The Free Press
Two weeks ago, Congresswoman Delia Ramirez, a Democrat from Chicago, took to X to blast the arrest of a pro-Hamas activist at Columbia University.
“Criminalizing dissent is part of the authoritarian playbook,” Ramirez posted, alluding to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who detained Syrian-born Mahmoud Khalil. “And it is being followed step by step by the Trump Administration.”
Khalil is a permanent resident with a green card. He played a leading role in organizing anti-Israel protests on campus. His supporters insist that his arrest and detention, in a Louisiana facility, violate his First Amendment rights. (Yale Law constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld has argued that, in fact, his case is more complicated than that.) “We should all be alarmed and standing opposed, because authoritarianism thrives when we surrender our right to dissent,” Ramirez said.
Resisting the “fascist” takeover of America—that was the Democratic Party’s raison d’être, Ramirez told me. We were on the phone, and Ramirez was in her D.C. office ping-ponging between House votes and speeches and television hits.
Pushing back—or, as Ramirez put it, “fighting like hell and maybe making our own leadership uncomfortable and calling it like it is”—has always been the Democratic MO, but it has really been that since Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. After their most recent defeat in November 2024, Democrats and their media allies have been reassessing the wisdom of the Resistance, which felt predictable and panicky and just too much. But not Ramirez. If Democrats were getting tired of progressives beating the same eardrum-shattering timpani, she didn’t care.
“If we hadn’t failed voters, Donald Trump, a fascist, would not be the United States’ president.”
To Ramirez, there was nothing mysterious about the great Democratic clobbering. Losing the White House, including every battleground state. Losing the Senate. Losing support among men, women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, tech bros—pretty much everyone.
The issue was that her party hadn’t gone far left enough.
“When the Democratic Party is the party of the establishment, when it’s the party that’s okay with the status quo, when the Democratic Party just pats itself on the back for minimal, dismal policy progress, then how different are we—how relatable are we?” she said.
She added: “My Democratic colleagues are hearing from their constituents every day, ‘What are you doing?’ And then, ‘Do more!’—which is what I have been saying.”
The “outrage,” she said, was palpable in the third district, which she has represented since early 2023, that stretches westward from the mostly Hispanic neighborhoods in Chicago toward the whiter suburbs, the old Irish, Polish, Czech, and German communities, and beyond. (The district went 65 percent for Harris and 34 percent for Trump in 2024.)
When she started to speak about the “desperation” out there—stagnant wages, shrinking health benefits, the silencing of dissent—she sped up and got louder. Forte, then double forte, with fewer punctuation marks.
“People are desperate,” she went on. “People are tired. Democrats like to tell you all the great things we did for you while I’m carrying my very nice purse, and people are looking at you thinking, ‘Your purse costs more than my rent,’ and we have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we the party of the people?’ ”
Everyone else The Free Press has profiled in our series about Democrats charting a new future for the party in the wake of its November drubbing—Rep. Ro Khanna, Governor Josh Shapiro, and Senator Elissa Slotkin—took it for granted that their team had gone too far, that they had alienated some critical voter bloc in their leftward lurch: normies, the working class, the middle class, independents, persuadable Republicans.
But the progressives in Washington, especially the Squad—the mostly female, black, and Latino uber-progressive clique that includes Ramirez—assume the opposite. And Ramirez is leading the charge against the new administration. It’s not just that she’s ranked the eighth most progressive House member—ahead of all other Squad members except Summer Lee—by the website ProgressivePunch. It’s that, to Ramirez, this is personal: Her husband, Boris, was a so-called Dreamer—he had entered the U.S. illegally as a minor; his status had been up in the air since then—and she liked to say she was the only member of Congress in a “mixed-status marriage.” She is the face of a new kind of blended American family.
To Ramirez, the party never took a leftward lurch. If the Democrats had swung left—if they had banned “dark money” from campaigns, extended the Civil Rights Act to protect the transgender community, and given illegal aliens healthcare benefits and free school meals, as Ramirez proposed last year—they wouldn’t have lost.
“If we hadn’t failed voters, Donald Trump, a fascist, would not be the United States’ president,” Ramirez, 41, told me. She added: “He is someone who, on day one, has said, ‘I am above the Constitution.’ He is someone who is saying it doesn’t matter if you were born here.” (In fact, Trump has never said he’s above the Constitution, and he did say he would not be a dictator, “except for Day One.”)
When I asked Ramirez what she hated most about the new administration, she said: “Absolutely everything. We are in a constitutional crisis.”
She characterized Trump’s return to the Oval Office, with Elon Musk at his side running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as “an attempted coup.”
She added: “I’ve actually been in Russia, and I can tell you what every American should be worried about.” She was talking about the oligarchs, the kleptocracy. “When you have the president together with the richest men in the world, who he’s going to use to retaliate against those who want to keep him accountable.”
Trump’s January inauguration—which included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world —really drove that home, Ramirez said. “There were the people who were sitting in the front row—the richest people, the people with the power to control the message, the social media, the algorithm, what information spreads, what misinformation spreads, and the person who controls most of our purchasing power, Amazon.”
She paused—it was one of just a handful of pauses in a long and sometimes meandering conversation. “And then,” she said, “just beyond Elon and all those people, there were the senators and the members of Congress who are going to enact the laws he wants them to enact. They’re just going to do it. No questions. And all this concentration of power tells me the systems we’ve put in place are failing. They’re failing.”
There was one big reason for this systemic breakdown, Ramirez said: Democrats had forgotten the people they were supposed to represent.
She had in mind, she said, the paycheck-to-paycheck people, homeless veterans, day laborers, the single moms with kids hobbled by Covid-lockdown learning loss, the people who had to choose between buying fresh produce and keeping the lights on.
This was reflected, she said, in last year’s campaign.
In order to win over a majority, she said, the Democrats went after “Republicans and obviously some independents—but really Republicans.”
She thought it had been a “huge mistake” to trot out GOP has-beens like former vice president Dick Cheney, former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, and former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger to back Kamala Harris for president.
“I don’t know how well that worked out for us,” Ramirez said. “How many Democrats, how many people that have voted Democratic, just decided not to vote, period?” (It was true that Democratic turnout dipped in 2024—but only in non-battleground states, which didn’t affect the election outcome. In fact, Democratic pollster David Shor’s research shows that, had turnout been higher in 2024, Donald Trump would have increased his vote share.)
“Look, I am a Democrat—I have been a Democrat my entire life, and the reality is that people are pissed off about a shitty-ass system that keeps them poor.”
Ramirez added: “How many Democrats voted for Trump but then voted for me, for AOC, for Rashida Tlaib, for the rest of the ticket?” She was referring to the mostly black and Latino ticket-splitters in places like the South Bronx and Garfield Ridge, in Chicago, and Dearborn, which is just west of Detroit and represented by Tlaib. “The voters who voted for Trump were voting for him as a ‘fuck you.’ ” She meant a fuck you to “the powerful people” in her own party, the old-time Washington people, the people who ran the campaign committees and had funneled pro-Israel money into House primaries—defeating Squad members like Cori Bush in Missouri and Jamaal Bowman in New York.
“This is not just a Bowman issue,” she said. “You are seeing this happen across the country.” She had in mind races in Oregon and Arizona and Virginia. “A candidate is up 15 points, and then, all of a sudden, there was crypto money there, there was AIPAC money, and all of a sudden this election turned completely.”
She added: “Look, I am a Democrat—I have been a Democrat my entire life, and the reality is that people are pissed off about a shitty-ass system that keeps them poor.”
Bottom line, she said: “For Democrats, the number-one priority right now is to be absolutely clear about who we’re fighting for. We’re fighting for the people who can’t afford to pay rent, let alone purchase a home, the people who are having to make really difficult decisions between going to the doctor or paying for groceries, the people fighting for their legal status.”
Then, she said: “I think there’s some real work to do.”
She always came back to her story.
In the early 1980s, her mother fled her home in Guatemala and crossed the Rio Grande—where she nearly drowned—and finally settled in Humboldt Park, in Chicago.
And then there was Boris. He had come from the same village her mother came from, and he had spent years trying to resolve his immigrant status until November, when Citizenship and Immigration Services informed him that he was officially a “legal permanent resident.”
But things still felt very fluid, uncertain.
“I think that what I’m most afraid of is the ‘in your face’ persecution and prosecution of immigrants,” she said. She worried about people being stripped of their civil liberties, like Mahmoud Khalil. “No one in this moment really feels safe.”
Alluding to Khalil, she said: “Somehow, if we say someone’s an immigrant, if you can translate it to the border, it’s okay for Republicans to take away due process. Protection of due process or civil rights should not be dependent on if you’re Palestinian or an immigrant or Jewish or Irish or whatever.”
But Ramirez is a progressive in 2025, which means she has an uneven record when it comes to civil liberties.
Consider, for example, Ramirez’s reaction to the story of Joseph Czuba, a Chicago-area man who stabbed to death six-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi and wounded Wadee’s mother. Czuba made it clear that he attacked the two—just one week after the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel—because they were Muslim, and on February 28 of this year, he was found guilty of murder and a hate crime.
Importantly, the attack took place amid a great deal of commentary, on television and social media, disparaging Hamas and, more broadly, Arabs.
Immediately after the guilty verdict, Ramirez posted on X: “While the trial has concluded, the fight is not over. We must address dehumanization, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric.” She added that “those who spew it must be held accountable for the impact of their recklessness.” Railing against “misinformation, hate speech, and propaganda,” Ramirez went on to say: “As we start the holy time of Ramadan, may we all reflect on how we build communities free of hateful rhetoric and bigotry.”
When I asked Ramirez how she reconciles her support for the First Amendment with her opposition to “hate speech”—how she could support the rights of an antisemite like Khalil but not those of the Islamophobes who presumably influenced Joseph Czuba—she said simply: “Defending free speech does not contradict with holding ourselves accountable for the effects of our words and the narratives we elevate.”
She said she “couldn’t believe” that the House had yet to pass the Wadee Resolution, after Wadee Alfayoumi, which condemns anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate.
“We have passed multiple resolutions about October 7,” she said. “Not once have we acknowledged the pain, the fear, and the impact that this war has caused in Palestinian American lives and communities, and I think that says a lot about how we don’t honor or even acknowledge all children—all lives—the same way.”
When I asked Ramirez why she cared so much about the war in Gaza—which has consumed an enormous quantity of energy on the left despite being so far removed from Americans’ daily lives—she portrayed it as an extension of her fight for immigrants’ rights. “I, as a progressive daughter of immigrants, want to see the safety and security of both Israeli and Palestinian people.”
She added: “I do believe that Israel has a right to exist, and I also believe the Palestinians have a right to self-determination and that Israel will never be safe as long as Palestinians are persecuted. Their futures are intertwined.”
After the election—which many Democrats blamed on their left-wing flank—and before the inauguration, it was easier to dismiss the progressives. To call them hysterical, race-obsessed, strident, bullying, unserious, intolerant—all of which other Democratic members or bundlers or staffers called them in private conversations with me.
When I asked Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, whose district abuts that of Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Bronx, what he thought of the party’s progressive wing, he laughed briefly and said, “I have a rule against passing judgment on colleagues.”
But now Trump is back, and he is consolidating power and arresting people like Khalil, and he has made it clear that this was just the start of things. Now, progressives sound just a little less frantic and a little more attuned to the new reality. One that includes a Pentagon deputy press secretary who has posted antisemitic pap, and a DOGE engineer who wants to “normalize Indian hate” and boasts about being “racist before it was cool.” (Both still have their jobs.)
The silver lining of Khalil’s arrest and possible deportation, Ramirez said, was that it had woken up a lot of Democrats.
“I am far more concerned than where I was 40 days ago, 50 days ago,” she told me. Because now, she said, we weren’t just facing the threats and promises that the White House planned, but the brave new world of Trump 2.0.
Of the president, she said, “I do believe that many of my colleagues are seeing him for who he is.”
To read more in our series about what’s next for the Democrats, read Peter’s profiles of Rep. Ro Khanna of California and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and Sean Patrick Cooper’s interview with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.