Civil Rights

Issues

Access to abortion

The decision on when and how to start a family is sacrosanct. It does not belong in the hands of any legislator or judge.

The situation post-Roe v. Wade is one of dramatic health and economic impacts. A 2024 study revealed the Dobbs decision led a 7 percent increase in infant mortality. Abortion bans, deeply unpopular around the country, were linked to a dramatic jump in sepsis—50 percent in Texas, for example. These burdens are, of course, borne more heavily on marginalized communities, Medicaid beneficiaries, individuals without college degrees, young people, and communities in the South.

A number of women died because they were denied abortion care when it could have saved their life.

Additional studies found contraception access declined.

A 2024 study found that states with the most restrictive policies experienced a combined economic loss of $64 billion as it reduced women’s labor force participation, ages 15 to 44, by 556,000.

Matt will fight to establish a national right to abortion access and protect those who seek and perform an abortion. Anti-abortion forces spent decades concocting a myriad of ways to weaken access to abortion prior to and after Dobbs. There are a number of actions Congress must undertake to restore abortion access.

Establish a statutory right to abortion with minimum standards for access
Repeal the Comstock Act to prevent a backdoor national abortion ban
Codify FDA approval of mifepristone
Shield FDA decisions from judicial meddling
Outlaw fetal personhood
Prohibit criminalization of travel to obtain an abortion
Protect those who assist an individual to obtain an abortion
Protect doctors and hospitals who perform abortions
Prohibit crisis pregnancy centers from lying to women
Prohibit government registries or databases which track personally identifying information of those who had an abortion
Prohibit civil actions and deputized private citizens as defined in Texas’ SB 8

Settle Puerto Rico political status

Puerto Rico is a U.S. colonial possession and territory since the war with Spain in 1898. Its people enjoy American citizenship but lack true representation within its relationship to the federal government.

It lacks sovereignty with plenary power over the territory held by Congress by the Territorial Clause of the Constitution. Puerto Ricans cannot vote for president with a single non-voting representative in Congress for 3 million U.S. citizens—more than Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, and many other states and territories. Governance is imposed on the island through the PROMESA oversight board with ultimate control over its budget and finances and appointed by Washington.

We must take this opportunity for sweeping democratic reforms to include an equitable settlement of Puerto Rico’s status.

Matt is fighting to correct a historical wrong and push for an equitable settlement of Puerto Rico’s political status with the United States. Congress must set a federally-sponsored, binding referendum for Puerto Rico to choose its path forward with statehood, independence, or autonomous free association.

Legislation must include a gesture of friendship and justice with federal funding to rebuild and repair the island’s electrical grid and the assumption of Puerto Rico’s outstanding debt by the federal government. In the wake of the Revolution, the federal government assumed the war debts of the original thirteen colonies and established a national line of credit. This courtesy must be extended to the Puerto Rican people, regardless of the outcome of a plebiscite.

Congressional authorization for a binding referendum of the Puerto Rican people to determine the island’s status
- Selection between statehood, full independence as a sovereign nation, or free association with the U.S.
Assumption of all remaining Puerto Rican debt by the federal government
Increase federal funding for, and resolve the delayed disbursement of, federal funding for repairs to the island’s electrical grid
- Properly fund FEMA operations to adequately review energy projects and provide technical support to PREPA
- Streamline the review process to speed up approvals

Demilitarize the police

Roots of the militarization of local police departments extend back to the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act and the creation of the 1033 Program, or Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO) Program. It authorized the Department of Defense to transfer excess military equipment, vehicles, and other supplies to federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the expansion of the Global War on Terror, these transfers intensified over terrorism fears. Manufacturers also began marketing military-grade equipment directly to local police departments. Training programs for police departments increasingly adopted a “warrior” ethos and combat tactics.

Matt is fighting to demilitarize the police. The forever war is over but its impacts are still felt in communities around the country. It is time to end the forever war at home, too.

End the 1033 Program which transfers military surplus equipment to police departments at no cost
- Reclaim the controlled equipment still under ownership of the Department of Defense, like vehicles, and redeploy them to our ally in Kyiv for the defense of Ukraine
Place restrictions on federal grant programs which fund equipment purchases
Condition federal funding contingent on local police demilitarization efforts
Provide federal funding for community policing models which show positive results over militarization
Additional transparency requirements for the acquisition and tracking of equipment transfers

Washington, D.C. rowhouses near Capitol Hill

Statehood for DC

Over 700,000 people live within the District of Columbia—a population larger than Vermont (644,000) and Wyoming (588,000) but without the representation on Capitol Hill. Residents of Vermont and Wyoming have a voting member in the U.S. House of Representatives and two U.S. senators. Yet D.C. residents do not.

It’s taxation without representation. A clarion call that helped spark the American revolution. It is long past time to ensure residents of the District of Columbia receive full representation in Congress.

Matt is fighting for D.C. statehood. As a former resident of D.C. for over a decade, Matt knows taxation without representation first-hand. It’s unfair to the city’s residents who pay federal taxes like everyone else.

Abolish ICE

This administration and their Republican lackeys in Congress greatly increased the budget for immigration and deportation measures to $170 billion. It makes immigration enforcement the largest paramilitary force in the country. The budget surpasses all annual law enforcement expenditures on police by state and local governments. Deportation operations under ICE saw a three-fold increase in its annual budget. $30 billion over four years to hire 10,000 new agents.

DHS and ICE recruitment propaganda are overtly white supremacist. The standards and training for new ICE agents are abysmal. The process, by which corners are cut, was described as a “shit show.” The results are predictable.

Masked ICE agents without name badges are documented to have:

Murdered a woman in her car and an observer on the street in Minnesota
Unlawfully detained U.S. citizens without proper due process
Unlawfully detained legal immigrants without proper due process
Misidentified individuals with benign NIKE or autism tattoos as signifiers for MS-13 gang membership and deported them to a foreign torture gulag
Drawn firearms on peaceful protesters
Fired “non-lethal” projectiles at peaceful protesters including in the head
Violently assault U.S. citizens and immigrants on the streets and within government buildings

Despite its claims to deport “the worst of the worst,” data leaked in October 2025 showed only 5 percent of those detained by ICE held violent convictions. 73 percent had no convictions at all.

Matt will fight for the abolition of ICE and prosecution of human rights violators. Under this administration, supercharged by the Republican Congress with massive increase to its budget, ICE is a flagrant human rights violator. It regularly violates the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens and immigrants of every status. ICE agents hide their identities in an attempt to escape accountability.

ICE must be abolished and its functions drawn-and-quartered into separate agencies. We must clean house. Everybody involved in this national disgrace must understand that the present circumstances are not going to last forever. There will be a day of reckoning and it is coming.

Protect and expand voting rights

Self-determination through the franchise is fundamental right for which this nation was founded. In our constant struggle to live up to our founding creed, Americans fought, and bled, and died for it on distant battlefields and American streets. We would dishonor their sacrifices if we did not protect the right for which many gave their lives.

Matt is fighting to protect and expand voting rights.

Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
- Restoration and modernization of preclearance
- Prohibition of partisan gerrymandering
- Transparency with 180 day notifications for changes to voting laws and procedures like polling site closures
- Improve polling location accessibility for voters with disabilities
- Expand early voting
- Same day and automatic voter registration
- Establish standards to combat voter suppression tactics
Set minimum standards for national mail-in voting, early voting periods, federal standards for adequate number of polling sites and location accessibility
Restoration of voting rights for the formerly incarcerated

Purge the surveillance state

The nation’s sprawling surveillance state through the Cold War and the post-9/11 era was always of great concern. Programs like the CIA’s HTLINGUAL mail intercept program photographed millions of letters for over twenty years during the Cold War. In response to September 11, Congress passed the PATRIOT Act and the following year, George W. Bush issued an executive order on warrantless surveillance by the NSA.

Palantir

The federal government’s relationship with data surveillance firms like Palantir, co-founded by major donor Peter Thiel, grew immensely with Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Palantir’s federal contracts amount to nearly $14 billion. They are leading efforts to amalgamate data sources from across the federal government. The concentration of tax, Social Security, and health data from across agencies creates an unprecedented surveillance power for the Executive Branch. A 2025 report noted the administration sought access to bank account numbers, student loan debt balances, medical claims, and disability status. The administration refuses to release documents about such data sharing.

ICE as a testing ground

ICE is one of the largest customers of Clearview AI, a facial recognition firm which reportedly scraped over 30 billion faces from internet sources. Paragon holds a $2 million contract with ICE for use of its Graphite spyware designed to infiltrate devices.

Matt is fighting to purge Palantir and other data surveillance tech from the federal government. He signed the Purge Palantir pledge to refuse their money and commit to excising firms like Palantir from the federal government. Matt believes we must act as soon as possible before these powerful tools become exceptionally difficult to dismantle.

Modernize the Privacy Act of 1974 to protect Americans from the loopholes of a fifty year old law
Prohibit a unified data query layer of Americans’ sensitive data
Direct inspectors general to audit existing contracts
Pursue contract cancellations on a budgetary basis or by congressional statute
Strengthen whistleblower protections and encourage reporting civil liberties violations
Congressional investigation of abuses and pursue prosecutions for violations of federal law

Defend the LGBTQ+ community and fight for equality

Our nation’s founding document declares all are created equal. We are confronted with an administration—and the political movement which swept it back into power—committed to denying these equal rights to millions of Americans including the LGBTQ+ community. It’s a campaign of erasure.

The LGBTQ+ community is under assault at every level of government. School boards, allied with far-right activists, ban books. In the last several years the ACLU tracked hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills in state legislatures across the country targeting health care, driver’s licenses, and bans on facility use or athletics. With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, his administration targeted federal funding for schools over bogus claims of “gender ideology” and reversed decades of precedent on gender markers on U.S. passports.

With increased demonization of the LGBTQ+ community, violent crime against people within the LGBTQ+ community increased. A 2025 study of data from 2022 and 2023 found that LGBT people are five times more likely to be victims of crime than others. A report released earlier this year described 2025 as “one of the most dangerous years on record for LGBTQ Americans.” Half of all incidents targeted transgender and gender-nonconforming people.

Matt is fighting to protect the LGBTQ+ community and push for equality. Matt is a longtime ally of the LGBTQ+ community. In the wake of the same-sex marriage bans in 2004, he sought out renown professor, V. Spike Peterson, on the Arizona campus to conduct an independent study on marriage equality the following spring. He has long supported LGBTQ+ candidates and causes.

His allyship comes from an understanding that our futures, no matter what our background, are inextricably tied together. As President Franklin Roosevelt read from a Stephen Vincent Benét prayer in 1942, “We are all of us children of earth—grant us that simple knowledge. If our brothers are oppressed, we are oppressed. If they hunger, we hunger. If their freedom is taken away, our freedom is not secure.”

Prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity by passing the Equality Act
Pass the Do No Harm Act to limit how the Religious Freedom Restoration Act can be used to prevent invocation to discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community
Make HIV prevention medication universally accessible and affordable by requiring private health insurance plans cover them through the PrEP Access and Coverage Act
Pass the Real Education for Healthy Youth Act to fund comprehensive, evidence-based sex education across the U.S. with a requirement that it is LGBTQ+ inclusive
Leverage oversight powers on health care restrictions
- Investigate Department of Justice subpoenas of children’s hospitals
- Demand CMS cost-benefit analyses
- Direct GAO to study health impacts on restrictions
Classify conversion therapy as fraudulent with the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act
Add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Fair Housing Act
Strengthen the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act with increased funding for enforcement and a lowered threshold for federal intervention
Permanently end the ban on transgender people serving in the military and pass the Fit to Serve Act

Combat rising antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racial hate

Our nation’s history is marred by the bigotries and prejudices which predate our founding. The spiritual embodiment of the American experiment is a challenge and a standard even our Founding Fathers failed to meet. It was only through the heroic sacrifices of Americans of many backgrounds were we able to progress toward a more enlightened understanding of our neighbors.

With progress, however, comes the backlash from those dark forces.

We saw the growth of white supremacist groups and militias with the election of Barack Obama. The rise of Donald Trump as a national political figure further integrated these far-right communities within the Republican Party.

The past twenty five years showed a wide range of communities impacted by bigotry and hate.

Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs mistaken as Muslim experienced acts of hate and bigotry in the wake of 9/11. The conservative political movement sought to codify their treatment with books lifting up Japanese internment as a solution and, later, Donald Trump’s Muslim ban.

The conservative movement’s campaign to demonize primarily Latino immigrants since George W. Bush’s push for comprehensive immigration reform culminated in Trump’s rise on the promise to “build the wall,” mass deportations, and the creation of a concentration camp network.

Donald Trump’s first campaign stoke fears within the Jewish community as his campaign increasingly embraced nakedly white supremacist and antisemitic figures. Trump’s campaign even used antisemitic tropes drawn from Nazi websites. Since that campaign, antisemitism within his orbit continues to this day.

Antisemites with associations to Trump’s political movement seized upon the war in Gaza to launder their antisemitism, tarring legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy. In recent months, acts of antisemitic hate hit the Bay Area. Hateful messages sprawled on Jewish community properties—including a school—in Oakland. Two men speaking Hebrew attacked in San Jose.

Anti-Asian hate in the U.S., unfortunately, extends deep into our history in the 19th century, land restrictions in the 1920s, and the unconscionable internment of people with Japanese ancestry including U.S. citizens during the war. The pandemic supercharged anti-Asian hate considerably higher than the previous year. Trump, during an election year, sought to deflect blame for his handling of the pandemic, engaged in vile uses of anti-Asian terms for COVID-19.

Christian nationalist allies of the president target South Asians like Republicans Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy with vile epithets and slurs. It is a rubber band effect of Donald Trump’s bigoted immigration rhetoric on staunch supporters of his immigration policies.

Matt is fighting hate and stands with communities targeted by bigotry and prejudice. Racial and religious hatred of any kind cannot be tolerated. We and our neighbors expect and deserve to live safe, prosperous, and free.