Welcome to Amped Up. This is your host Brian Knight.

And our guest today is David Kim.

David is a community activist and bold progressive candidate

running for Congress in California's 34th Congressional District.

David, welcome to Amped Up.

Thank you so much, Ryan.

I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, I'm so excited to have you,

and I was excited to endorse your campaign, and I see you out there fighting for all the right things so that's giving me a lot of hope

Since this is your first time on the podcast why don't you just start off by giving our listeners a little bit about your

background and why you're running for Congress.

To tell you just a little about my background I'm currently an immigration attorney.

I defend respondents in immigration court when they receive their notice to appear

of being removed from the country and I also help and fight for asylum for a lot of my clients who are seeking asylum and prior to that I had I worked as an attorney eight to nine years and I realized and and I did the two to three job hustle because at a point there were no paid legal

jobs and I had to still fill up my resume so I remember driving for Uber and Lyft 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. every day and then sleeping for 3, 4 hours and then going

back to my free attorney job and doing the daily high grind and hustle and and seeing our neighborhoods with two families to

one bedroom apartment with our district being the 10th poorest congressional district in the nation

with per capita incomes in the mid 20s, with all this financial distress and daily deep-rooted chronic economic anxiety that people

wake up in every single day, wondering how they're going to put food on the table

or pay rent.

We've come to a point where it's like, these are the most urgent times that we're in right now

and our elected officials are doing nothing.

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