Our country’s immigration system is a cruel relic of an imperialist past that continues to this day. Immigrants are renters, students, queer, working-class, seniors, and small business owners; by understanding the intersectionality and history of every issue, we know that by uplifting immigrants, we uplift all our city’s residents. We must rectify our city’s shortcomings, preparing us to receive newcomers with open arms and just living conditions. We will restore human dignity to those whose dignity has been robbed by immigration law.

• Continue strengthening Minneapolis’ sanctuary status and protections.

  • Work with state partners to enact the North STAR Act.

  • Establish an Immigration Response Board to inform residents about imminent or ongoing immigration enforcement actions and advise the council on responding to and protecting against them.

  • Work to provide non-citizens with voting rights for municipal elections. A true sanctuary must guarantee equitable representation, especially for underrepresented groups (No taxation without representation!).

• Increase support for the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (OIRA) and their work to:

  • Offer legal counsel for immigration cases and filing documentation.

  • Run their driver's license education and access program.

  • Conduct more quality studies to advise local leaders and NGOs.

  • Provide translation assistance to help people get situated and connect them to housing, food, transit, education, and healthcare resources.

• Increase OIRA’s and the city’s social service staffing capacity/infrastructure to ameliorate the backlog in immigration and social services.

• Cover DACA renewal fee.

• Work with campuses within city bounds to adopt sanctuary campus policy.

• Work with city apartments, buildings, businesses, and restaurants to increase and clearly designate private spaces to prevent ICE from entering without a warrant.

  • Require private spaces to ask ICE to present a judicial warrant if they appear.

The average rent in Ward 3 is almost $2,000 per month. Especially for students and working-class families, the cost of living is too high, and many new housing projects are unaffordable for residents and newcomers. Houselessness is a public health crisis, representing an intentional failure in governance that disproportionately impacts marginalized groups, especially Black, Indigenous, and Trans folks. We must ensure housing for all.

• Establish a city voucher system, which would provide critical support for low-income or disadvantaged renters while rewarding developers for leasing 15% of apartments with vouchers.

  • Create workforce vouchers to house our essential workers and city employees.

  • Include student, disability, and elderly housing in municipal voucher.

• MPHA should serve as a public option for housing and housing development:

  • Aim to build at least 50 public housing units annually.

  • Focus on building Deeply Affordable (30% AMI) units.

  • Advocate at the federal level to repeal the Faircloth Amendment.

  • Resist efforts to transition public housing (Section 9) to Section 8; these efforts ultimately displace people of color and low income renters.

• Incentivize affordable housing development, including construction, renovation, or repurposing of housing at an Area Median Income of 30%, 50%, and 80% by:

  • Establishing municipal Housing Tax Credit, modeled after Section 42.

  • Increasing support for Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

  • Enacting widespread zoning reform to remove obstacles for mixed-use housing and development.

• Issue rent stabilization at 5% annually tied to inflation with vacancy decontrol while incentivizing new development through the aforementioned policies.

• Bolster Minneapolis Public Housing Authority:

  • Improve administration of Section 8 vouchers.

  • Continue expanding Stable Homes, Stable Schools while making it more accessible and visible to families in need.

  • Expand, maintain, and refurbish its portfolio of family homes.

• Expand eviction notice to 90 days for nonpayment of rent.

• Create a Renters’ Insurance Fund as a safety net for renters who have lost their jobs.

• Establish, support, and protect tenants’ organizations to collectively represent and fight for their members’ needs.

• Initiate Transitional Housing and Permanent Supportive Housing for our unhoused neighbors, providing Emergency Housing Vouchers with accessible counseling, group-based treatment, healthcare, job training, and more.

• Enhance cooperation with county officials to ensure better housing services.

• Eliminate economically discriminatory requirements to tour or lease apartments.

• Support Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing Preservation programs, including the successful and newly updated 4D program.

• Establish municipal community land trust while bolstering existing land trusts.

• Support apartments in replacing coin-operated laundry with digital or electronic laundry rooms.

By meeting basic needs, we tackle our city’s root problems that push and lock people into endless cycles of carceral violence; a preventative, rather than punitive, and diverse de-escalatory approach ensures community safety for all. Sanctuary policy, transparency, and accountability build mutual trust between the community and those protecting it. When people feel safe asking for help for themselves or their neighbors, the community is safer.

• Implement alternative initiatives for community safety at a widespread level:

  • Expand support for the Behavior Crisis Response team.

  • Expand Department of Public Safety to include trained responders for domestic safety and substance abuse crises.

  • Expand Safety Ambassadorship so women, immigrants, POC, and others feel safe calling for help.

  • Sponsor specialized teams to keep transit, late-night affairs, public spaces, and other settings safe.

  • Build specialized Safety Centers offering a diverse range of safety services.

• Advocate for Civilian Police Accountability Commission (CPAC) charter amendment to place control of MPD in community hands.

• Improve social services and restorative services for prevention and rehabilitation.

  • Fighting for education, healthcare, and housing for all keeps us safe.

• Install urgently needed street lights in Ward 3 while eliminating light pollution.

• Fight funding and efforts for widespread surveillance.

• Hire more civilian investigators.

• Implement limits on overtime and successive shifts to ensure better working conditions for officers and safer interactions with the community.

• Continue work of creating Municipal ID.

• Enact newly created safe injection sites initiative.

• Hold Minneapolis accountable to state consent decree in light of horrific findings by the DOJ and MN Dept. of Human Rights on Minneapolis policing.

  • Eliminate years-long complaint backlog.

  • Meet community members halfway by going into community to ask for input.

  • Widespread retraining and revised stop and search policy.

  • Conduct random body cam checks.

• Tackle pandemic of intimate partner violence by:

  • Directing MPD and investigators to prioritize domestic violence calls and claims.

  • Supporting increased staffing, funding, and collaboration with the county for its Domestic Abuse Service Center.

  • Partnering with trained responders and organizations, including those serving the queer community, to respond to domestic violence situations.

• Combat the crisis of gun violence by:

  • Supporting gun buyback and removal programs at a local and state level.

  • Working at the state to ban semiautomatic and assault-style weapons, expand legal accountability measures for the gun industry, and create an Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

  • Ensuring guns are quickly removed or absent from a situation of domestic violence.

  • Demilitarizing MPD.

The history of redlining, racial covenants, and highway/plant construction in Minneapolis directly contributes to the inaccessibility of green spaces for communities of color, who, as a consequence of these systemic choices, experience high rates of chronic diseases. Apart from vastly expanding and bolstering green transit and housing, we must restore our city’s environment and urgently adopt a vision for a sustainable future to avoid irrevocable harm to our planet and marginalized groups.

• Keep Minneapolis accountable for carbon emission goals for 2030 and 2050, including the roadmap laid out by the Climate Equity Plan.

• Issue immediate Declaration of Climate Emergency to:

  • Urge state lawmakers, once again, to divest from fossil fuels.

  • Prepare Minneapolis for climate disasters.

  • Raise awareness and understanding of the climate crisis.

• Launch Minneapolis Climate Corps to provide for the city’s natural well-being, mend the wounds caused by environmental racism, and supplement Minneapolis’ burgeoning green economy.

• Support Northside Green Zone (Sheridan and St. Anthony West along the Mississippi) by:

  • Filling vacant seats and providing adequate compensation to members

  • Investing in the Green Zone.

  • Pushing to include North Loop into Green Zone.

  • Enacting Green Zone Work Plan and Taskforce goals and recommendations to address the “environmental justice burden” caused by industrial facilities (GAF, HERC, Solid Waste Facility) and I-94

• Encourage the proliferation of urban farming, forests/canopies, and park gardens.

• Establish green energy requirements for new and existing development.

  • Support electrification and energy efficiency efforts.

  • Support and create more affordable, environmentally-friendly housing.

• Require stores, restaurants, and businesses to provide 10 cent paper bags.

• Provide vouchers and healthcare for communities displaced and hurt by highway construction.

• Tax pollution and emissions by expanding carbon fees and the city’s charter authority on taxing polluters.

• Establish an astronomy advocacy board, working with partners at Bell Museum and local governments to:

  • Offer astronomy events and education as community service.

  • Conduct legislative advocacy for astronomy at all levels of government.

• Capture and store carbon with biochar.

• Conduct community healing and environmental awareness, and organize community to push for a greener future.

In light of the presidential elections, it is clear that our elected officials have abandoned the working class, falling out of touch with our needs and livelihoods. Students and immigrants in particular,can’t buy their way into the political process, unlike corporations, developers, and millionaires who live out of state and have little stake in the communities they affect. We must move from oligarchy to representative democracy, where our material needs are met.

• Increase the minimum wage to $20/hr for large employers

  • Establish new category of essential workers, employed directly by Minneapolis, and ensure that they—citizens and non-citizens alike—are well-cared for and justly compensated.

• Establish Labor Standards Board.

• Given that Minneapolis was 1st to provide sick and safe time, we must work to improve benefits, including:

  • Childcare

  • Tuition reimbursement

  • Retirement assistance

  • Dental, hearing, and vision care

• Reform the tax system to relieve the working class from shouldering responsibility for city property taxes.

  • Raise tax revenue on high-income households, companies, and entities so that the wealthy pay their fair share.

  • The new tax system, coupled with increased funding from the state, will fund our necessary and forward-thinking policies.

• Crack down on wage theft by:

  • Hire more investigators and case managers, preferably with multilingual and immigration justice backgrounds, to enforce the city’s wage theft ordinance.

  • Increase support for and number of labor co-enforcement partners.

  • Promote city’s wage theft protection services and monitor employer compliance through more site visits.

• Enumerate and enforce more protections for unionizers from retaliation, especially for strikes.

• Based on results from Guaranteed Basic Income pilot in Minneapolis, we must work to make guaranteed basic income a reality for working class households.

• Banning real-time surge pricing, which often utilizes AI and data privacy overreaches, in grocery stores and restaurants.

While many politicians say that local businesses are the backbone of the American economy, few have the backbone to defend them. Ward 3 is the beating heart of Minneapolis, keeping our city and its residents alive and thriving. I will ensure that our businesses continue to flourish.

• Creation of a municipal bank to provide lower interest rates and financial services for city residents, new businesses, developers, and homebuyers.

• Award guidance, subsidies, and tax breaks for businesses--new and old--that are POC-owned or are providing fair working conditions and wages.

• Introduce city-sponsored community land trust commercial business properties.

• Eliminate food deserts and insecurity with healthy and affordable groceries by:

  • Establishing a mobile grocery store program

  • Creating and encouraging community gardens and urban farming

  • Cracking down on price gouging

• Expand funding for Minneapolis’ Arts & Cultural Affairs to create the necessary environment for a flourishing creative economy.

• Support and remove obstacles for food vendors.

• Provide compensation for businesses affected by construction.

• Work towards building a community-owned IMAX theater in Minneapolis.

Education is a human right; the existence of a school-to-prison pipeline in this country is a disgusting shame. The crisis of unhoused students in Minneapolis is heartbreaking. Our children and students are the future, and we must guarantee them the tools to learn and to dream so that they may accomplish wonders.

• Expand the Stable Homes, Stable Schools program.

• Work with Hennepin County to keep libraries open 24/7.

• Establish citywide scholarships and stipends for students attending public universities within city bounds.

• Provide student debt forgiveness.

• Work with leaders at state legislature on widespread education reform:

  • Increase North Star Promise to $120K for free college tuition coverage

  • Work with Minneapolis Public Schools and state officials to keep schools open, provide quality education for all, and eliminate racial disparities.

  • Pledge just compensation and care for our teachers and school faculties.

• Develop and improve the University District to meet students’ and residents’ housing, grocery, and transportation needs.

• Respect students’ right to protest and protect those rights from surveillance, suppression, and retaliation.

Reshaping our city’s transportation is necessary to fight climate change and economic inequality while connecting the city together. We must transition away from our unsustainable and pollutive auto-oriented infrastructure and way of life by recognizing that, without any other option, people have no option but to drive to provide for their families, go to work or school, and sustain themselves. Transportation should be a public service, so let’s provide reliable, safe, and accessible bus, light rail, and biking alternatives!

• Work with Metro Council to ultimately make transit free and available 24/7.

• Increase support for the Metro Mobility program to make it affordable and reliable.

• Support new public and private ride-sharing initiatives.

• Work to expand Bus Rapid Transit, keeping new projects on time and connecting Ward 3:

  • E Line: University/4th St to Westgate Light Rail Station (St. Anthony Main to Prospect Park), Hennepin and France to Southdale Transit Center.

  • F Line: Central/University to Northtown Transit Center (St. Anthony Main to Coon Rapids), Central/3rd Ave S (St. Anthony Main to Downtown West), Nicollet (Downtown West to Loring Park).

  • H Line: 3rd/2nd Ave (Warehouse Dist/North Loop), Washington (Downtown East/West), Como to St. Paul

• Increase the frequency of busy bus lines, particularly the 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 17,  and 18

• Keep Blue Line and Green Line Extensions’ timelines on track, gathering input from marginalized groups,and working under anti-displacement thinking; these projects enrich North Loop and Ward 3, connecting Metro Area together

• Fight for I-94 Boulevard and similar projects throughout Minneapolis.

• Restore historic rail on Main Street and Stone Arch Bridge

• Provide at least $3.5 million for traffic calming projects citywide, making our streets safer for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.

• Establish bike theft task force so that cyclists can quickly register their bike, stay up-to-date on serial numbers for stolen bikes, and receive GPS bike trackers.

• Create municipal bike-sharing and secure bike storage/parking system in collaboration with Metro Transit. 

• Increase funding for snow and ice removal programs for sidewalks.

• Propose/Explore reintroduction of ferry system and boulevard along Mississippi starting at St. Anthony Falls, encouraging development and interconnectedness.

As an organizer, I am often reminded of the sheer dedication of organizers before me for civil rights, divestment from apartheid, or cessation of the Vietnam War. I look up to my grandparents, whose biomedical research has saved lives. Our seniors gave me the ground I stand on to fight for my community and my future. Minneapolis must honor their legacies and become a city where people can grow, live, and retire comfortably and with dignity. 

• Build or renovate housing to be accommodating and affordable for our seniors.

• Create city agency to ensure ADA compliance for all buildings and work alongside buildings to achieve said compliance, particularly in housing. 

• Enact the most up-to-date goals of Minneapolis for a Lifetime while increasing the city’s sponsorship of the program.

• Provide visibility, funding, and legislative support to:

  • Senior LinkAge Line

  • Navigators helping seniors apply for benefits

  • Classes and resources on tech literacy

• Create senior voucher for housing as part of municipal system

Reproductive rights are under attack, and our regression into the 20th century is alarmingly ominous. Trans people have become the target and scapegoat of a cruel and artificially produced culture war that places people’s lives at risk. Elected officials are taking away people’s right to their own care and autonomy, and Minneapolis must boldly fight against this tyranny so that all women and LGBTQ+ people can live joyfully.

• Store up on gender-affirming care, abortion pills, and surgical abortion tools to prepare for 2nd Trump administration. 

• Require and enforce all public buildings (schools, apartments, office-buildings, restaurants, etc.) to have menstrual products in their bathrooms.

• Provide educational programs for providers and city agencies to increase awareness and prevent discrimination.

• Provide housing resources for trans, intersex, or otherwise gender non-conforming folks facing a housing crisis.

• Establish Reproductive Health Fund.

  • Provide travel to Minneapolis for gender and reproductive health.

  • Fund clinics for gender-affirming care.

  • Assist name change clinics and services.

  • Meet budget shortfalls of providers of gender-affirming care.

• At the state level, we will push for:

  • passage of an all-encompassing ERA

  • prohibition of medically unnecessary “gender-correcting” surgery on intersex children

  • Public Health option that guarantees all reproductive and gender-affirming care.

  • Push to create Office of Missing and Murdered LGBTQ+ Minnesotans

Millions of households, especially seniors with fixed incomes, struggle to afford healthcare. Mental health too is tied to economic well-being, which is systematically deprived from young, queer, and BIPOC folks. The mental health crisis is an intentionally caused public health crisis which must be addressed with decent working and living conditions and basic access to care. As someone who is on the spectrum and who has struggled with mental health, I will fight for equal rights, access, and representation for those who are neurodivergent and those with disabilities.

• Push for Minnesota Public Option at state legislature.

• Follow St. Paul’s initiative to forgive medical debt.

• Fund vaccine pop-up stands, offering free immunizations and masks.

• Build public bathrooms. 

• Enforce mental health parity laws to make mental healthcare accessible.

• Establish municipal agency to assist with ADA and Section 504 navigation for workers and students while investigating cases of discrimination.

• Fight to make childcare a municipal or state level guarantee.