On July 23, 2026, I sat down with Jonathan Paz, candidate for US Congress in Massachusetts District 5, to ask him questions about his campaign and his vision for the future. Jonathan Paz (“Paz for the People!”) is challenging the incumbent, Katherine Clark.
Jonathan was wonderful to interview. He was so engaging that when I tried to edit this article I had trouble cutting it down!
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I was reading that you were the child of immigrants, grew up in Waltham, and your father was deported. I’m interested in how you got into politics and activism and what are some of the things you did as a student and city councilor in Waltham?
I always say my greatest honor was being my mother’s son. I’m the son of Bolivian immigrants who were fighting to provide a better future for their family, and we had a taste of the American dream for a short while. My parents were undocumented, but at the time people could get by and Waltham was very good to us. Then 9-11 happened & the government started going after Arab folks, Muslim folks, and immigrants and a lot of immigrants across the country started losing their jobs because the government was cracking down on who had proper documentation. My family had to leave Waltham, and we had to move around a bit and then my Dad was deported, which was a tragedy for my family. My Mom and my sisters felt endangered, so they left shortly thereafter and my brothers and I faced the same decision. But we had this conviction that we were not going to be defined by our circumstances, so my aunt provided this opportunity for us—to adopt us basically–and God bless her heart; she already had four sons of her own.
Freshman year in high school I transferred from Virginia back to Mansfield, Massachusetts, where I graduated from high school and went on to become the first in my family to go to college. I was able to go to a very prestigious school and had a full ride, eventually graduating with Donald Trump’s youngest daughter and Joe Biden’s granddaughter, if you can believe that.
I committed my life to social justice. I’ve always kept the memory of what it meant to be the son of undocumented immigrants. Every day you’re afraid for your parents and you fear that you and your livelihood are being politicized way outside your sphere of influence in Washington, DC. That feeling never left and that level of solidarity and anger never left. I have a deep sense of empathy and compassion for people who are made into second-class citizens, and it’s informed my work ever since. I’m currently an educator; I’m a union organizer by trade and went on to become the second-youngest city councilor in Waltham history, the second Latino ever to be elected to Waltham City Council, and I’ve been fighting for and committed to social justice ever since.
You had mentioned some student activism. What did you do as a student?
I was the vice chair of the State Student Advisory Council (SSAC). That’s a semi-public office because the chair of the State Student Advisory Council is a voting member of the Massachusetts Board of Education. I got elected to that level and I ran a campaign to lower the dropout rate of black and Latino students in Massachusetts. Believe it or not, I won a $10,000 grant from Colin Powell, and we went across the state to visit at-risk high school students who were likely to drop out. We talked about the consequences of dropping out and the hardships that come with it. That activism got me thinking about systemic change.
When did you become a city councilor?
I got elected in 2019.
What were some of the things you did on the city council?
I was able to get us over $1 million in sustainability improvements to our public housing and fight for affordable and sustainable housing in Waltham. I advocated for funding for a new high school that we desperately needed. One of my proudest achievements was supporting our small business community on Moody Street during the pandemic. We were the envy during Covid of what a sustainable downtown can look like in a time of distancing. We saved a lot of jobs and a lot of businesses.
Let’s talk about how you compare to Katherine Clark. I looked at The People’s Scorecard on your website, which was very well done. Maybe you could go into a few specifics about why you think Katherine Clark is bad for the people of Massachusetts, the country, and the world, and where you differ on some of the main issues.
If I had to put it into words, it’s controlled opposition. We’re in a fascist moment in our country’s history, and we just need to be clear about where we stand in our values. The people of Massachusetts want peace; they want to disband ICE, they want a real immigration system rooted in humanity, not brutality, and they want to get the dark money and corruption out of our political process.
What Katherine Clark does is create a façade of a progressive legislator, and that is historically one of the most damaging things you can do to a movement–pretend you stand with the people but truly sell them out to the interests harming them.
Let’s use war, for example. It just came out that all of a sudden, Katherine Clark opposes this war in Iran, and she opposes funding to Israel. But she has a very well-documented track record of sending endless amounts of money to Israel, which by the way, has dragged us into this conflict; which by the way has committed a genocide in Gaza and is creating genocide in Lebanon, and continues to put our service men and women in harm’s way. That is a hawk! She is committed to a project of endless war. She just won’t tell you, but her votes will.
She’s beholden to the AIPAC lobby. When we had the highest level of mobilization against genocide in Palestine, Katherine Clark started receiving record amounts of donations from AIPAC and she managed to completely silence that movement in a variety of ways, effectively saying that she will not budge on this issue. Not only does that put us in harm’s way, but it’s also a clear breach of our democratic process and our trust in our elected officials.
That’s just one example. Let’s talk about ICE—an unscrupulous paramilitary operation literally kidnapping our neighbors. She voted back in May for the CORCA bill, which would create a national data center in partnership with the private sector to surveil every American, every American—and it puts ICE in the middle of it with no real accountability with the pretext of going after retail theft. So, every time someone steals a chocolate bar at CVS, the feds have to get involved? But she’s going to go and run ads on social media that say, “ICE is so bad.” I would consider this an insult to people’s intelligence. There’s this doublespeak that I think is very dangerous; it’s disingenuous and it’s also heavily propagandized.
These are just two examples. We could go on and on about insider trading in Congress, which she says she opposes, but she breaks records in the number of stocks that she’s trading, and she made herself millions of dollars personally.
It’s emblematic of why people don’t trust politicians, why people don’t trust the Democratic party, why they don’t engage in the democratic process. The people of the 5th district deserve someone who is going to fight the billionaire class, not take millions in their donations.
Thank you. That brings me to a question a lot of people have. You’re running as a Democrat, and you just described a large portion of the Democratic party, which is very corporate and which always follows party line and does not think independently and takes AIPAC money. Do you think there is hope for reforming the Democratic party with progressives like yourself or is that impossible because the corruption is so entrenched?
I think that’s the question of our time. I don’t have a crystal ball. I just know that historically, the way that the people overcome such ferocious challenges is through coalition building. I don’t subscribe to one formula; I think that we need an inside and outside strategy to take on national fascism that is here at home. We have to take back our government. In the inside track, we need to organize, whether it’s with progressive Democrats, or independents, and through whatever other avenues people with shared values are able to take office. In Massachusetts that vehicle is the Democratic party. In Kansas it could be different. So, I’m open to innovation. We need to become a voting bloc. What I’m hoping to do is to help create that voting bloc against the war machine, against the ICE machine, that is going to investigate the Epstein class. Those are three very serious things that we can do in the next two years under the Trump administration.
This is not a new concept. This is what other democracies across the world do—create coalitions in their legislative governments that get things done. Our duopoly makes it near impossible to do this, but we’re breaking through. The power of AIPAC is diminishing. You can’t lie to everyone forever. These are the contradictions that are heightening at this moment as the gas prices go up to $5 or $6 per gallon. There’s never been a more direct line to seeing how our foreign policy impacts our quality of life. Since the seventies, there hasn’t been such a clear example of why foreign policy matters.
Regardless of who’s elected, we still need broad mobilization to affect our elections. That’s not going away. One person getting elected is not going to save us all. Having a broader movement will.
Speaking a little more about foreign policy. The House just passed the NDAA which pairs some of our military with Israel. Of course, Trump started the war with Iran by bombing them in February at the behest of Israel. Given all of this, what do you think the relationship of the US should be with Israel?
There’s never been a clearer example of the tail wagging the dog. We have an obligation to the American people and the international community to follow international law because it enables us to have some semblance of peace. Israel right now is a genocidal and apartheid state that is clearly dictating our foreign policy in the Middle East. This didn’t happen overnight. It’s happened over decades. The Israel lobby has been buying our politicians and creating mechanisms to sway our foreign policy, and we need to end that unconditional partnership. Full stop. We need an arms embargo; we need sanctions; we need to hold more criminals accountable.
If we truly care about the civilian population in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, then we would completely stop what we’re doing to Iran. We are the aggressors there. This is bigger than Netanyahu, bigger than Trump; this is a broader hegemonic project that has fallen apart and is crashing the world economy, and it’s going to harm a lot of people.
We are in the midst of a war and an energy crisis. It is only going to get worse. If we want peace in our lifetime, the Palestinian people need to be free.
How will this happen?
It’s not that complicated. Congress has the right to declare war and to [make decisions about] our taxpayer money. If you cut the money off to Israel right now, they can’t sustain a multi-frontal war because they need our intelligence; they need our weapons; they need our money. They can’t handle this. But it also needs to be said that we have been leveraging the state of Israel to control the petroleum in the world. It’s very cynical to say this has anything to do with protecting Jewish people. We know that’s not the case. It has to do with hegemonic control of the region. What this looks like is you cut off all the aid to Israel; Israel has to withdraw and retreat, and then you hold them accountable as you would any other country–to the United Nations, to the International Criminal Court–and you begin a process of demilitarization, you let people have full rights, and you enforce international law.
Let’s just start with acknowledging the root of the problem, which our opponent cannot even call a genocide. She had to use a word salad to imply that maybe she’s opposed to sending endless amounts of money to Israel. It just needs to be said that the US government needs to look out for the American people, and right now, supporting a genocidal state is not consistent with that goal. It’s not a hard thing to conceptualize and it’s an insult to the American people that what our government is doing right now makes us safer, makes our quality of life better, or somehow will create stabilization for some kind of future in the Middle East. It’s absolute bullsh*t!
You claim on your website that the root cause of the immigration crisis in the US is our foreign policy. Could you expand on that and talk about what you think a fair immigration policy would be?
We can’t talk about immigration without talking about how we’ve created immigrants as an empire. As a country, we have a brutal relationship with the immigration process. The US loves to have cheap labor, and they love to exploit other countries and disallow countries in Latin America to have real sovereignty over their economic futures. Venezuela comes to mind. Cuba comes to mind. Bolivia comes to mind. The US status quo is to destabilize countries abroad, not only to extricate natural resources, but also to be able to better dominate the population. This isn’t new history. What’s happening now is we have Donald Trump ramping up the violence to fast track some of these outcomes. Venezuela is coming to mind, but if we’re going to have an immigration system rooted in humanity, it requires us to be better neighbors and to respect international law. We need to have an immigration system that honors the millions of people who have already been in the US and provide amnesty to many of our neighbors and to provide a humane pathway to citizenship. Unfortunately, it’s become a political football, where every other presidential election they pretend they’re going to provide a real path forward and it just somehow never happens.
It’s clear immigrants are not a priority for Democratic leadership. They’ve enabled ICE to grow into this massive paramilitary operation where now we’re seeing an ethnic cleansing in our country. I’ve seen this head on. Last year I was supposed to run for city council in Waltham and instead, I dedicated my time to doing rapid response around ICE sightings and rapid retentions. I dedicated my time to developing the rapid response network in Waltham and the founding of the LUCE hotline because I knew this was a clear violation of human rights and our constitutional process. It’s just inhumane, but it’s also becoming normalized, which is the atrocity of it all. We have an obligation to finally close Pandora’s box and abolish ICE. I mean ending that paramilitary operation and replacing it with an immigration system that will actually respect human rights and will actually provide a humane pathway forward for citizenship.
Our immigration laws can be under the Department of Labor which was what we did before the Patriot Act. We can have a secure border, and we can have a process for everyone, for all of our dreamers, all of our DACA recipients, all of our neighbors, who have been here for many years. What we’re seeing instead is immigration being used as a lever to go after social movements, to go after peace activists, and to curb freedom of speech. These things are all connected. The lessons of Nazi Germany come to mind. First they came for the immigrants, then they came for the trans people, then they came for women seeking abortion access. It’s all connected, and ICE is an excuse to control working class dissent towards what’s happening in our federal government.
I didn’t know immigration used to be under the Department of Labor.
Wouldn’t it make sense?
We afford visas to people coming in here for work. Isn’t that a labor matter? It wasn’t a criminal process. Overstaying your visa was equivalent to getting a speeding ticket. And then you had Bill Clinton who created the framework to criminalize immigrants and then you had Obama who perfected it. A local to federal law enforcement pipeline under the pretense of DACA. We have seen Democratic and Republican administrations be very consistent towards criminalizing immigrants. Very consistent in Washington, DC that we’re supposed to criminalize people whose countries we’ve destroyed. If we don’t have the courage to understand our own history, what are we doing?
What do your first 30 days and first year in office look like?
We would support articles of impeachment of our president; we would do everything possible to fight for a better quality of life for [the] people of Massachusetts. We would support Medicare for All. We would sponsor a universal childcare bill and a universal education bill. There are three things that we can do right now to make everyone’s lives better, which are providing universal healthcare, providing universal childcare, so people can have and maintain their families, and to make sure that our school systems are fully funded. We have the money to make that happen right now.
Do we think that these will be approved within the first 30 days? Probably not because we still have Donald Trump and we still don’t have a super-majority. So, we would have to go on defense and stop funding for wars, stop funding for ICE, and I would leverage our investigative powers to go after these monopolies that are jacking up prices and investigate the Epstein class—people who are clearly implicated in the Epstein files and expose them and hold them to account. We should not have criminals walking amongst us who clearly are above the law. We need to go on offense by having an affirmative agenda that will make people’s lives better and we need to play defense by stopping the systemic violence that is harming us every day.
I believe in playing chess. I’m a strategist and I believe that in our first year, we would engage the district in town halls, and we would mobilize and bring people to Washington, DC. Donald Trump is not going to quietly go out. We need to prepare for social movements and [prepare for] organizing popular resistance against clear breaches of our constitution.
I would be talking as an elected congressman because we can’t rely on our supreme court to reign in our president, so we need to be working inside the halls of Congress. We know that that’s going to be a tough road ahead, but we also need to be willing to exert external pressure and mobilize the people to make those things happen.
I bring an organizer’s perspective to this, fully acknowledging that winning these midterms is only the beginning. It’s not the end of the story. We need to take back our democracy. We need to take on the billionaires, the war mongers, and the fascists and in order to do that it’s going to require sustained mobilization and sustained organization inside and outside the halls of Congress.
Final note, how can people get involved?
We’re a grassroots movement. People can join us in knocking on doors or they can donate. Over half of our donations come from people within the district, no donation is too small or big. Knocking on doors is how we will win. We are featuring a documentary very soon called AIPAC Clark: How to Silence A Movement. People can host a screening or they’re welcome to or join the premiere, which we’ll be announcing very soon.
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For more information:
MAPA Statement Endorsing Jonathan Paz
Jonathan will take part in a debate sponsored by Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice & the Environment on August 5 on Zoom. Please register here: Watertown Debate
By Jeannie Connerney
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Jeannie Connerney is an activist and writer. She is a member of Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice and the Environment; Pax Christi; and Massachusetts Peace Action, where she serves on the editorial board of The Peace Advocate.