I’m MAGA’s greatest enemy and I’m running for Congress

Let me tell you about my mom

You’ve been with me from the start. You know that I blew the whistle on the White House’s incompetence and cruelty during Trump’s first term. I’m MAGA’s greatest enemy, and now, I’m running for Congress.

I’m going to ask you to be a Founding Donor to my campaign, but before I do, I want to tell you a story.

My mother was born in 1944 in Mexico, into a world that told girls what they couldn’t do. Girls weren’t supposed to play sports, but my mother didn’t care.

She laced up her sneakers and tucked her basketball shorts under her skirt so that her father wouldn’t know she was playing after school.

That quiet defiance? That’s where I come from.

She immigrated to the United States, became a citizen, and married my father, a long-haul truck driver who hauled cross-country to build a life for our family. She worked in factories in El Paso.

She believed fiercely in the promise of this country. In freedom. In opportunity. In the idea that if you worked hard and kept your head high, you could build something real.

When my father passed away, everything changed. It was just Mom and me. No safety net. And when I was in college at the University of Pennsylvania, she went back to work, something she never, ever complained about, because it was the only way we were going to afford my education. It was her quiet way of telling me my dreams mattered.

Everything I am today, I learned from her. That’s why it’s so personal when I watch what’s happening in this country right now.

My mother is an immigrant. She took an oath to this country. She lived its values. She cries at the National Anthem.

But today, people who look like her, who sound like her, are being demonized, targeted, and dehumanized by the very government I served.

That’s my why.

I’m running for Congress because I believe that my mother and every immigrant in this country deserve decency and respect. That’s something Donald Trump knows nothing about.

Before you read any further, can I humbly ask you to chip in to become a founding donor to my grassroots campaign? My team set a strict $500,000 goal before midnight, and I’m counting on my longtime supporters like you to help. Please, chip in whatever you can spare >>

I witnessed the hatred and racism of the Trump Administration firsthand.

Trump’s personal henchman, Stephen Miller, called me at home to try to convince me we should bomb Mexico. He thought he could use my background against me.

I remember him saying something along the lines of, “I know you’re from the border, I know you care about the cartels.” He wanted me to demonize my own people.

I wouldn’t, and I never will.

I watched Donald Trump refuse to release disaster relief for California wildfires because it was a blue state. I was in the room when we had to pull voter data from Orange County to prove that some of his own supporters lived there, and that was the only reason he agreed to send help.

Not because Americans were losing their homes. Because some of them had voted for him.

And when a white supremacist opened fire in my hometown of El Paso, in a Walmart where my aunt was shopping for back-to-school supplies, I was the one who carried the shooter’s manifesto into the West Wing.

The gunman wrote about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The same language the president used. My aunt described the shooter to me over the phone. Twenty-three people died that day, including Mexican citizens who had crossed the border just to go shopping.

The president’s response to the situation disgusted me. This is not the country my mother worked so hard for and believed in.

So, when I couldn’t stop what was happening from the inside anymore, I resigned. They offered me a promotion to keep me in the fold. I said no. They offered to place me in a senior role at DHS. I said no to that, too.

Because I understood that if I took it, I’d never get free of the chaos, and I’d never be able to tell the truth about what I’d seen. I’d be culpable in their corruption.

Some of you have been with me since I made that choice. You were there when I went public, and my whole life changed overnight.

When the harassment campaigns started. When they lied on national television and said I’d been fired. When Trump’s lawyers came after me.

You didn’t flinch. You didn’t leave. And I need you to know that is the reason I’m still standing here today.

I couldn’t stay silent when I was inside Trump’s White House. I can’t stay silent now.

I’m running for Congress because the values my mother gave me demand it. Because right is right, even when it costs you. Because someone has to fight for the dream she believed in, the dream of a country that doesn’t turn on the people who built it.

Will you make a founding donation to help power my campaign before my midnight deadline? Anything you can chip in means the world to me.

I’m not connected. I’m not rich. I have no famous last name. I grew up on the border with a mom who hid her basketball shorts under her skirt so she could play and a dad who drove 18-wheelers across the country.

But I have her courage and the humble foundation they instilled in me. And I have an amazing team of supporters behind me, including you.

Every dollar you give helps us build a campaign that fights for people like my mother.

People who worked hard, played by the rules, and deserve a government that sees them, not one that demonizes them.

Let’s go fight for it.

Olivia