you take the test?" And sure enough, it was like, "This person is 95% likely match of being your half-brother," and I'm in shock.
He grew up literally about an hour from El Paso. We were right by each other. I was born in Reno, Nevada. He was born in Reno, Nevada. And the sad part is my dad is gone, I can't ask him about it, so we're both sort of left putting the pieces together on how this happened. And as you can imagine, explaining that to my mom was very hard.
Alicia Menendez: I came into this conversation thinking about how you must have some sense of displacement having been a Republican all of your adult life and then in the last few years choosing to distance yourself from the party to become a critic of the current iteration of the party. And this, in some ways, feels like a foil to me in that your family, as you imagined it, was fundamentally different, had to be reimagined. All of these identity pieces, right? "I'm an only child. Well, I'm not. This is who my dad is. Well, he was more complicated than I thought he was. This is the party I love. What has happened to this party that I once loved and dedicated myself to?" That is a lot of upheaval in a short period of time.
Olivia Troye: It's a lot to process and I think trying to figure out who I am, where do I fit in now, I became a Trump critic, very outspoken and a very public figure about it. I remember someone telling me in the aftermath about it, I asked about how Mike Pence was doing right after I had come forward. Someone had talked to him about it and he said, "She'll never work in Washington again." That hurt at the core just because I've spent my entire career and a career really focused, driven by public service. And to hear someone at that level, at this factor who knows me as a person, who I worked very, very loyally with for two and a half years, very hard, it makes you question everything.
Alicia Menendez: 2016, did you vote for Donald Trump?
Olivia Troye: I did not. I was really offended by his rhetoric about migrants and immigrants being criminals and Mexicans and the cartels. I'm a border town child. It's just like someone took your childhood memories and dream and just completely shattered them. I'm like, "Wait a second." I thought that he would grow to be presidential, to be honest with you. I was like, "Is this bluster? Will he grow into the role?" I take an assignment at the Department of Homeland Security. I end up working on all of the immigration executive orders. I end up having to work the travel ban. We're in the hotseat in that department for everything. We see it all.
Alicia Menendez: What happens that you choose to leave and why, as you were working through all of these other policies that gave you pause in rooms where people were saying things that were giving you pause, did you not leave sooner?
Olivia Troye: When I was in these meetings, I remember one of them specifically where we were discussing the list of countries. I'm talking about the travel ban list as it's referred to. I remember the fear of just the Intel community and the service of going into these confrontational meetings, it was palpable. We were going into a confrontation and we're all just actually operating on facts. And so I just remember walking to a meeting and they're like, "This is unacceptable," and I'm thinking to myself like, "Oh, because they want a longer list. That's the hidden agenda here. Yeah, I'm understanding of it."
I just didn't budge. I said, "Look, these are the facts. This is where we've landed," and they were like, "Well, you need to go back to work." And I'm like, "No, this is not how the intelligence community works." I remember walking out of that meeting, I remember actually the undersecretary that I was working for in that meeting and he was like, "Whoa, Olivia, you didn't waiver." He's like, "You've got balls," is what he said to me. And I remember thinking, "What happens when somebody else replaces me? What happens when people like me leave? What does that look like?"
And that's how I actually ended up working for Mike Pence, was the DHS front office that asked, "Would you be willing to interview for this role?" And a lot of it was because I had a clear understanding of the entire national security apparatus. I worked in different departments. I had deployed with FEMA before. I knew the immigration stuff, obviously, because I worked at first hand and I got to be honest, inside baseball, they also wanted to have a conduit there that was going to be honest about what was really going on in a truthful way. There were people that were like, "We cannot believe she's going to go work in the Trump administration now." And I just felt strongly that, to me, I wasn't there to push a political partisan agenda. To me, I was there to really do the role and do it well for Mike Pence and I was a person that covered mass shootings, natural disasters.
I just felt strongly that I needed to do my best to operate on factual situations, inform him of the facts and play my part in trying to make a difference here in what we were seeing, because by that point, we knew what Donald Trump was. So I'm not going to sit here and claim that I didn't go into that with eyes wide open. I remember reporting to the White House the first day walking in and saying, "All right, you've signed up for this. Put your big girl pantalones on and let's go because this is going to be interesting." And so fast forward, I have seen all of these things.
And then we get to the 2020 COVID pandemic and I'm watching the recklessness and I'm there for the conversations about shooting Americans, and at some point, I'm just like, "Okay, at some point, are you enabling or are you actually making a difference?" and at that point, I just didn't feel that I was.
Alicia Menendez: With whom did you discuss your decision to resign?
Olivia Troye: The vice president. I spoke directly to Mike Pence. I said that, "I feel like I cannot do this job the way that I feel that it needs to be done." I told him, I was like, "I think there are actually people on your own staff working against you because there's a direct link to the Oval Office and I think it's dangerous and counterproductive." And I remember leaving that conversation and thinking to myself, "Did you just give life advice to the VP of the United? Who are you?" right? That was pretty bold. I walked out of there and I was like, "Well, if you didn't resign, you were going to get fired, I guess, because I had nothing to lose at that point." I said, "I hope that you stay safe."
And I remember that and thinking to myself, looking on January 6th and those words still haunt me today, because obviously, the dynamic in the White House was so toxic already and I was watching some of the behavior from Donald Trump that, as a homeless kid, it was bothering me. It was hard to make that decision though because I was the conduit for the taskforce. I was a conduit for the doctors. I walked around for weeks thinking, "Did I do the right thing? Did I hurt the taskforce? They no longer have that confidant," but at some point I was like, "I can't be a part of this anymore. It's against my own oath and everything that I stand for to continue to just be witness to this and I also don't think at this point that I'm preventing anything from happening."
Alicia Menendez: Olivia, as a Republican Latina, what do you say to your fellow conservative Latinas or Republican Latinas who aren't sure who they're going to vote for on election day?
Olivia Troye: I think it's really important to take a step back and say, "What does this mean for our community?" Look, I've had conversations with conservatives, Latinos and some of them are like, "Well, we're hearing all this stuff on immigration and we believe in legal immigration," and I'm like, "I'm not saying that I don't. I come from Homeland Security." What I'm saying though is that with the extremism that I witnessed in the Trump administration, they don't differentiate between legal status on who you are, right? Legal permanent resident means nothing to them. That Office of Denaturalization is very real. I overheard the conversations where they were talking about how they rolled this back.
And to me, there's a lot of hardworking people across our country that are Latinos that are actually getting pulled into the divisiveness because that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to divide us up as a community so that they can exploit us, but the thing is that the end result is going to actually hurt us. When they talk about these raids and encampments, what does that actually look like? Are they just going to be at random doing random checks at people's homes, disrupting kids in their schools? This is some scary stuff that will be implemented because that's their vision. What do these encampments look like?
We remember the children in cages. We remember child separation. It's going to be that much worse and I think that we should take that seriously. And I'll tell you this, I'm a Republican, I don't agree with everything that Kamala Harris stands for, but I trust her to lead the country in a responsible way. I trust her to have the greater good of the American people. I'm not worried about what she's going to do in the middle of a crisis. I'm not worried about how she's not going to care when there's a shooter in a Walmart and that person's targeting Hispanics or Mexicans. That's very real and it's going to continue to happen in our communities across the country if Donald Trump continues to be enabled, and if he returns to office, it's going to be that much worse.
Alicia Menendez: Olivia, thank you so much for such a great conversation, for being so honest. Thank you for being with me.
Olivia Troye: Thank you.
Alicia Menendez: Thank you for listening. Latina to Latina is executive produced and owned by Juleyka Lantigua, and me, Alicia Menendez. Kojin Tashiro is our lead producer. Tren Lightburn mixed this episode. We love hearing from you. Email us at hola@latinatolatina.com. Slide into our DMs on Instagram Threads and TikTok @latinatolatina. Check out our merchandise at latinatolatina.com/shop and remember to subscribe or follow us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Goodpods, wherever you're listening right now. Every time you share this podcast, every time you leave a review, you help us to grow as a community.