As the Democratic establishment continues to alienate its base by insisting on centrism and decrepit candidates, progressives are attracting giant crowds even in red states, drawing standing ovations, and mobilizing millions of voters through old-fashioned, street-level campaigning. They’re taking lessons from organized labor, talking policy, and speaking to voters like adults, not scolding them like disobedient children.
One of the latest progressive candidates to join the fight is California community advocate Angela Gonzales-Torres, whom the campaign group Justice Democrats endorsed this morning. Gonzales-Torres, 30, is running in the state’s 34th District, an area within the city of Los Angeles that includes some of the neighborhoods President Trump’s immigration officials have hit the hardest with raids, according to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, including Glassell Park and downtown’s Little Tokyo.
Her pitch: She knows how to fight Trump’s immigrant terror campaign because she’s lived through it before. Her mixed-status family was ripped apart 15 years ago, when the federal government deported her father, an auto mechanic, back to Mexico, where he has been forced to remain to this day. The experience left her mother alone to raise four daughters as she struggled to keep a roof over their head with her waitressing job. They lived in a series of shelters, as well as their car; among her most vivid memories of that time was doing her homework, leaning over the hood of the car the family was living in at the time, parked in a Denny’s parking lot, she told the Prospect.
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The experience has shaped her politics, which her policy platform reflects. While others in the Democratic Party refuse to stand up for vulnerable populations and meekly say they too want border security, Gonzales-Torres has specific policy points she wants to achieve in Congress that would protect immigrants.
Gonzales-Torres wants to create a pathway to citizenship for all, with a “clear, attainable, and inclusive” way for DACA recipients, TPS holders, and essential workers to gain citizenship; protections against arbitrary deportation and permanent family separation; and “legislative solutions that end reliance on outdated and punitive immigration quotas.” She pledges to fight for mixed-status households to ensure no one is denied needed assistance (including for health care or pandemic relief), expand eligibility for driver’s licenses and in-state tuition, and protect schools, hospitals, courthouses, and other sensitive locations against ICE surveillance.
Such policies take dead aim at the GOP’s mega spending law, which excludes undocumented immigrants from a host of federal programs, including even minor programs like No Tax on Tips.
“Experiencing family separation, economic insecurity, housing instability, and all of the trauma that comes with it has only made me more committed to fighting for my community, and for all of the Angelenos for whom that is a daily struggle, like it was for my family,” Gonzales-Torres said via email in response to questions. She called it “unacceptable” that the cycle is repeating itself 15 years later. “Los Angeles deserves better, and I’m determined to get it for us.”
Gonzales-Torres is the second candidate Justice Democrats has endorsed ahead of the 2026 midterms. The Squad-making group in April endorsed Donavan McKinney, running in Michigan’s 13th District against two-term multimillionaire incumbent Shri Thanedar, who last month failed to disclose a $50,000 crypto purchase. As the Prospect reported, Justice Democrats said McKinney was just the beginning of endorsements it planned to make to find “as many working-class champions challenging corporate, do-nothing politicians as we can this cycle.”
The policy platform Gonzales-Torres outlines squares with the economic populist message that has made other progressive candidates household names across the country.
“In a city that has become ground zero for Donald Trump’s war on immigrant families, Angelenos deserve a leader whose donors will never dictate how hard they fight back,” said Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, in a statement.
Gonzales-Torres put herself through school while working two jobs, first at Pasadena City College before transferring to UCLA. She became president of the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council and led campaigns to protect renters and hold developers and city officials accountable. She’s now a member of the L.A. Metro Public Safety Advisory Committee and works as an academic counselor at her alma mater, Pasadena City College, in its Community Overcoming Recidivism Through Education program, which supports formerly incarcerated students. She’s also the program director for a permanent affordable-housing project in Altadena, helping older tenants recover from recent fires that ravaged that city.
The policy platform Gonzales-Torres outlines in campaign material squares with the economic populist message that has made other progressive candidates household names across the country, including Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City Zohran Mamdani, and rising star Graham Platner, the populist Senate candidate who is running to unseat Republican Susan Collins in Maine.
Like them, Gonzales-Torres is focused on cost-of-living and economic justice matters that are making life hard for average Americans, and leading more to believe the American dream is nothing but a lie. Consider, for example, a recent Wall Street Journal/NORC survey, where 70 percent of registered voters said it’s not true now, or never was, that “if you work hard, you will get ahead.” It’s the highest share saying so in 15 years of the survey. Gonzales-Torres is taking aim at that despair, listing “economic dignity and security” as a core issue.
To make that a reality, she is pledging to champion the launch of a guaranteed basic income pilot program for her district, giving direct, unconditional monthly payments to residents, an idea that jurisdictions around the world have tried with routine, if uneven, success. A 12-month basic income program in Los Angeles, for example, found that giving people $1,000 monthly payments for a year led to stronger food security and less domestic violence. More recently, Philadelphia’s experiment of giving no-strings-attached monthly cash in amounts ranging from $15 to $2,057 to struggling renters was found to be even more successful than anticipated.
Also on the economics list, Gonzales-Torres includes protecting gig workers’ right to organize and collectively bargain a contract. This week, Uber and Lyft agreed to allow California drivers to unionize, but not strike, in exchange for a reduction in the companies’ insurance obligations.
Gonzales-Torres also supports portable benefits for gig workers, including health care and retirement savings, a national paid family and medical leave program, universal sick leave, and “significant federal investment” in affordable child care, including subsidies, expanded pre-kindergarten, and fair wages for child care workers.
She’s likewise taking aim at American despair with proposals for housing for all, environmental justice, and education equity, including early-childhood education programs. Bills currently under consideration that speak to her policy positions include Rep. Summer Lee’s Abolish Super PACs Act, Rep. Delia Ramirez’s Block the Bombs Act, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act, Gonzales-Torres told the Prospect.
GONZALES-TORRES IS ALSO TAKING AIM at incumbent Jimmy Gomez, whom the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent hundreds of thousands on last year to protect against progressive challenger David Kim’s third attempt to unseat him. As the Prospect reported, this was the only congressional general election AIPAC got directly involved in during 2024. United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC, spent $500,000 on TV ads, $300,000 on mailers, and what Politico referred to as “five figures” on digital ads targeting Kim. Fairshake, a pro-crypto PAC, also took out half a million dollars for the race.
In 2020, the distance between Gomez and Kim was six points; in 2022, it was two points. Last year, boosted by AIPAC and crypto spending, the distance grew again, with Gomez drawing 55.6 percent of the vote to Kim’s 44.4 percent.
Once installed in the House, Gomez voted for the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, a bill that would have taken cryptocurrency regulation away from the Securities and Exchange Commission and given it to the digital industry’s regulator of choice, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The bill died last year in the Senate. But under the Trump administration, there is now a crypto-friendly chief at the SEC and the industry has successfully captured it and all other relevant regulators. Gomez also backed the GENIUS Act, the law setting up light-touch regulation for stablecoins, which passed Congress earlier this summer.
Gonzales-Torres is not impressed by Gomez’s capture by either the Israel or the crypto lobby. She notes he’s taken more than $2.3 million from AIPAC in the last campaign cycle alone and that the cryptocurrency industry gives him an “A” rating. By the end of last year, AIPAC was his top contributor, followed by a bank named Capital Group and the real estate company Servenco Management. None of that aligns with the constituents he claims to represent, she said, noting that CA-34 has some of the highest issuances of eviction notices in all of Los Angeles and is in the poorest 20 percent of congressional districts nationwide.
Gomez did not respond to a request for comment.
“My community does not want to see compromise as fascism invades our city and terrorizes our neighborhoods,” Gonzales-Torres told the Prospect. “We want courage in this time of cowardice.”