Ramirez-Rosa was first elected the
alderman of the 35th Ward on February 24, 2015. He received 67% of the vote, defeating incumbent alderman
Rey Colón. He was re-elected to a second four-year term on February 26, 2019, and to a third term on February 28, 2023. Upon his election in 2015, he was the youngest alderman on the City Council at the time and among the youngest in Chicago's history, and one of the city's first two openly
LGBT Latino councilors alongside colleague
Raymond Lopez. After a year as alderman, ''
Crain's Chicago Business'' distinguished Ramirez-Rosa as a member of their 2016 "Twenty in their 20s" class. In 2023, Crain's Chicago Business distinguished Ramirez-Rosa as one of that year's "40 Under 40." He was a member of the Chicago City Council's Progressive Reform Caucus, Latino Caucus, the
LGBT Caucus, and the inaugural chair and dean of the council's Democratic Socialist Caucus. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Ramirez-Rosa served as the Illinois State Vice-chair for
Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign. After Ramirez-Rosa resigned from the City Council to assume leadership of the Chicago Park District, Mayor Brandon Johnson appointed Cook County Commissioner
Anthony Joel Quezada to fill the vacant 35th Ward seat, and the Chicago City Council confirmed the appointment in April 2025.
City budget and property tax rebate In 2015, Ramirez-Rosa opposed Mayor Rahm Emanuel's record $589 million property tax increase, arguing that the city should have "emptied out hundreds of millions in
TIF funds before raising property taxes and fees on Chicago's working families." Ramirez-Rosa voted no on Mayor Emanuel's 2016 budget proposal and property tax increase. After the property tax increase passed, Ramirez-Rosa proposed a $35 million property tax rebate for struggling homeowners. Ultimately, Ramirez-Rosa joined with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to sponsor and pass a $21 million property tax rebate program. Ramirez-Rosa said of the compromise: "this proposal ensures that the poorest homeowners who see the largest property-tax increase get the maximum rebate." In November 2019, Ramirez-Rosa was one of eleven aldermen to vote against Mayor
Lori Lightfoot's first budget. He joined all five other members of the Socialist Caucus in signing a letter to Lightfoot which criticized her budget for "an over-reliance on property taxes" and "regressive funding models" that are "burdensome to our working-class citizens, while giving the wealthy and large corporations a pass." In November 2024, Ramirez-Rosa was among Chicago City Council members who voted against Mayor Brandon Johnson's proposed $300 million property tax increase during negotiations over the city's 2025 budget.
Chicago Immigration Policy Working Group In August 2015, Ramirez-Rosa was a founding member of the Chicago Immigration Policy Working Group. Ramirez-Rosa and the working group successfully pushed the City of Chicago to provide free or low-cost legal assistance to Chicagoans facing deportation, provide support for
DACA applicants, expand language access, and create a
municipal ID. In 2021, Ramirez-Rosa and the working group succeeded in removing the carveouts from Chicago's
sanctuary city ordinance, ensuring the Chicago Police Department could not work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in any case. Ramirez-Rosa co-sponsored the successful measure alongside Mayor Lori Lightfoot. He first introduced the measure to remove the carveouts in 2017. In Albany Park, Ramirez-Rosa supported the construction of the Oso Apartments, a 48-unit, all-affordable housing development located near Montrose and Kimball avenues. After a fire destroyed the Independence Branch Library in Irving Park, Ramirez-Rosa supported rebuilding the library at a new site co-located with affordable housing, combining a new public library with residential units for low-income seniors. In addition to supporting affordable housing, Ramirez-Rosa has advocated for rent control. In 2021, he sponsored successful ordinances to establish
minimum density requirements, and a
demolition impact fee for portions of his ward facing high displacement. Ramirez-Rosa argued these ordinances would help preserve
naturally-occurring affordable housing. In September 2024, the City Council approved Ramirez-Rosa's Northwest Side Housing Preservation Ordinance, expanding and codifying anti-displacement protections in portions of Logan Square, Avondale, Hermosa, Humboldt Park, and West Town. The ordinance strengthened protections for multi-unit residential buildings by restricting demolitions and limiting conversions of multi-unit buildings into single-family homes. It also established tenant purchase protections by providing tenants with a right of first refusal when their building is offered for sale. In November 2018, he supported the creation of the First Nations Garden on a large city-owned lot in his ward. The First Nations Garden was created by
American Indian youth as a place to heal and connect back to nature. The garden was inaugurated with a
land acknowledgement ceremony that included a Chicago City Council resolution passed by Ramirez-Rosa that acknowledged Chicago as an "indigenous landscape." In 2020, Ramirez-Rosa supported the legalization of
accessory dwelling units in much of his ward. He supported
historic preservationist efforts in his district, including the allocation of $250,000 in public landmark funds to help restore Logan Square's
Minnekirken. Ramirez-Rosa worked with community organizations and the Chicago Department of Planning and Development on rezoning initiatives along Milwaukee Avenue, including sponsoring the Milwaukee Avenue Special Character Overlay District, which established design guidelines intended to preserve the corridor's historic character while allowing context-sensitive development aligned with existing neighborhood patterns. In May 2024, Ramirez-Rosa broke ground on a more than $27 million Milwaukee Avenue and Logan Square redesign project — previously known as the Logan Square Bicentennial Improvement Project — which reconfigured the historic Logan Square traffic circle, rerouted Kedzie Avenue, and added new pedestrian and public spaces, a change he championed through a multi-year community input and design process involving Chicago Department of Transportation and Logan Square community organizations.
Participatory democracy Ramirez-Rosa has consistently expressed his belief in
participatory democracy as central to his work as a democratic socialist elected official. In 2017, he told
The Nation Magazine: "I'm a big believer that we can build socialism from below. We need to create these opportunities for working people to hold the reins of power and govern themselves." Likewise, in 2017, he told
Jacobin magazine: "democratic socialism means that the people govern every facet of their lives, whether it be the economic structure or the government that's determining the policies that impact their lives." As part of this approach, Ramirez-Rosa helped found United Neighbors of the 35th Ward (UN35), a neighborhood-based political organization active in his ward.
In These Times described UN35 as an "independent political organization," engaging residents in collective decision-making and electoral activity, and noted that Ramirez-Rosa viewed his City Council seat as an extension of community base-building and co-governance rather than a solely individual mandate. In 2019, Ramirez-Rosa explained to writer Micah Uetricht how he seeks to put participatory democracy into action in his elected office: "In the thirty-fifth ward we have what we call 'people-power initiatives.' To date, those are three programs that we run through my office. They seek to show people's ability to govern themselves and collectively come together and make decisions. We don't need the Donald Trumps of the world, the Jeff Bezoses of the world... telling us what our communities should look like or how we should live our lives. We collectively, from the grassroots, from below, can determine our own destiny." The three "people-power initiatives" Ramirez-Rosa supported through his elected office were "community-driven zoning and development" - a local
participatory planning process,
participatory budgeting for the allocation of infrastructure improvement dollars, and a local
rapid-response deportation defense network called the "community defense committee." The "community defense committee" distributed immigration know-your-rights cards door-to-door, organized know-your-rights trainings, and trained ward residents in how to engage in
civil disobedience to stop deportations. Ramirez-Rosa has also called himself a "movement elected official," stating his "role is to be an organizer on the inside for those movements that are organizing people-power bases on the outside." In 2021, Ramirez-Rosa led efforts to join the CPAC ordinance with a rival civilian oversight ordinance. The new ordinance – Empowering Communities for Public Safety – passed the Chicago City Council on July 21, 2021; Ramirez-Rosa was a chief sponsor. The passage of the ordinance led to the historic election of 66 civilians in the 2023 Chicago municipal election to serve as police district councilors. In December 2017, Ramirez-Rosa was the sole member of the Chicago City Council to support the No Cop Academy campaign, a grassroots
abolitionist effort to stop the city from spending $95 million on a new police academy building and instead spend that money on education, after-school programs, job training, and social services. Ramirez-Rosa would explain his support of the No Cop Academy campaign as follows: "police violence has cost Chicagoans $662 million in settlements since 2004, and CPD is funded to a tune of $4 million per day, $1.5 billion per year. Our nation has witnessed the magnitude of police crimes in the City of Chicago with the murders of
Rekia Boyd and
Laquan McDonald. The Chicago Police Department is not lacking in resources, it is lacking in accountability and oversight. The $95 million that the City is projected to spend on this new cop academy should be invested in jobs, education, youth programs, and mental health services, not a new shooting range and swimming pool for police.” In May 2018, after successfully delaying a vote on the new police academy, Ramirez-Rosa was expelled from the Chicago City Council's Latino Caucus. Ramirez-Rosa was later readmitted to the Latino Caucus after public outcry. In 2020, in the wake of
George Floyd protests, Ramirez-Rosa helped dozens of
Black Lives Matter protesters recover their bikes which had been confiscated by the Chicago Police.
Pandemic response In 2020, in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic, Ramirez-Rosa used his aldermanic office's resources to initiate and support neighborhood
mutual aid networks, and to target support to communities most impacted by the pandemic. Ramirez-Rosa's office distributed a bilingual newsletter to 7,000 ward households to provide residents with information on unemployment insurance and resources available to support them during the pandemic. Ramirez-Rosa joined with his socialist colleagues to call for a pandemic response that prioritized "the most vulnerable." He also worked to expand Chicago's emergency rental assistance to undocumented Chicagoans. In December 2020, he helped bring the
One Fair Wage High Road Kitchens program to Chicago, which provided grants to restaurants who committed to transition to a full minimum wage with tips on top.
Economic justice and workers' rights Ramirez-Rosa has advocated for the raising of Chicago's
minimum wage to a
living wage, and other measures in support of
workers' rights. He was a sponsor of the successful Fair Workweek ordinance to provide
hourly-workers with stability in their work schedules. He also sponsored the ordinance to raise Chicago's minimum wage to $15. Ramirez-Rosa also worked to create a municipal Office of Labor Standards to protect Chicago workers. On October 4, 2018, Ramirez-Rosa was arrested at a
Fight for $15 protest outside
McDonald's global
headquarters in the
West Loop. He was arrested alongside striking workers as they blocked the entrance to the building in an act of civil disobedience. The McDonald's workers were demanding a $15 wage and a
union. Ramirez-Rosa has spoken at several Fight for $15 demonstrations. In 2017, Ramirez-Rosa sponsored and passed an ordinance to designate
Kedzie Avenue in his ward as "
Lucy Gonzalez Parsons Way," in honor of the late
labor organizer and founder of the
IWW union. Parsons lived off Kedzie Avenue at 3130 N. Troy. At an honorary street sign unveiling event held on May 1, 2017,
International Workers' Day, Ramirez-Rosa said: "The conditions Lucy and other workers were facing... are not too different from the conditions we're facing now. Today we honor Lucy Gonzalez Parsons because she taught us the way, she taught us that you don't take it sitting down, you don't live on your knees, you rise up and you fight back." In 2023, Ramirez-Rosa played a central role in the passage of Chicago's
One Fair Wage ordinance, which raised the hourly pay for hospitality workers by phasing tipped workers up to the full minimum wage while allowing tips to remain in addition to wages. The policy aligned Chicago with other U.S. jurisdictions that have ended separate wage standards for tipped and non-tipped workers and represented one of the most significant labor policy changes adopted by the City Council in decades. Ramirez-Rosa had supported One Fair Wage legislation for several years as an alderperson and, in 2023, served as a key negotiator and vote counter as City Council Floor Leader. In that role, he worked to secure majority support for the ordinance amid opposition from restaurant industry groups and helped shepherd the measure through the legislative process as part of a broader labor reform package that expanded paid leave and strengthened workplace protections for Chicago workers.
LGBTQ rights and bodily autonomy In 2016, Ramirez-Rosa sponsored a successful measure to ensure
transgender persons had the right to access the public bathroom of their choice. During City Council debate on the ordinance, Ramirez-Rosa said: "We must do everything we can to legislate love and to reject hate... we can legislate love because we can show that as a city, we will not discriminate against our trans-sisters and brothers, that we will allow equality to reign supreme when it comes to access to public accommodations.” In 2022, Ramirez-Rosa supported and helped advance Chicago's Bodily Autonomy Ordinance, which strengthened abortion rights by limiting city cooperation with out-of-state investigations related to abortion care and certain forms of gender-affirming healthcare that are legal in Illinois. In 2024, following Ramirez-Rosa's advocacy, Mayor Brandon Johnson established a Transfemicide Working Group by executive order to develop recommendations addressing violence against transgender women and gender-diverse people; the Council later adopted Ramirez-Rosa's ordinance codifying the mayor's executive order.
Council leadership roles and controversy Throughout his tenure on the Chicago City Council, Ramirez-Rosa served in several leadership roles, including chair of the Democratic Socialist Caucus, vice chair of the Latino Caucus, and as a board member of the Chicago City Council Latino Caucus Foundation. From May to November 2023, he served as Mayor Brandon Johnson's City Council Floor Leader and chair of the Committee on Zoning, Landmarks, and Building Standards. In November 2023, amid heightened tensions related to a proposed referendum on Chicago's sanctuary city ordinance during the city's migrant crisis, a procedural dispute occurred on the City Council floor. Following the adjournment of a special meeting called by opponents of the ordinance, Alderman Raymond Lopez alleged that Ramirez-Rosa had physically assaulted Alderman Emma Mitts in an effort to prevent a quorum from being reached. Ramirez-Rosa denied the allegation, and video footage released shortly thereafter showed him briefly touching Mitts' arm and standing in her path before moving aside, without evidence of physical assault. Following the incident, Ramirez-Rosa resigned from his City Council leadership roles but continued to serve as an alderperson. Progressive elected officials and community leaders characterized the episode leading to his leadership resignation as politically motivated and tied to broader opposition to a progressive legislative agenda, including sanctuary city protections and labor reforms. == Chicago Park District Superintendency ==