Five months ago, I declared my candidacy to take on Connecticut Congressman John Larson, a 14-term incumbent who has been in office since I was 10 years old. The Democratic Party needs a new generation of leaders, but more importantly, it needs a new kind of leader. Leaders forged by the fight to survive are fundamentally different from leaders who pick their fights.

The systemic barriers of daring to run for Congress as a Black woman, an immigrant and a mother of three school-aged children far surpass the obstacles I faced as an undocumented immigrant. I find myself in the familiar territory of pushing back against the unspoken message: know your place.

But my place is at the table and in the spaces where my voice is least welcome. When the New York Times writes an article about this Connecticut congressional race and selects who is a “serious contender,” when the media fixate on fundraising numbers and when an older male politician suggests I wait until my children are older to run for office, I’m reminded that the barriers facing candidates like me are systemic, and breaking them is part of the mission.

Not being a traditional congressional candidate is a strength. When I was 12, my parents moved our family to the United States from Haiti. When we first arrived, we shared a bedroom among eight relatives and were undocumented for a decade. I internalized the shame of being called “illegal” and carried it as a dark family secret.

In January 2010 – just four months before I graduated college, a devastating earthquake struck Haiti and destroyed a large part of the country, including the neighborhood where I grew up. The Obama Administration turned this tragedy into a lifeline for undocumented Haitians by granting us Temporary Protected Status, which offers protections from deportation and authorization to work legally in the United States.

Getting TPS transformed my life. Without it, I would have only hung my college diploma on the wall of my small bedroom instead of using it to build a better life for myself and my family. I learned through my lived experiences that policy isn’t so abstract when it’s your life on the line.  Government has the power not just to regulate lives, but to liberate them. This is the type of experience that makes me a new kind of congressional candidate.

My personal and professional life, first as a financial advisor then as an attorney, has centered around intergenerational financial stability. Every client who came to me to plan for their family’s future had one thing in common: they earned a living wage.

In contrast, my mother was earning $11.15 per hour packing meat in a freezer in New York until tears ran down her face because her gloved hands burned from the cold. No amount of financial literacy can fix the reality of a poverty wage. So many of our challenges stem from a single issue: people aren’t earning enough to live with dignity. That’s why I will fight to raise the federal minimum wage to $25 per hour tied to inflation, so when prices go up, paychecks also go up. Real affordability begins with pay that covers the cost of living.

For my family, achieving intergenerational financial stability meant helping my parents retire by having them move in with me. I can run for Congress as a 37-year-old mother of three because in our multigenerational household, we care for each other and uplift each other. I can’t replicate my mother, who is as devoted to her grandchildren as her mother was to me, for every young mother forced out of the workforce. I can’t make everyone’s partner as supportive as my husband. What I can do is fight for policies that allow families to thrive like affordable housing, universal childcare, well-funded public schools, healthcare for all, long-term care covered by Medicare and paid family leave.

Before we say “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” we must first have a country that keeps its promises to its people regardless of where they live, who they love, what they look like and how they worship. I am simultaneously profoundly grateful that this country has offered me opportunities that allowed me to achieve my American dream and outraged that many Americans still face structural barriers that have persisted for generations

We have enough career politicians who have never personally navigated systemic barriers. Yet they are convinced they’re indispensable in the fight to knock down those barriers. Wrong! The kind of leader Connecticut needs is one who understands that a single law can mean the difference between despair and dignity, between invisibility and opportunity because they have lived it. They must know how it feels to navigate a world that tells you “wait your turn” while the doors of opportunity keep revolving for the same few people. The new kind of leader comes from communities that have been talked about, legislated over, and written off, but persevere anyway.

Ruth Fortune, is a formerly undocumented immigrant challenging U.S. Rep. John Larson and others in the first district congressional race.

https://www.courant.com/2025/12/28/opinion-the-kind-of-democrat-connecticut-needs/