In recent years, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has grown both more influential and more extreme. While its members are going to Congress and getting elected mayor, the DSA is empowering advocates of violent revolution, working hand-in-glove with other radical groups, and building ties with hostile foreign powers.
How do those whom the DSA has installed in public office view their role? A recent panel, hosted by the DSA’s Los Angeles chapter, offers a window into their thinking. Taking the panelists at their word, the view seems to be that elected office is a tool to advance DSA priorities—not necessarily the will of the voters.
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Panelists—including Minnesota State Representative Athena Hollins, Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, and Chicago Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez—described using elected office for movement purposes, and leveraging government and law as tools of resistance against what they called a “white nationalist, patriarchal, MAGA, fascist project.” Though nominally Democrats, the panelists also blasted their party’s more moderate wing as too weak to confront the Trump administration.
Chicago’s Sigcho-Lopez discussed elected socialists’ “responsibility to open up our spaces to organize and organize and organize from the ground up, organize in every space you know.” He also praised local efforts like Los Angeles’s “rapid response” network. That organization, trained by the far-left immigration-focused group Union del Barrio, is one of the nation’s most radical anti-ICE networks.
Los Angeles’s Hernandez echoed Sigcho-Lopez’s organizing emphasis, describing how her office has built out a “community defense network” to try to deter enforcement of federal immigration law. The effort includes sending text alerts, partnering with organizations like Unión del Barrio and CIDLA to establish rapid-response networks, and training hundreds of people through Mijente to respond to federal immigration raids.
Hollins—though largely absent from street-level activity, a fact she lamented—explained how her office worked with the St. Paul teachers’ union to organize a presence of parents “at every street corner, at every school” to protect families from ICE. This organizing occurred despite federal officials’ claim that ICE does not target schools.
Another major focus of the panel was “mutual aid”—a term with roots in decentralized, activist-run support networks that operate outside civic and governmental institutions. In contemporary politics, however, the phrase has taken on a more explicitly ideological character than traditional neighbor-to-neighbor charity. Today, “mutual aid” is often used to describe activist-led redistribution efforts that blur the line between community support, partisan organizing, and publicly funded social programs. Hernandez said that her Los Angeles office has “invested half a million dollars in rental assistance” for constituents, along with $400,000 in food assistance. That amounts to nearly $1 million directed toward households affected by ICE arrests of illegal immigrants identified as their families’ primary “breadwinner.” Hernandez described the discretionary spending as aid for “low-income families.”
Sigcho-Lopez praised DSA-linked networks that delivered food during periods when many people, fearing ICE presence, “had to shelter in place.” He also mentioned legal support for would-be deportees. Sigcho-Lopez noted that of the 3,000 people arrested by ICE during its Operation Midway Blitz enforcement effort last year, 700 were released “because of the fights of the people.”
For her part, Hollins pushed for increased funding for eviction moratoriums and rental-stability measures in response to ICE operations, urging pressure on Governor Walz because families were falling behind on rent while afraid or unable to work. She is not enthusiastic about this approach, she said, because it requires the state to compensate landlords, but supports it as a practical measure.
Hollins has also used her legislative position to challenge ICE and the federal government. Alongside allied lawmakers, she helped draft 78 separate bills, roll back local-federal police cooperation agreements, pursue measures “creating legal causes of action against ICE agents,” and even explore requiring ICE agents to pay state income tax while deployed in Minnesota.
Her co-panelists have pushed similar efforts. Hernandez was one of the co-authors of the sanctuary-city ordinance in Los Angeles. She has supported motions calling for “structural reforms” to the Los Angeles Police Department’s relationship with ICE, including efforts to require the LAPD to identify masked federal agents. Sigcho-Lopez has done less, but noted that the “Democratic Socialist Caucus of the Chicago city council was at the forefront of protecting the sanctuary-city legislation.”
Despite a loose affiliation with the Democrats, these elected officials hold a dim view of their own party. Hollins blamed “status quo Democrats” in Minnesota for voting against a sanctuary-state bill two years ago because it might hurt their reelection chances. Sigcho-Lopez, meanwhile, attacked Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker as an out-of-touch billionaire whose class interests help explain his failure to meaningfully defend immigrant communities—whether by refusing to tax the wealthy or by showing up for the fight on the very day it was ending. “The billionaire class, no matter if it’s benevolent or not, they are not with us,” he said, adding that billionaires are “destroying our city and our country,” and that “we cannot have democracy and have billionaires.” Sigcho-Lopez added that the Democrats “showed no leadership whatsoever,” and that the time has come to “challenge the democratic establishment.”
The approach of these “socialists in office” differs markedly from our usual expectations of politicians. Instead of treating activism as subordinated to elected office, DSA officials see activism as the purpose of office. They fold protest, organizing, support networks, and mutual-aid efforts into the practice of governance.
That tendency is not restricted to the panelists. The DSA often invokes an “inside–outside” strategy, seeking to advance policy both within formal institutions, such as public office, and outside them via sustained grassroots pressure. Many of the DSA’s elected officials were groomed for leadership because of their activist backgrounds. They have a foot in both worlds. Within DSA circles, this dual role is sometimes described as the “organizer-in-chief,” a term borrowed from Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns.
This blurring may be easier precisely because DSA is not a formal political party. It does not bear the same level of electoral accountability for policy outcomes that the major parties do. Thus, it can function simultaneously as a political faction and as movement infrastructure, providing its elected officials with greater room to test strategies that challenge institutional constraints and build power. Meantime, it still benefits from holding a Democratic ballot line, or even an independent one—as Sigcho-Lopez is now doing.
The DSA’s politicization of public office blurs the boundary between governing and movement-building, risking a drift toward a form of clientelism in which access and policy responsiveness are increasingly mediated through organizational and ideological loyalty rather than democratic administrative norms. As the Los Angeles panel discussion suggests, DSA elected officials do not view public office as a public trust but instead as an instrument to serve their own ends.