FAHQ (Frequently Asked Hard Questions)
I want to be transparent about key issues that are animating this current political environment, even if I am not fully a “candidate” yet, having not made the ballot.
Why are you running for Congress?
Because the systems I spent my career trying to hold together from the outside are failingāand in some cases collapsingāfaster than courts, nonprofits, or protests can respond.
I am an immigration lawyer by training. For years, I believed that litigation, advocacy, and pressure campaigns could restrain abusive systems. That was once true. It is no longer sufficient.
Immigration enforcement has become a fully militarized, cash-fueled federal machine. Congress funds it reflexively. Courts defer to it. Administrations of both parties manage it, rather than dismantle it. At some point, continuing to work only at the edges becomes a form of consent.
Running for Congress is not an ambition project. It is a recognition that power must be confronted at the level where it is created and funded.
What is your position on Israel and Palestine?
I support enforcing international law: fully, consistently, and without exceptions. I believe that the actions of Israel in Gaza constitute an explicit attempt at ethnic cleansing.
As a lawyer and genocide scholar in college, I understand that the 1948 Genocide Convention obligates states to prevent genocide, avoid complicity in it, and hold perpetrators accountable. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel has committed acts of genocide against Palestinians and ordered immediate preventative measures. That finding matters and the U.S. has a moral obligation to support the ICJ in the prosecution of this case.
At the same time, Hamasās October 2023 attacks on Israeli civilians may also constitute genocide or crimes against humanity. Accountability must be universal. No civilian population should be targeted. No armed actor is above the law. Therefore, the US must support the ICJ in its prosecution of Hamas.
My actions as a Congressperson in relation to Israel and Palestine would be straightforward:
U.S. military and foreign aid to Israel must be withheld until Israel holds its leadership accountable, either in the ICJ or in domestic courts, for the atrocities in Gaza
Aid should resume only when future accountability mechanisms are in place.
Palestinians are entitled to statehood, dignity, and safety. They are entitled to an end of occupation. Therefore, aid to Israel should be suspended until the occupation of Palestine is brought to an end.
Israelis are entitled to security and a future free from permanent war. Israel can become an actual democracy again, and if we help Israel do so, maybe we, too, can become an actual democracy again. Our fate is intertwined, for better and for worse.
Finally, as the descendant of Holocaust survivors, I reject the idea that endless violence carried out in Israelās name protects Jewish people. It does the opposite. It fuels global antisemitism, collapses Israelās moral legitimacy, and places Jewish communities worldwide at risk.
Enforcing international law is not anti-Israel. It is the only path by which Israel can have a future that does not end in isolation, collapse, or perpetual war.
Enforcing international law is pro-humanity. Perhaps a return to the law will remind us both here in the U.S. and the citizens of Israel that Palestinians are human beings, whose occupation and slaughter has been a stain on the souls of both our countries.
Did you donate to Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville?
Yes. In March 2025, I made a donation that appears as two entries in public records. It was one donation split into two transactions by the platform.
That donation requires explanation, and I do not shy away from it.
At the time, Senator Tuberville was blocking the issuance of 67,000 H-2B visas, which are essential for seasonal workers, small businesses, and immigrant families. I was actively representing employers and workers who were about to lose livelihoods overnight.
That donation was not ideological support. It was a desperate, transactional attempt to stop immediate harm in a moment when Republicans effectively controlled Congress and immigration policy had become hostage politics.
I have otherwise made progressive donations my entire adult life.
That moment was also clarifying.
It made painfully clear that immigration had become a system where survival depended on pleading with power, buying time, and hoping someone with leverage would blink. That is not a sustainable or dignified way to run a country.
It is part of why I decided that trying to save people one crisis at a time was no longer enough, and, ironically, it is a large part of the reason why I chose to run – I saw before me a future where bribes and consigliere “politics” were going to define the entirety of this century for our country if something did not change.
Do you support Abolishing ICE?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer:
ICE is not an untouchable institution. It is one component inside the Department of Homeland Security, and Congress has already shown that DHS components can be eliminated, dissolved, or fundamentally restructured through budgeting and statute.
In recent years, multiple DHS offices responsible for oversight, civil rights, scientific capacity, and accountability were defunded or functionally dismantled. Those decisions prove that abolition is not some abstract or impossible idea. It is a political choice.
My position is simple:
If Congress can eliminate watchdog and oversight offices, it can also eliminate an enforcement agency whose structure incentivizes abuse and fear.
āReformā without structural change has failed repeatedly. Cosmetic fixes do not stop misconduct or restore trust.
Immigration enforcement does not disappear if ICE is abolished. Its functions can be reassigned, narrowed, or replaced with systems that emphasize due process, transparency, and human dignity rather than mass detention and removal.
Supporting abolition is not about chaos. It is about accountability.
It is about acknowledging that some systems were built wrong from the start and require replacement, not endless patchwork.
Abolishing ICE means choosing a different model, one that enforces the law without criminalizing families, communities, and workers, and without operating beyond meaningful oversight.
That is the choice I support.
Have you opposed ICE in the past?
Yes, directly, aggressively, and successfully for eight straight years, from 2016 to 2023. The story of my most famous deportation client, Wilden Acosta, is told in a 2025 book published by Bloomsbury, called “Stopping the Deportation Machine”. I was able to take his case, lost in the system for six years, bring it to the 4th Federal Circuit, win on appeal, and then win on two subsequent remands to the BIA and the lower immigration court. I played hard and I played for keeps, but it took a toll on my health.
Beyond my traditional deportation cases, seven years ago, my organization Mi MaletĆn (later FronteraTech.org) helped pioneer what we called massive collaborative representation: using technology, volunteers, and coordination to defend detained immigrants at scale.
In late 2018, a jail in Charleston secretly accepted over 100 Haitian and Cuban migrants to turn a profit for ICE. We mobilized.
We represented every single migrant.
We freed minors.
We clogged ICEās machinery with due process until detention became legally and financially unsustainable.
We worked until we broke, but we won. ICE was forced to cancel the contract.
We proved something important: because ICE operated on coercion and cash, cutting off the money could stop the abuse.
That era is over.
Today, ICE is better funded than parts of the U.S. military. It is embedded in sprawling federal budgets that Congress passes with little scrutiny. Courts defer. Oversight has collapsed.
Legal aid and protest are still necessaryābut on their own, they are now bringing knives to a gunfight.
Are you a lawyer in Connecticut?
I am a lawyer in Connecticut. I work in New Haven, where I have an office.
I am barred in North Carolina. My Bar number is publicly available – 49660.
Immigration is FEDERAL LAW, so I can be barred anywhere and practice nationwide, so long as I do not wade into state-law issues, like, for example, representing immigration clients in criminal proceedings.
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