Boris Velasquez

Equal Rights for All. Privileges for None.

Where I Come From

My mother left El Salvador with a college degree and a choice. She could have stayed. She could have built a life in her homeland, close to her family, in a country where her education meant something.
Instead, she chose to start over in a place where her degree meant nothing, where
she cleaned office buildings in Herndon at night so that her child
could have a future during the day.

My father left with training from a technical school and a similar conviction.
He went from being homeless after arriving in this country with literally
nothing to earning his piece of the American Dream. Not because he lacked skills.
Because he believed the risk of starting from nothing in America was worth
more than the certainty of staying behind.

They didn't come here out of desperation. They came here out of conviction.
One white collar, one blue collar, both turning those bets into
accomplishments built from the ground up because they
believed this nation would return what you put into it.
I was raised by that courage.

My mother taught me things I carry to this day. That humility is strength.
That compassion is a well that needs not run dry, no matter what the hatred of the
world may say. That unconditional love feeds the soul.
That seeing joy in others can be joyful in itself. She also believed in putting down
roots properly. Not just living somewhere, but getting to know the people
and places where you live. That is how I grew up in the DMV. Not just
passing through, but belonging and devoting oneself to community.

I stood on my parents' shoulders and built on what they gave me. I started at
Northern Virginia Community College, transferred to George Mason University, and later to Johns Hopkins University. From community college to one of the most respected research institutions in the country. Not because I was handed anything, but because two immigrants refused to let their child have less of a chance than anyone else.

That road should not be the exception. It should be the baseline. And right now, it is being ripped away from families that look exactly like mine.

The Kid Who Wouldn't Wait

I was in fifth grade in Reston, Virginia when I watched the towers fall on September 11th. I saw the Pentagon attacked. I was a kid in this area when the DC sniper; I saw my teachers scared while they worked through fear to keep that same fear away from us. I didn't grow up reading
about threats to American life in a textbook. I grew up living them.
Most importantly, I grew up surrounded by heroes who protected the next generation.

And when I was old enough to do something about it, I didn't wait for permission.
At seventeen, I asked my parents to sign my enlistment papers. They refused.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at their most intense, with troop surges
sending more Americans into harm's way than at any point since the invasions began.
They were conflicted, and they had every reason to be. So five days after my
eighteenth birthday, when I no longer needed their signature, I snuck out of the
house and went to Baltimore MEPS to enlist in the United States Marine Corps because
I wholeheartedly believed in our nation and our ideals.

Looking back, I see the parallel clearly. My parents left everything behind and walked into uncertainty because they believed in something larger than their own comfort. I did the same thing at eighteen. The conviction that drove them to cross a border drove me to a recruiting station. It was the same instinct, pointed in a different direction.

As a Marine, I served with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, Special Operations
Capable, on the Private Security Detail to the MEU's commanding officer.
Serving in the Command Element gave me the unique opportunity to work among
some of the finest professionals our military produces: 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines.
The legendary Dark Horse infantry battalion whose members earned Bronze Stars
in Sangin Province, one of the most dangerous districts in the entire
Afghan war; ANGLICO, the joint fires coordination specialists who embed with allied
forces; and Force Recon Marines whose mission profiles I am still not at liberty to discuss. These men and women are my kin. What they gave, and what some of them lost, is never far from my mind.

After the Marine Corps, I continued serving within our national security
apparatus. I have spent over twelve years as a national security
technologist serving three administrations across organizations at
the highest levels of the federal government. I built technology that
protects American lives, organized supply shipments and raised
resources to support Ukraine's defense when Russia invaded, and faced
the moment every person in this work eventually faces: the moment
where you have to decide what you are willing to be part of.
I chose my oath over my comfort. Every time.

The child of a woman who left her career to clean office buildings and a man who rebuilt his life from homelessness went on to build tools that safeguard the nation they chose to call home. That is not just my story. That is America's story, when it works the way it is supposed to. But it is not working the way it is supposed to. And the people who broke it are not going to fix it.

Why I'm Running

I have served this country for more than twelve years. In uniform. In federal agencies. At the highest levels of the national security apparatus. I have built the technology that protects American lives. I have organized support for allies under siege. I have worked across three administrations, under both parties, because the mission was never about politics. It was about the oath.

I have had enough.

This is personal for me. My mother was a college graduate. She had a degree. She had a career. She had standing in her country. And she gave all of it up. Not some of it. All of it. Her home. Her family. Her friends. Her professional life. She walked away from everything she had earned in El Salvador and came to this country, where her degree meant nothing, where her credentials meant nothing, where she went from
college graduate to cleaning office buildings at night in Herndon, Virginia so that
her son could have a future during the day. That is what she traded.
A college education for a mop. Not because she had no options. Because
she believed in the promise of this country that much. And that
same opportunity she had, she had to win it inch by inch, in a nation
that did not hand her anything.

Now the oligarchs are not happy with those scraps. They want everything.
Because their greed has no limit. If it did, they would not be billionaires.
No human being needs a billion dollars. A billion dollars is not a
reward for hard work. It is a monument of exploitation. It is what happens
when a system is designed to let a handful of people take from everyone else without restraint, without shame, and without consequence. And now they are not just taking our wages and our opportunities. They are coming for our obedience. They want to control what we watch, how we vote, what we think, and whether we are allowed to speak at all.

I have watched colleagues, people who have served this country with honor, go silent. Not because they have nothing to say, but because they are afraid. Afraid to speak their minds in an environment where authoritarianism does not just demand loyalty. It demands the surrender of your most basic human dignity. Not for certainty of anything in return, but for less. Less security. Less voice. Less freedom. The fear that you will be targeted. That your career will be destroyed. That your name will appear on a list. That is not hypothetical. That is happening right now, to people I know, in buildings I have worked in, across agencies I have served.

And it does not stop at federal workers. It does not matter if you are an immigrant or if your name is Renée Good or Alex Pretti. Renée Good was a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis who was shot and killed by a federal agent on January 7th for the crime of being present in her own neighborhood while ICE conducted operations. The administration called her a domestic terrorist. Video showed her turning her car away from the agent when he opened fire. Six federal prosecutors resigned rather than participate in the cover-up. Alex Pretti, a 37 year old intensive care nurse at the VA, a man who spent his working life caring for veterans, was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents seventeen days later in the same city. He had stepped between an agent and a woman who had been knocked to the ground. They pepper sprayed him, tackled him, and killed him while he was surrounded by six agents on the pavement. The administration called him an agitator and an insurrectionist. He was a nurse. He took care of our veterans. And they killed him for standing up.

I am not a hero. But I served with plenty. And they came home carrying things no one can see, trusting that the country they bled for would remain worthy of what they gave. This is not the America they fought for. And it sure as hell is not the America I served.

So I am doing what the fascists are afraid of us doing.

I am building coalitions. With labor unions. With friends. With family. With neighbors. With anyone who is tired of living under a boot. Because it is time for us to reclaim what rightfully belongs to us: a government of the People, by the People.

The Masks Have Fallen

There is no such thing as the "working class." That phrase is an invention of the oligarchy, designed to make you believe there are natural tiers of people, that some were born to labor and others were born to own. There is only the people and the powerful. You are not working class. You are the class that works. You are the class that builds the roads, wires the buildings, teaches the children, staffs the hospitals, assembles the weapons, drives the trucks, and keeps every system in this country running. The billionaire class produces nothing. They move money. They acquire companies. They buy elections. And they have spent fifty years convincing you that you should be grateful for the scraps they leave on the table after they have taken everything else.

The RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan research institution, found that $79 trillion has been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent since 1975. That is not a typo. Seventy-nine trillion dollars. In 2023 alone, $3.9 trillion was transferred upward. That is enough to give every full-time worker in the bottom 90 percent a $32,000 raise. Every single year. That money did not disappear. It went into the pockets of people who already had more than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. The three richest men in America now own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the population combined. That is three people with more than 170 million. And the only good that concentrated wealth provides to the rest of us is a bottomless thirst to tell us what to watch, how to vote, and how to think, without regard to the environment, our children, or our future.

Meanwhile, over half of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Not just lower-income earners. Over 20 percent of households making $150,000 or more report the same. Sixty-seven percent of Gen Z. Sixty-five percent of Millennials. Forty-two million Americans, one in eight, depend on SNAP just to eat, and Congress just slashed $186 billion from that program over the next decade while celebrating that 2.4 million people were "lifted off" food assistance. They were not lifted. They were pushed. Pushed off a cliff by legislators who have never had to choose between groceries and rent in their lives.

This is not an economy. This is an extraction operation. And it will not end until working people organize and fight back.

What I Fight For and Why

I do not have campaign promises. I have commitments owed to the people, grounded in law, in precedent, and in the lived experience of working families. Every position below is something I will fight for from my first day in Congress. Not because they are easy. Because they are necessary. And because in times like these, we must attempt the impossible, or the oligarchy will swallow our dreams and our future whole.

Your Labor Is Your Dignity

My mother cleaned offices at night. My father rebuilt his life from nothing. They were not unusual. They were America. And America has spent fifty years making their lives harder on purpose.

I support a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to organize. Not a statute that can be gutted by the next Congress or struck down by a captured court. A constitutional right, because the ability of working people to bargain collectively is as fundamental to a functioning republic as the right to speak, to assemble, or to vote. I support defending the independence of the NLRB as a national security imperative. In 90 years, no Board member had ever been removed before their term expired until January 2025, when a member was fired without cause, leaving the Board without a quorum for nearly a full year. The President then signed an executive order citing national security to strip collective bargaining rights from two-thirds of the federal workforce, including VA nurses, EPA scientists, and weather forecasters. Using national security as a pretext to dismantle the agencies that protect workers does not make the country safer. It makes our institutions more fragile and more susceptible to the political capture that Congress designed independent agencies to prevent.

I support fifty percent worker representation on corporate boards, modeled on the German codetermination system that has produced the most stable, highest quality manufacturing workforce in the Western world. When half the board answers to workers, wages rise, layoffs decrease, and long-term investment replaces short-term extraction. This is not theory. Germany has operated this way for decades and their workers are better paid, better trained, and more productive than ours.

I support mandatory collective bargaining rights for every defense contractor employee at or above the Cost Accounting Standards threshold. The workers who build the weapons that defend this nation should not be denied the right to bargain for fair wages and safe conditions by the very corporations that profit from their labor. National security begins with the people who do the work.

I support sectoral wage boards for every sector designated as critical infrastructure under Presidential Policy Directive 21. Energy, water, transportation, communications, healthcare, and defense. These workers keep the country alive. Their compensation should be set by negotiation at the industry level, not dictated unilaterally by employers who treat labor as a cost to be minimized rather than a people to be respected.

I support a four-day work week. Productivity does not require five days. Every serious study of reduced work weeks has shown the same result: output remains constant or increases, worker health improves, and turnover drops. The five-day work week was a victory won by organized labor a century ago. It is time for the next victory.

And I hold a simple conviction that I will carry into every negotiation, every vote, every fight: unless a Union label guarantees a product, there is no guarantee of human dignity in its making and no assurance of quality in its construction.

Your Health Is Not a Commodity

I grew up watching my parents make decisions no family should have to make. Whether to go to the doctor or pay rent. Whether to fill a prescription or keep the lights on. Millions of families are still making those decisions tonight.

I support universal healthcare moving toward single payer. The United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any nation on earth and delivers worse outcomes than dozens of countries that guarantee coverage to every citizen. This is not a mystery. It is the predictable result of a system designed to generate profit rather than health. Every other industrialized democracy has solved this. We are not incapable. We are not ignorant. We are captured.

I support universal childcare, because no parent should have to choose between earning a living and raising their children, and no child's early development should depend on whether their family can afford care that costs more than college tuition in most states. The care economy makes all other work possible. It is time we funded it like we mean it.

Your Mind Is Not a Luxury

A desire for education and the courage to follow through should be applauded, not met with debt.

I support universal higher education at public colleges, universities, and vocational schools. The GI Bill funded my education. It also built the American middle class. When this country decided that every returning veteran deserved a college education, it did not destroy the economy. It created the greatest expansion of prosperity in human history. The only question is whether we believe the children of working families deserve the same investment this country once made in its veterans. I believe they do.

Vocational schools and trade programs are schools just the same other colleges and universities, and deserve equal standing and equal funding. Electricians, welders, pipefitters, machinists, and healthcare workers who keep this country running deserve training pipelines that are fully funded, debt-free, and treated with the same respect as any other school. This distinction of schools of a vocational or trade school vs other schools is but another tool of the oligarchy to create a separation to keep us from uniting as one group.

Your Vote Is Your Power

My parents came to this country believing in its promise. The most fundamental expression of that promise is the right of every citizen to cast a vote and have it counted.

I support a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to vote. It is a national disgrace that the United States Constitution does not explicitly guarantee this right. Every restriction, every purge, every gerrymandered map exists in the gap between what we say we believe and what we have actually written into law. It is time to close that gap permanently.

I support making Election Day a federal holiday. If this country can shut down for the Fourth of July, it can shut down for the act that gives the Fourth of July its meaning.

Your Body Is Your Own

Equal rights for all means exactly what it says. Every person in this country has the right to make decisions about their own body without interference from the state. Full stop.

I support codifying the right to full body autonomy as a matter of federal law and pursuing a constitutional amendment to make it permanent. This is not a negotiation. This is not a compromise. A government that can dictate what you do with your own body is a government that owns you, and ownership of human beings is something this country supposedly settled a long time ago.

Your Taxes Should Work for You

My mother paid taxes on every dollar she earned cleaning offices. My father paid taxes on every dollar he earned rebuilding his life. They never had an army of accountants finding loopholes. They never had a lobbyist writing exceptions into the code on their behalf. They just paid. And the system they paid into was designed, deliberately, over fifty years, to transfer their share of the burden upward while transferring the benefits of their labor to the people who needed it least.

How dare the oligarchs tell regular people to be happy with scraps while forcing us to pay for the very infrastructure on which they exploit us. How dare they hoard wealth immeasurable and beyond what they will ever spend in immeasurable lifetimes, while over half of Americans cannot make it from one paycheck to the next. While 42 million people need federal assistance just to eat. While nine out of eighteen categories of American infrastructure still sit in the D range on the engineers' report card, with a $3.7 trillion investment gap and growing. While our schools crumble. While our bridges decay. While our transit systems earn the same grade as a student would need to repeat a course. While SNAP benefits are slashed by $186 billion to fund tax cuts for the people who caused the crisis in the first place.

And now our brothers and sisters are sent into a meat grinder in the Middle East for corporate greed, to protect the interests and investments of the same people who will never send their own children, who will never carry the weight of a rucksack or a flag-draped coffin, who will read about the casualties over breakfast and check their portfolios before lunch.

The corporate income tax share of federal revenue has fallen from about one third in the early 1950s to under 10 percent in the most recent years. The tax code generates $2.2 trillion in annual tax breaks, more than the United States spends on Social Security, Medicare, defense, or any other single program. That revenue gap is not an accident. It is the product of fifty years of deliberate policy choices that began with Reagan and accelerated with the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed the corporate rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The promised investment boom never materialized. Instead, the windfall went overwhelmingly to stock buybacks and executive compensation while working families saw nothing.

I support a progressive corporate tax reaching 80 percent on profits over one billion dollars. Before anyone calls this radical, let me be clear: the United States had a progressive corporate tax structure for 81 years, from 1936 to 2017. What was radical was abolishing it and handing the largest corporations in history a flat rate lower than what a family-owned machine shop pays in effective terms.

Here is what my structure does. A small business earning $100,000 in taxable profit pays 10 percent. That is a 52 percent tax cut from the current flat rate of 21 percent. A business earning $500,000 pays an effective rate of 14 percent, seven full points below the current rate. At $1 million, the effective rate is approximately 17 percent, still four points below today. The crossover point where a business starts paying more than the current rate does not arrive until well into the millions. There are 36.2 million small businesses in this country. They make up 99.9 percent of all American businesses, employ over 62 million workers, and create nine out of every ten net new jobs. Not one of them would ever see the top rate. The 80 percent rate applies to a few hundred corporations at most.

This is the most pro small business tax proposal on the table and it is simultaneously the most aggressive check on monopoly power on the table. When the top marginal corporate rate is 80 percent on profits above one billion dollars, the incentive to grow a single dominant firm into ever greater market concentration is fundamentally broken. At a flat 21 percent, a corporation that achieves monopolistic dominance keeps 79 cents of every additional dollar regardless of scale. At 80 percent, it keeps 20 cents. Meanwhile, a midsized competitor in a lower bracket keeps a significantly higher share of each marginal dollar. The tax code actively favors the smaller, more competitive firm. If a corporation earning five billion in annual profit decides to split into five companies each earning one billion, those five companies would each face significantly lower effective rates. If the tax structure motivates an actual breakup of concentrated market power, that is a feature, not a bug, because it achieves through the tax code what antitrust litigation takes years to accomplish and hostile courts can block. The policy that is most aggressive toward monopoly is simultaneously most generous toward the small firms that monopoly suppresses.

I support a 90 percent individual income tax rate on income over four million dollars per year. Between 1944 and 1963, the top marginal individual rate never dropped below 91 percent. During those decades, the wealthiest Americans still accumulated wealth, still invested, still built businesses, and still lived extremely well. What they could not do was extract income at a pace that drained the economy of the revenue needed to maintain infrastructure, defense, education, and social investment. The $4 million threshold means this rate applies to roughly the top 0.1 percent of earners. The vast majority of Americans, including virtually all small business owners, professionals, and high-earning workers, would never see this rate.

I support taxing capital gains as ordinary income, because the preferential capital gains rate is the single largest mechanism by which the wealthiest Americans pay lower effective rates than the workers who earn wages.

The revenue generated by restoring these rates funds everything on this page. Universal healthcare. Universal education. Universal childcare. Infrastructure at a scale that matches the interstate highway era. Defense industrial base workforce development. All of it. These are not separate spending proposals requiring separate funding mechanisms. They are what the tax code was designed to fund before it was captured by the interests it was supposed to tax.

I support taxing unrealized gains. Why should a regular citizen be forced to pay taxes on their homes while the Oligarch pays nothing?

Roosevelt understood this in 1942. When the nation faced an existential threat, he demanded that those with the most contribute the most, and with that revenue the United States built the most powerful military and industrial machine in human history. We did not become weaker when the wealthy paid more. We became the strongest nation on earth. And we have become weaker, year by year, as those rates have fallen and the revenue they generated has disappeared into private fortunes while the public systems that built this country have starved.

Your Fight Is the Only Fight That Matters

The time is now. Not later. Not after the next election. Not after the next hearing. Now. Because while politicians argue about constitutionality and legalities with traitors who respect neither, we the People are drowning. You cannot argue with a traitor who has no respect for human dignity. You cannot reason with a traitor who finds joy in the pain of others. And you cannot negotiate with traitors whose goal is our submission so they can build their tech fiefdoms on the ashes of our republic.

The oligarchs have taken your good hearts and used them against you. They are counting on us following procedures all the way to the abyss. Because we are a people of law. But the law is meaningless to people who have no regard for it. In fact, it is their tool to dominate us. They wrap themselves in the Constitution while shredding it. They invoke order while creating chaos. They call themselves patriots while selling the country to the highest bidder.

One cannot litigate one's way out of a crisis of legitimacy with an adversary that respects no law, no norm, and no human life. You organize your way out. You build power from the ground up. You do what Marine General Smedley Butler did in 1933 when he stopped a fascist coup not by filing a brief but by standing up, speaking out, and refusing to let concentrated power subvert the republic. You do what Indigenous communities across this continent have done for longer than any American institution has existed: when your land is taken, your language is suppressed, and your governance is dismantled, you do not survive by petitioning the people who are destroying you. You survive by organizing, by holding your community together, and by refusing to disappear.

That is the tradition I come from. Marine and Indigenous alike.

The establishment will not save you. The millionaires in Congress gain nothing from changing the system and everything from perpetuating it. Maybe some of them believe what they say. But belief is not enough when your top contributing industries are the same ones that profit most from the complexity of the tax code, the weakness of labor law, and the cost of healthcare. The tax code has $2.2 trillion in annual breaks because the industries and individuals who benefit from those breaks fund the campaigns of the legislators who write them. That is not a conspiracy. That is math.

Now that their masks have fallen, the good people of this country no longer have to waste a single moment giving them the benefit of the doubt. They told you they were playing by the rules while they rewrote them. They told you trickle down economics would lift everyone while they hoarded $79 trillion. They told you SNAP was too expensive while they pocketed $2.2 trillion a year in tax breaks. They told you unions were outdated while they stripped collective bargaining rights from nurses and scientists. They are not pretending anymore. And neither should we.

Dolores Huerta was a schoolteacher before she was ever a movement leader. She co-founded the United Farm Workers, stood on picket lines alongside the people she organized, and gave us the words "Sí, se puede" long before any politician borrowed them. She proved something this moment demands we remember: credentials alone don't shift power. People do. Solidarity does.

Every policy on this page sounds impossible. I know that. An 80 percent corporate tax rate sounds impossible. Universal healthcare sounds impossible. A constitutional right to vote sounds impossible. Fifty percent worker representation sounds impossible. A four-day work week sounds impossible. Universal education sounds impossible.

But my mother leaving her career to clean offices in a country where she knew no one, so her child could have a future sounded impossible. My father rebuilding his life from homelessness in a nation that owed him nothing and provided no help sounded impossible. A kid sneaking out of his house five days after his eighteenth birthday to join the Marine Corps during two wars sounded impossible. And yet here I stand.

Reversing Roe v. Wade sounded impossible, a compromised administration sounded impossible, another war in the Middle East sounded impossible, and an American Gestapo sounded impossible. And yet here we are.

We must attempt the impossible. Not because we are guaranteed to win. Because the alternative is surrender. And surrender means the oligarchy swallows everything our parents built, everything our neighbors earned, everything our children deserve. Their masks have fallen. They are no longer pretending to care about you. And neither should we pretend that patience will save us.

Organize. Fight. Not someday. Now. Now is the time of the unions. Now is the time of the people. Now is the time to fight.

I am asking the people of Maryland's 8th to join me.

Equal Rights for All. Privileges for None.

Boris Velasquez Progressive Candidate, Maryland's 8th Congressional District