With Rep. Danny Davis retiring after nearly 30 years representing Illinois’ 7th congressional district, 18 candidates have declared their intentions to fill his seat. The Democratic primary will take place March 17, 2026, and contenders are currently circulating nominating petitions.
Hyde Park resident Anabel Mendoza is among them. She’s 27 years old, the youngest in the race, and works for the largest youth-led immigrant nonprofit in the country. Her career and lived experience inspired her to run for Congress.
Since graduating from Northwestern University, Mendoza has provided direct services and advocacy for immigrants, working with undocumented youth and those who have Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status. Mendoza said the recent presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terrorizing Chicago residents without accountability influenced her to run for Congress and move from full-time to part-time in her day job.
“This was a moment, with the political climate, where I didn’t feel like I could be taking a step out of that work,” Mendoza said. “What I do for work every day is part of why I’m running.”
She added that working in immigrant rights has taught her to navigate complex legislation and processes.
“There are so many functions and mechanisms of Congress and of elected offices that everyday people have been, I believe, deliberately not told about. We don’t get that understanding of what Congress actually can do and accomplish,” Mendoza said. “We see Republicans or the Trump administration dusting off a rule from the f*cking 1800s and using it to ram through their agenda. Clearly, there are ways.”
Mendoza was also inspired to run for Congress by her upbringing in West Lawn. She said she recently learned that, during her childhood, her working class Latino parents once had only $9 to spend on her and her two siblings between paychecks.
“There were times when my mom and dad deliberately chose to skip lunch and dinner to be able to feed me and my siblings,” Mendoza said. “This many years later as an adult, I see that there are millions of people who are facing the same pressure, and sometimes even worse. Nothing has changed materially enough where people have actually seen improvements in their life, and in fact, it’s actually rapidly going the opposite direction.”
The main priority of Mendoza’s platform is increasing affordability for her constituents, many of whom have told her about working two or three jobs to scrape by.
“There are so many parents like that who I get to meet when I’m in Austin, in North Lawndale, in Garfield Park, and they share these stories with me,” Mendoza said. “Affordability and the price of living is the biggest thing I have heard is on people’s minds.”
That includes the high cost of groceries, utility bills and rent. If elected to Congress, Mendoza said she would fight for legislation for rent control, so people don’t spend over 25% of their income on it, and to restrict large rental companies from pricing out residents from their neighborhoods.
“We need to make life livable for the people and the families who have been in these neighborhoods and have made these neighborhoods amazing,” Mendoza said.
That also includes affordability of health care, which Mendoza calls a “human right for everybody, regardless of your immigration status and regardless of where you live.”
“One of the things I want to fight for at the federal level isn’t just health care for all, but relieving people’s medical debt the same way we continue to fight for student debt relief,” Mendoza said, “which I will fight for as someone with a lot of student loans.”
Mendoza added that she’d also have an aggressive approach to gun legislation.
“Making sure that we are investing in common sense gun legislation is so important,” she said.
Growing up in West Lawn, Mendoza remembers times when she was playing outside and her parents called her in because there was a shooting down the street.
“There are countless families on the South and West Side that have been shattered by gun violence, and I’ve talked to them,” Mendoza said. And she’s met with several community leaders in gun violence prevention who don’t have the sustained federal funding to make an impact at a larger scale.
“Congress has always held the power of the purse to be able to fight for resources and transformational investments to come back into the South and West Side,” Mendoza said. “That is why we need a fighter in Congress, someone who isn’t going to take ‘No’ for an answer, someone who is going to fight just as hard as this government often fights to fund a genocide abroad and bring that funding here. Because if we have the money to fund a genocide abroad, if we have the money to give ICE and Customs and Border Protection $170 billion of our taxpayer dollars, then I know we have the money to fund our communities.”
“We have operated it in this country, thinking top-down economics works,” Mendoza added. “From what I’ve seen, it just keeps the rich richer. Real investment is standing shoulder to shoulder with your community and lifting from the bottom up.”
Mendoza said increasing affordability and decreasing gun violence would vastly help the South and West Side, but also the rest of the country.
“The seventh district tells a national story,” Mendoza said. “In Congress, you’re representing this district, but the things that you fight for affect the entire country.”
The 7th district is far reaching, from the western suburbs to the Loop to the South Side of Chicago. Over 40% of the district is Black, 30% white, and nearly 10% Asian and 10% Hispanic.
“One of the things that this district tells the story about nationally is not just income inequality, but the racial wealth gap in this country.”
Mendoza gives the example of Englewood, a predominately Black neighborhood, where the median household income is just over $29,000.
“In the same district, you have Streeterville — one of the richest, if not the richest, part of the city, where the median household income is well into the six figures,” said Mendoza of the predominately white neighborhood. “One of the things I have been fighting for on my platform, and that I will absolutely make a conversation in this campaign, is reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.”
Though she’s had people tell her that support for reparations will lose her votes, Mendoza said the racial wealth gap is tied to decades of intentional economic disinvestment from the South and West Side.
“You have had generations of families that have been deliberately left behind, while everybody else grows their wealth,” Mendoza said. She added that providing more opportunities to these families would improve the overall economy. “Reparations is an investment in our communities. It’s also an investment in our entire city. It would mean billions of federal dollars from the federal government.”
That money could impact the entire 7th district, from the South and West Side of Chicago to neighborhoods along I-290.
“My goal is to bring all of these communities together, and I believe I’m uniquely positioned to do that given my experience, not only growing up and being a lifelong Chicagoan, but someone from West Lawn, someone from an immigrant family, someone who is Latina, someone who has lived on the South Side and lived on the West Side,” Mendoza said. “There are so many similarities in our plights, and there are so many similarities in what we are facing.”
Mendoza said the Chicagoland area is seeing these shared stakes right now, as ICE raids have unfolded throughout the city — like the one in South Shore last month, where federal agents ambushed an apartment in the middle of the night and illegally detained its residents.
“What happened in South Shore is a perfect example that the immigration enforcement that is escalating right here in our own city is what’s binding us, regardless of whether we are undocumented, a U.S. citizen, whether we are Latino, whether we are Black, whether we are Asian — we all have shared stakes in this,” Mendoza said. “I think there’s been a wrongful narrative that this is really only a targeted attack against immigrants. In this moment, immigrants and undocumented communities are the top of the spear for this administration, but it’s very clear if they don’t actually care if you’re an immigrant or not.”
Mendoza said the reason that governmental bodies haven’t been able to stop the Trump administration is because “we haven’t built the kind of leverage that actually speaks their language and makes them feel threatened.” The way to do that, she added, is by using collective labor power to boycott industries that financially impact the administration.
“Part of uniting this community isn’t just some hollow slogan. It’s not just a platitude. I mean it as our strategy in this moment. How do we show that we have shared stakes, we have shared experiences? And through that, we also have shared labor power, and we have always been the ones — as working and middle class, but predominantly working class — to keep the gears turning in this country,” Mendoza said. “We’re building a movement that is ready to meet this moment. When we see that the most disenfranchised communities also have the most courage, then we better match that courage.”
Mendoza said she’s largely seen this bravery displayed in young voters, both those who she works with and who she’s seen protesting ICE.
“I think what our generation is bringing to the table in this particular political moment is a level of moral courage that has long been hollow in our political system,” Mendoza said. “We have seen how politics has neglected us. We have seen the stagnation. We have seen people with our own Democratic Party who have stood in the way of progress. We need a new generation,” Mendoza added, something she represents in the 7th district congressional race. “I genuinely see being the youngest as my greatest strength in this because I know I have the most energy and fresh perspective and new ideas, but also the mentality that is not trying to replicate the status quo.”
Other candidates who are running for Davis’ seat include Richard Boykin, Jerico J. Brown, Kina Collins, Melissa Conyears-Ervin, Anthony Driver Jr., Dr. Thomas Fisher, Jason Friedman, La Shawn Ford, Rory Hoskins, Danica Leigh, Tekita Martinez, John McCombs, Jazmine Robinson, Emelia Rosie, Reed Showalter, Felix Tello and William Volny.
