Our Platform

Affordability is a moot point if one has no income. CA-32 has a median household income of $110K and a mean household income of $177K. And yet we’re still struggling. The concept of the ‘working class’ needs to meaningfully be extended to white-collar professions, as some of the most active sectors of union membership include education, healthcare, and retail. I will fight for the ability of CA-32 constituents to keep their jobs and to be able to organize for better working conditions and wages. I support the PRO Act and extending the WARN Act, to provide workers options and advanced warning when faced with potential layoffs.

Far more than vehicles for increased wages and benefits, unions are fundamental to democracy and defending against authoritarian and corporate power. I’ve been rank-and-file at UAW Local 5810 and UAW Local 2865, and I was part of a core group of workers who organized and successfully won the Harvard Graduate Students Union - UAW (HGSU-UAW Local 5118) during the first Trump administration and against a multimillion dollar union-busting campaign.

In our organizing, it became clear that labor rights are inextricable from civil rights, immigration rights, disability rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and rights to dignity and equality. These rights are functionally non-existent unless there are mechanisms and power to defend them and to defend against retaliation. In addition to being methods of addressing injustice, union grievance procedures have a preventative effect on discrimination, and the collective power of a union can set norms and advocate for these rights–even as federal civil rights laws are eroded.

I stand with unions, formal and informal, as levers against corporate power, against discrimination, against unjust workplace and living conditions, and against authoritarianism. 

I support Medicare for All and robust food security programs. Our current healthcare system robs us of time and health, and I've seen the lifesaving power of being able to go to any cancer specialist in the country for care, which is a reality under the richest Medicare plan.

The high cost of food and doubling health insurance premiums and costs means that many families will choose to forgo both to continue to afford their housing. This trade-off is unacceptable. Approximately 10% of our district members use food stamps (Supplemental Food Assistance Program), and 29% are on Medi-Cal (and therefore not on employer-sponsored plans). Almost half of SNAP recipient households are elderly, and over a third have a child under 18. Thirty-nine percent include someone with a disability. Medi-Cal and SNAP serve our most vulnerable.

Congress has already cut these programs significantly by introducing work requirements and eliminating healthcare subsidies. The introduction of work requirements is expected to sharply increase the number of uninsured Americans. On day one of my term, I will fight to repeal the cuts to healthcare in the OBBB. Just as the Affordable Care Act halved the percent of our district population that is uninsured, therefore saving lives, I will advocate for Medicare for All and a more robust food security so that no one, especially our most vulnerable constituents—the elderly, the poor, children, and those with disabilities—ever has to make that impossible choice of giving up food or health.

I fully support cutting red tape to increase the housing supply and making housing affordable. The housing and homelessness crisis in Los Angeles County is a failure at all levels of government: federal, state, and local. We know what solutions work and that they just need to be funded.

The research overwhelmingly shows that Permanent Supportive Housing works and that people are better able to improve their mental health and their overall status once housed. Forcing treatment as a prerequisite does not work. A Lancet systematic review found permanent supportive housing increased 6-year housing stability by 42%. In Congress, I would fight to fund HUD's Continuum of Care program and expand Housing Choice Vouchers. The waitlist for these Section 8 vouchers is 5-10 years long while immigrant detention centers can rake in $100M annually in revenue per 2000 beds (OBBB allocated $45BN to immigration detention centers while Section 8 voucher waitlists remain closed across the country).

I believe in rent control paired with increased housing supply. Rent control can make units affordable to lowest income households (below 30% of Area Median Incomes, or AMI) but decrease the number of units affordable for those making above 120% AMI. To address this loss of units available to those making above 120% AMI, I fully support The 21st Century Road to Housing Act (S.2651/H.R.6644). This cuts the red tape from new construction, places restrictions on corporate investors for buying single family homes, and provides time-limited funding for building new housing (funding is withdrawn if construction completion does not meet milestones).

Transportation is critically important to people living in CA-32, with significant impacts on climate change and affordability. 84% of Angelenos who use the bus don’t use a car, and Angelenos use a fifth of their budget on transportation; for the nation’s poorest households that own cars, it’s a third or more of a household budget. I support a high-speed Metro subway connection between the Valley and the Westside, fully connected to UCLA. While freeway traffic is supply-driven demand and will not be meaningfully decreased by public transit, the greener alternative of this subway, which can serve an estimated 400,000 people daily, will also help with our affordability crisis. I will work toward a balanced multimodal transportation system that serves everyone, including the young and the elderly. I will work toward frequent reliable transit, with effective first/last mile walk/bike connections.

In the 2022 and 2024 Primary Elections for District 32, the voter turnout (as a percentage of registered voters) in precincts with the highest concentration of Hispanic/Latine constituents was among the lowest in the district. And these communities are now the least supported in this administration as ICE and DHS prey on these neighborhoods and their families.

Our rights under the constitution are under threat. Citizens United needs to be overturned. We need to get private money out of politics. This includes the unlimited, unaccountable spending through Super PACs and dark money groups that allow corporate entities to override people’s voices in elections. I support publicly financed elections so candidates answer to voters, not donors.

We must ensure that every eligible citizen has a clear, secure path to the ballot box. We must ensure that we do not create a modern version of Jim Crow with onerous requirements meant to disenfranchise citizens.

If we expect elections to represent the will of the people, we need to remove barriers to voting, and this means the United States Postal Service and voting by mail need to be fully funded and reinforced.

Public service should never be a stepping stone to a lobbying career. We need to end the ‘revolving door’ by banning former government officials from lobbying the agencies they once served. I refuse PAC money because my obligation is to CA-32, not to the crypto industry or any foreign government’s military operations.

I am a climate scientist, and I take this issue seriously because CA-32 has lived it. The 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed thousands of homes. Over a year later, FEMA has covered just 7% of assessed damage costs, a third of what it covered after comparable disasters. Governor Newsom requested nearly $40 billion in federal recovery aid; Congress has not acted. Meanwhile, 27% of soil samples in the Eaton Fire burn zone exceed California’s residential lead standards — and FEMA refused for nearly a year to fund testing in a community where 96% of destroyed homes predated the 1978 lead paint ban.

This district has also endured the 2015 Porter Ranch gas leak, which was the largest methane leak in U.S. history, and decades of unresolved nuclear and chemical contamination at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. These are not abstractions. They are the lived experience of my own family and our community, and they demand federal accountability. I would use committee oversight and appropriations power to force cleanup accountability and ensure FEMA meets its obligations to every affected community equitably.

The Green New Deal is so named because it is a nod to the original New Deal and its strategies for creating jobs and building the social safety nets that so many in CA-32 rely on today. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was the closest thing to a Green New Deal ever enacted. And before the OBBBA gutted it, the results were striking: In just its first two years, the IRA created 334,000 clean energy jobs, drove over $115 billion in manufacturing investment, and directed those investments disproportionately into lower-income communities, including in districts whose representatives voted against the law.

The OBBBA killed these incentives years ahead of schedule. The 30% residential solar credit ended December 31, 2025. EV purchase credits of up to $7,500 sunset on September 30, 2025. These weren’t burdens on families — they were putting money directly into household budgets while reducing emissions. On my first day in office, I would fight to restore and expand every IRA incentive the OBBBA eliminated.

The Green New Deal must be updated to address the fastest-growing source of energy demand in the country. Data centers consumed 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023. The Department of Energy projects that could triple to 12% by 2028. AI-optimized servers alone will consume nearly five times more electricity by 2030. Cryptocurrency mining is a significant additional driver, particularly in states like Texas.

As a software engineer who works with AI daily, I understand the technology and its benefits. But tech companies are privatizing gains while externalizing costs: massive energy consumption, water use for cooling, and displacement of workers. I would mandate that new data centers and cryptocurrency mining facilities be powered by 100% carbon-free energy, and I would support an AI consumption tax on enterprise-level services, where companies pay, to fund green jobs and community energy resilience.

The Green New Deal’s objective of mitigating the climate crisis while creating economic resilience and social safety nets is not radical — it is the proven model. The IRA already demonstrated that clean energy investment creates jobs, lowers household costs, and strengthens communities. We have the evidence. We need the political will to act on it.

The overriding narrative of immigration is that it is a border security problem, but the actual bottleneck is what happens after people arrive. The asylum case backlog is over 3.3 million cases. Rather than meaningfully funding USCIS to address it, the OBBBA gave ICE $75 billion over four years (effectively tripling its annual budget to $29 billion) while USCIS received just $10 million for backlog reduction.

The unresolved backlog is not an accident — it is a convenient justification for filling detention beds with people who have no criminal conviction, at over $100 a night, while private prison companies collect billions in federal contracts. Under both Biden and Trump, visa processing has been extremely slow, and those bureaucratic delays have kept our community members from visiting a dying parent. Delays with no end in sight have prevented hardworking members of our district from planning for the future. This is silent and systematic cruelty, and it is a policy choice, not an inevitability.

While Trump has openly threatened naturalized and birthright citizenship, which form the basis of at least a third of CA-32 constituents’ citizenship, we have heard nothing from Representative Sherman regarding his plans to fight this. I will fight to protect existing pathways to U.S. citizenship and the visa statuses, like green cards and Temporary Protected Status, that many Americans have lived with for decades. I will also protect our undocumented community members, who contribute to our economy and pay taxes but are ineligible for many of the public benefits they fund.

U.S. citizens, including children with cancer, have been abducted and deported by ICE, and many of our citizen constituents now carry their passports in fear. If our citizen community members feel this way, the psychological trauma being dealt upon our non-citizen community members is unfathomable.

I am the only candidate in this race to have helped parole an asylum seeker from months of inhumane ICE detention as an ordinary citizen. I saw firsthand the perversion of taxpayer dollars spent to imprison him at over $100 a night, to hinder him from contacting his family and advancing his case, and to violate his human rights. The federal government made him dependent on community members’ good will by refusing to let him work. Once free, he won his asylum case.

ICE is incapable of following our constitution or being accountable to taxpayers. Seventy-three percent of people in ICE detention have no criminal conviction. The conflation of immigration with criminality — what scholars call ‘crimigration’ — is the legal and rhetorical framework that has been used to justify what is now the largest system of mass detention in the country. People seeking asylum are not criminals. Overstaying a visa is a civil violation, not a crime. Yet the infrastructure we have built treats immigration as a criminal matter, and the result is a network of detention facilities with no accountability, no adequate oversight, and a death toll rising to its highest levels in decades.

Separating enforcement from services in 2003 created an agency with no institutional brake — no counterweight from the people processing visas, reuniting families, and adjudicating asylum claims. Representative Sherman has said we should “abolish Trump’s ICE” but argues that folding it back into a unified agency would just produce the same behavior under a different name. The historical record says otherwise. Before 2003, immigration enforcement competed for resources and attention with immigration services inside INS. A standalone enforcement agency optimizes for enforcement maximalism: ICE and its out-of-control behavior is not a bug. It’s by design. I would fold immigration enforcement back into the same agency as immigration services, restoring the structural balance that existed before ICE was created.