We met Vasquez on his own turf, a North Side space he is quick to say is not a taxpayer-funded ward office. He calls it a community hub, a co-op, a place where neighbors come in to work through what they want to get done. He keeps what he jokingly calls movement merch on hand: t-shirts, hats, and the small Chicago Star butterfly pins his team made during last fall’s surge in immigration enforcement. “The public needs to be informed in order to know how to hold government accountable,” he says. The distinction matters to him, and it frames how he describes almost everything else. Power, in his telling, is something you build with other people. From the cypher to the council Vasquez, 46, is the son of Guatemalan immigrants and a former battle rapper who performed under the name Prime. His politics started with hip-hop, long before any party. Listening to NWA, KRS-One, and Public Enemy in the late 1990s, he says, gave language to things he had already lived: poverty, being treated as an outsider, friction with police. “Without thinking about the politics of it, you just know it’s a dope song,” he says. “And next thing you know you’re reciting it, you’re thinking about how it speaks to you and your environment.” When he first heard Bernie Sanders in 2015, the pitch felt familiar. Sanders, he says, “sounded like my rap records.” He knocked doors in Iowa, came back and threw a fundraiser that doubled as a concert, and met an organizer recruiting first-time candidates. In 2019 he unseated Ald. Patrick O’Connor, a 36-year incumbent and a former floor leader for Mayor Rahm Emanuel. He describes his first televised debate in the terms he knew best. It “felt like a battle. Back to back to back bars.” The only socialist to vote yes What has defined his six years in office is a willingness to break with the left that produced him. The clearest example is on the record. In late 2020, Vasquez broke with the city’s other socialists to vote for Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s 2021 budget, which carried a $94 million property tax increase and passed narrowly. He was the only Democratic Socialists of America member on the council to support it, and the Chicago DSA chapter censured him, its first such censure. He has not recanted. He says the vote was the price of a deal to stop city worker layoffs during the pandemic, and he frames the episode as the recurring fight on the left between purity and governing. “We all agree on goals. We don’t all agree on how to get there,” he says. A movement built by people who have felt cast out, in his telling, has a habit of casting out its own. “Yo, you’re not left enough, so now you’re not a progressive. And it’s like, we’re not gaining power that way.” His critics on the left framed it as something else. On the floor of that 2020 debate, Socialist Caucus members rejected the same deal he defended as the responsible vote. “Don’t give me crumbs and tell me it’s cake,” Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th Ward) said of the budget. “We’re in a global pandemic, and there’s no way in the world that we should be balancing this budget on the backs of taxpayers.” To that wing of the left, Vasquez’s pragmatism reads as capitulation. He calls it the price of keeping people from getting hurt. Asked directly whether he still considers himself a socialist, he does not hedge. “Government is socialist. You’ve made a social agreement that you think you can do better by pulling your resources together to solve for more people.” He adds a qualifier, calling himself a coalitionist, and draws a distinction between two kinds of people who share the label. One comes to it through hardship, and he cites Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King, and Harold Washington. The other, he says, is the person whose “mom and dad paid for college and I read Marx.” People who have lived precarity, he argues, learn to compromise because survival requires it. It is a framing that favors his own position, and he makes no apology for it. He sums up his method in the language of an umpire: he calls “balls and strikes,” he says, no matter “who’s on the fifth floor” at City Hall. At odds with an allied mayor That posture has put him at odds with Brandon Johnson, the closest thing the Chicago left has to one of its own in the mayor’s office. Vasquez voted against the mayor’s 2026 budget. He says he supports taxing corporations and still calls the mayor’s signature corporate head tax a marketing ploy. The measure, a $33-per-employee monthly tax on companies with at least 500 workers, would have raised about $82 million. His objection, he says, is precision. A broad tax also falls on immigrant- and Black-owned businesses trying to scale, and the city would do better to target industries that have thrived while others have struggled. “Am I really doing something, or am I saying that we’re doing the corporate head tax, so that people out here movement-wise go, well, clearly that’s progressive?” Johnson made the opposite case in his own words. Unveiling the budget, the mayor said he would “challenge the ultra-rich,” asking large corporations and the wealthy to carry more so working families would not face higher property, grocery, or garbage taxes. When the council stripped the tax out, he called the result “morally bankrupt,” arguing there was a way to balance the budget without going after working and poor people. His finance team projected the council plan would leave a $163 million hole to be filled mid-year. Johnson ultimately neither signed nor vetoed the $16.6 billion budget, allowing it to take effect. On the left, losing the head tax read as a gift to the wealthy. Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th Ward), a fellow socialist who championed it, called the budget that passed without it “the billionaire budget” and said it was unacceptable to put the burden on the poorest people in the city. The opposition reached beyond the left. Gov. JB Pritzker, a fellow Democrat, also opposed the head tax, calling it a “job killer.” Vasquez lands in neither camp. He says he would tax corporations, just not this one. On policing, Vasquez makes a budget argument. He says the department should be audited like any other, noting that it takes up roughly half of the corporate fund’s departmental spending, the discretionary pool the city actually controls. The department’s 2026 budget runs about $2.1 billion, and its overtime line alone grew by roughly $101 million. “You talk to the cops, they don’t feel it, they don’t see that money,” he says. “So my premise is, something’s inefficient here. We’ve got to audit this thing.” Johnson, like most politicians, is unwilling to say that publicly, he argues, so the number keeps climbing. He frames the larger development as a shift in how Chicago governs. By moving the budget cycle up about six weeks, the council was able to draft and pass a spending plan over a mayor’s objection for the first time in the city’s history. Vasquez voted against that plan too, calling both it and the mayor’s version inadequate, yet he counts the council’s new independence as a gain. “The fact that the council is becoming more independent, I think is a good thing for government, because you have a counterbalance.” The ordinance that was never tested Immigration is the fight that has consumed his chairmanship of the City Council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and here the lines with Johnson are less clean. Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, which says city employees will not help enforce federal immigration law, began as a 1985 executive order under Mayor Harold Washington, became law in 2006, and was expanded in 2012. Vasquez says it had never been seriously tested until the past year. After a mass detention incident in June 2025 and a hearing his committee held that July, it became clear that no rule explicitly empowered the Civilian Office of Police Accountability to investigate whether Chicago officers had violated it. His own attempt to fix that was blocked by colleagues. A similar measure led by Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26th Ward) passed in March 2026, and on this one Johnson was a supporter. Then the issue reached his own staff. His chief of staff, Catherine “Cat” Sharp, was one of the “Broadview Six,” a group of protesters indicted by a federal grand jury in October 2025 over a September protest outside the suburban ICE facility. Prosecutors alleged the group surrounded a federal agent’s vehicle, banged on it, and damaged it. Vasquez characterizes the prosecution as an attempt to frighten people out of dissent. The case then collapsed. Charges against Sharp were dropped in March 2026, and the remaining charges were dismissed with prejudice in May after the U.S. attorney acknowledged the case was tainted and a federal judge said she was shocked by redactions prosecutors had made to grand jury transcripts. Vasquez goes further than the court record, saying the prosecutor “tampered with the grand jury,” and says he wants hearings to put that official under oath. That word is his. What the record establishes is that there was documented prosecutorial misconduct serious enough to end the case. Legislating at teenagers The same instinct shaped his opposition to a proposed snap curfew aimed at large gatherings of teenagers. He grounds it in his own adolescence, getting cleared out of Navy Pier by police for gathering to rap while, as he puts it, “the white kids are chilling.” He was arrested twice before he turned 18, once while sitting near friends who were smoking, and says officers ignored him to arrest the three Black kids beside him, then listed him as gang-affiliated anyway. He never got a record. “That changes the trajectory of your whole life,” he says. He does not dismiss the underlying problem. Large groups gather, he acknowledges, and a few make it dangerous for e
