(This bit of personal background is here to explain who is organizing this petition effort. It is not a campaign ad meant to sell you on me, in order to solicit a donation You’ll note the lack of donation buttons anywhere on the site. The only request on this site right now is that you pledge your petition signature)

That being said – I was born in 1985 in Split, in what was then Yugoslavia, to a Serbian mother and a Croatian father. My early childhood was spent between Sarajevo and the islands of the Adriatic until war arrived; in 1992, we left with three suitcases for the United States.

My father took a research job at Duke University in North Carolina. My parents worked constantly and rebuilt their lives from the ground up. I grew up in American public schools, played basketball, went to prom, made mistakes, and by the time I graduated high school, I felt fully at home here.

I studied public policy at Duke, where I became interested in how institutions shape people’s lives and how the concept of human rights shaped international law and policy after World War II:

After college, I lived and worked in China, studied at Peking University, started a small business, and later co-founded a consulting firm focused on health and regulatory issues in Asia.

In my legal practice, I represented people navigating complex immigration and labor systems. Much of that work involved interacting with institutions most people rarely see — courts, detention systems, and regulatory bodies.

For a part of that time, from 2015 to 2022, I ran a practice (a hybrid non-profit/private practice) focused on visas for victims of crime and deportation defense, the latter part modeled around the idea of massive collaborative representation, which is the practice of representing many detained people with a committed group of volunteers and organizing technology, something I was granted more than $500,000.00 to build out between 2018 and 2020 (and ended due to COVID-related issues in funding and prison access):

My education, my life abroad, and my experiences inside of America’s detention centers and prisons, taught me a simple truth: fair institutions and accessible procedures shape whether everyday people can participate meaningfully in civic life.

And that belief, in turn, is what led me here.

I now live and work in Connecticut’s 3rd District with my wife and children. This is our home. This effort is an attempt to bring some more civic life into our communities at a time when untruths, non-humanitarian ideas, and violence have come to dominate our political landscape.