The Lexington Observer hopes to interview Katherine Clark before the primary election.
Jonathan Paz, a 31-year-old Waltham native, son of Bolivian immigrants, and avid ICE protestor, is running to represent Massachusetts’ 5th District, which includes Lexington, in Congress.
If elected, he wants to take on big corporations, work to abolish ICE, and incite a green jobs revolution in the Bay State.
Paz believes he’s a better candidate than incumbent and Democratic Whip Katherine Clark because he has first-hand experience with how many working-class Americans are struggling to get by.
“People deserve to have a fighter who is going to take on the billionaires and not take millions in their donations,” Paz told the Observer in a conversation about his campaign. “This is the time for strong progressive leadership, this is the time for working people to take back their democracy.”
The Waltham resident is running to the left of Clark and faces a steep climb to unseat the incumbent. Clark has been in Congress since 2013 and has risen to be one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.
Background
Paz was born in Boston and spent eight years growing up in Bolivia before returning to Waltham. He lived in the Boston suburb until he was in high school. Around that time, his father, who was an undocumented immigrant, got deported. His mother followed his father back to Bolivia soon after.
“We had a taste of the American dream for a little while but after 9/11 things got really tough,” he said. “I always had this residual fear that my parents could be taken…so I’ve always understood these fears, these anxieties, these hardships, because I lived it.”
Paz’s aunt, who lived in Mansfield, took him and his brother in, and they graduated from Mansfield High.
Paz received a full-ride scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied economics. He didn’t know he wanted to be a politician then, but he knew he wanted to be politically active.
Asked what he has done for work between college graduation and now, Paz said he is a “union organizer by trade,” an educator, and a Waltham city councilor.
He served as Waltham’s Ward 9 councilor from 2020 through 2023, upsetting 30-year incumbent Robert Logan in 2019. After two terms as councilor, Paz ran in Waltham’s 2023 mayoral election and lost to incumbent Jeanette McCarthy.
When Paz says he’s an educator, he’s referring to the online Spanish language courses he created so activists can practice conversational Spanish through real-world social justice scenarios.
Paz has also worked as a public affairs manager for Flock Safety from February 2024 to July 2025, his LinkedIn shows. Flock is a technology company that makes automated license plate reader cameras and software that are mostly bought or leased by local governments and law enforcement. The company has faced controversy this year after ICE used their data.
Asked whether he knew the data Flock collected was available to ICE when he worked there, Paz directed LexObserver to a video of him at a Town Hall in Waltham on March 31 explaining why he worked at Flock and why he left. In short, Paz worked at Flock because he wanted to work in the technology industry, Flock offered him a job, and they made him believe they cared about transparency. He left because he quickly learned “companies like these, their only role is to help the government spy on you…to bypass public scrutiny and just surveil, surveil, surveil,” he said at that Town Hall.
Issues
Among other goals, Paz is hopes to challenge the big corporations that are, in part, driving up the cost of living for Americans.
“We can’t talk about affordability without talking about the monopolies that are rigging our economy,” he said.
If elected, he wants to investigate companies such as CVS, where many people get prescription drugs that are becoming increasingly more expensive.
“This is the difference between being someone who is an establishment incumbent and being a progressive member of congress,” he said. “We need to go up against these corporations, these multi-billionaries, and they don’t want to do that. They’d rather patch a broken system and say, ‘we’re going to deliver some kind of tax credit.’ We call that putting breadcrumbs on the table.”
Paz wants the government to invest in “dignified” public housing, so lower-income Americans can have more — and better — housing options.
“We need a Green New Deal for public housing,” he argued. “That means we invest into our public housing stock, and that we create sustainable housing.”
Paz does not think the MBTA Communities Act, which Charlie Baker signed into law in 2021 to build more housing in transit-connected municipalities by right, goes far enough. As a result of the law passing, developers from all over the country are buying land in Greater Boston to build apartment and condo complexes that they will then sell or rent out.
“There is a sense that the private sector is going to save us (people who are struggling to afford housing) and it’s not,” Paz said. “We need to stop private equity from buying our land.”
“When you have multimillionaires like our Congresswoman, it’s hard for her to fathom just the sheer reality of what it is to pay rent these days,” he added. “That’s why we need more working class leaders.”
Paz wants to create more opportunity for people in the Bay State by igniting a green jobs revolution. He believes it’s important to fight the climate crisis, which he called “one of the underlying existential issues of our time.” One way to do that, and support local people and the local economy, is by investing in more green jobs.
Paz imagines taking the local energy grid back from what he called “carbon-dependant monopolies” like National Grid and Eversource, and pushing to create a “federal green jobs program,” among other ideas.
“This is an opportunity to build green jobs, get people trained, educated, and bolster our unions in Massachusetts,” he said. “We already have an employment crisis that is being under-reported and we need to get people back to work and we need to have people doing work that’s meaningful.”
During his conversation with the Observer, Paz spoke about his goal to abolish ICE.
“ICE is an illegitimate agency operating outside the scope of law,” he said. “We have concentration camps and thugs literally abducting people in broad daylight.”
Paz founded Fuerza, an organization that records and verifies ICE activity around Waltham and educates the community on immigration rights and resources, in January 2025.
“We deserve to have an immigration system rooted in humanity, our neighbors deserve a humane pathway to citizenship, and we need to provide amnesty to many of our neighbors who have been living her for years, contributing to our society, and have been consistently denied citizenship because of a politicized and broken system,” he said.
Paz noted how ICE operates on a multi-billion dollar budget. He imagines that money could be put toward offering Americans universal healthcare, universal childcare, and public housing if the agency is abolished.
“This is how we go on offense — by pushing a vision of abolishing ICE and delivering immigration reform and investigating the Epstein class that is operating above the law,” he said.
While Clark has not verbatim called for ICE to be “abolished,” she has called for more oversight and restrictions on the Agency. On her campaign page, Clark says “she’s leading the fight to hold Trump’s ICE accountable.”
Asked what sets him apart from the incumbent Congresswoman, Paz said that unlike her, he “will never take corporate dollars and will never take AIPAC money.” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (or AIPAC) is a lobbying group that encourages the US government to support Israel.
Paz is proud to have a grassroots campaign. According to the Federal Election Commission, the largest donation Paz has accepted is $2,000.
“There is a lot of appetite for non-corporate, non-establishment candidates who actually stand for something,” he said. “We may not have the millions, but we have the people, and I think it’s exciting to provide that hope to people in a time that’s so dire.”
Clark and Paz are also challenged by Tarik Samman, a 27-year-old Lowell native and son of Syrian immigrants who has worked as an organizer with the Harvard Academic Workers Union. LexObserver interviewed Samman and will post an article on his campaign soon.
The MA primary election, where voters will choose whether Clark, Paz, or Samman will appear on the general election ballot, is slated for September 1, 2026. The general election is scheduled for November 3, 2026.