Chuck Park is focused on protecting immigrant families in his run for Congress

A former U.S. Department of State employee, New York City Council staffer and Jackson Heights, Queens, native, Chuck Park is looking to unseat longtime Rep. Grace Meng, an influential voice in establishment Democratic politics in Queens. Park is challenging Meng to her left in the 2026 Democratic primary, and he’s focusing on fighting to protect immigrant communities and affordability. He spoke with City & State about his long-shot bid and how he plans to give Meng a run for her money. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re from the district originally – you did some work in the Obama administration and then came back to do a lot of local work. It’s a pretty big change to go from working in the State Department to the MinKwon Center for Community Action?

That’s correct, right after the State Department, I was at MinKwon Center. But if I can go back in my bio, even before that, I was raised by Korean immigrants who first landed in Queens in the 1980s. Their first job was peddling jackets and jeans on the streets of Chinatown, Manhattan, and they worked 12 to 13-hour days to feed me and my four siblings. They eventually were able to buy a house, paid a mortgage, started a small business in Jackson Heights that to this day, my dad still lifts the gates on four days a week, and he’s in his 70s. And so I’m running for Congress because I see what is happening in terms of (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids on Canal Street, the same street where my parents were desperate immigrants trying to scrape together a living. I see those ICE raids, I see unmarked vans sweeping up kids out of schools, parents on the streets, people in the back of restaurants and grocery stores. And I take that very personally, and I believe that it’s the most urgent work right now for leaders in New York City, especially in the beating heart of immigrant Queens. The most important thing that they should be doing is standing up and fighting back against this direct attack on our origin stories and the Queens dream, if you can call it that. That’s my core motivation. I think there are people sitting in office now who don’t take this personally. They half-heartedly promised to fight for us, but instead, they prioritize corporate donors, political machines and their own careers over the existential threat and the needs of our community.

I assume you’re referring directly to Rep. Grace Meng. 

Correct.

On your website you call Rep. Grace Meng an “absentee incumbent.” But she has been very visible in the community. Could you tell me a little bit about why you are challenging Rep. Grace Meng? What do you see as the path to victory?

So I wrote absentee, but maybe a better way of describing her is out of touch. I’ll start with the issue of immigration and ICE raids. In our community, there was a 6-year-old child – her name is Dayra – she was abducted with her mother at a routine check-in at 26 Federal Plaza over the summer. And she lives in the district, in Grace Meng’s district. She attends school at P.S. 89 (in) Elmhurst in the heart of New York’s 6th Congressional District. When she was abducted, when she was disappeared, when she was swiftly deported, the outcry was incredible – the City Council member, state electeds, even Gov. (Kathy) Hochul commented on it swiftly, demanding answers and demanding the return of this poor child and her mother. To this day, my opponent hasn’t said a word about that case. (Editor’s note: Meng said on X on Aug. 15 her office had been in touch with the family.) … I think that’s a fireable offense that you have not stood up to to protect a vulnerable child in your district when you represent, again, the beating heart of immigrant New York City and Queens. Moreover, around the same time this summer, she signed on to a Republican-led resolution thanking ICE for supposedly protecting our communities as these raids are happening, as people are being abducted, as our friends and neighbors and children are being grabbed off our street, disappeared into unmarked vans. She signed a resolution thanking ICE. I think that is fundamentally disqualifying if you are pretending to represent the communities of Queens, New York City, “The World’s Borough.” That is one reason I am challenging Grace Meng. The other reason I am challenging Grace Mang is because she doesn’t work for the working people and the working families of Queens – people like my parents, people probably like your parents. She is fundamentally bought and bossed by the, call it the billionaire class, the donor class, the corporate PACs.

When it comes to your experience in the State Department, do you see that as a way that you might be able to – if you were to be elected – navigate some of these issues we’re seeing with ICE and immigration?

I would talk about my time in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. I was a vice consulate visa officer for just over two years at what was then the largest U.S. consulate anywhere in the world. We processed tens of thousands of visa applications every year, and I personally conducted thousands of these interviews to more than 100 visa interviews a day in a tiny window, not unlike what you see at the DMV. And what I learned there on the southern border, even coming from an incredibly diverse place like New York City, in Queens, was that our immigration system is fundamentally broken. And if I can tell you how many people I met from Queens who are returning to Mexico for a visa interview, who are on the opposite side of a bulletproof glass window, who spoke perfect English, who also rode the No. 7 train to school, who also had whose parents also had small businesses and who only in adulthood learned that they weren’t actually American citizens, but actually were New Yorkers – it felt so arbitrary that a piece of paper, a birth certificate, a passport and a window separated me from someone on the other side, who in so many ways, was exactly like me.

I assume this was pre-DACA.

This is pre-DACA. That happened a few years later, but this is early Obama days. I was in Juárez from 2011 to 2013.

On your campaign website, you talk a little bit about stopping the funding of wars and specifically the voting in favor of the Block the Bombs Act. Given how many Jewish people live in this district, I think they’d want to know: What is your position on Israel-Palestine?

My position on Israel-Palestine, first of all, is that I don’t want to relitigate decades and decades of history. I think that’d be disrespectful of me as a non-Jew, as a non-Israeli, as a non-Palestinian, as a non-Muslim. What I can say is, I'll start at Oct. 7, 2023, that was a horrific attack that resulted in the murder of more than 1,000 Israeli Jews, civilians. There was sexual violence. There was the shooting of children in their beds. It was horrific. And not only that, hundreds of hostages were taken back into Gaza after and that was again, as a human being with empathy, it was horrific to see. It was also horrific to see for two years after a government led by (Benjamin) Netanyahu and (Itamar) Ben-Gvir lead a campaign of mass murder and starvation against an entire people, tens upon tens of thousands of, again, innocent civilians blown up, shot, just starved in their communities, and, again, as a human being with empathy, it was, it is, it has been horrific to see that. And so when I think about what a member of Congress can or should do, I question why the United States government should be sending lethal military aid to another nation at a time when our own children, we’re having SNAP benefits cut. We’re having cuts to Medicaid. We can’t have, apparently, we don’t have money for child care and health care, but we do have money to send bunker busters and smart bombs for another country to kill foreign children. I think that is a moral failure. I think if we have those resources, we have billions of dollars, and we have $4 billion of, say, an annual military (budget) to another country, then we should be, if anything, investing in our communities.

You recently hit the $100,000 mark for fundraising – that’s over three weeks? A month?

Just under four weeks.

Does that include pledges?

Nope, that’s 100% money in the bank. It’s 100% individual contributions. I haven’t taken a cent from any corporate PAC that I know of, any lobbyists that I know of, any foreign interest PAC … and if I have, I’ll happily refund it, and I intend to run my campaign in exactly that way. I think that as much as your policies, the way that you enter government, the process by which you are elected is very important and speaks to your values. And those are the values that I want to uphold. I want to be supported and elected by my constituents and individual, real human beings, and I don’t want to be elected like how my opponent has been elected over multiple cycles, which is by corporate PACs and special interests.

So you’re pledging not to accept money from any corporate PACs, to be clear?

1,000%, and if you find one, I will refund that money immediately.

In comparison to what Grace Meng currently has in the bank, $100,000 in four weeks, Meng has over $800,000 in the bank. What is your game plan here for continuing to make a dent in her lead? $800,000 versus $100,000 is very different, to put it bluntly.

Totally, yeah. I mean, I can do math. She has and she will always have the money advantage over me, and that’s because of who she accepts money from. I don’t have close to $1 million in the bank. I don’t have an army of slick lobbyists and consultants like she does, and you can look up those firms I don’t have. I haven’t spent 12 years burrowing deep into a political establishment like she has. So I know there is a very narrow path to victory here, but I also know that organized people in the real world will beat organized money every single time. 

Are you going to be seeking the DSA endorsement?

I will not be seeking the DSA endorsement for one very simple reason: I’m not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. … That said, I believe that many of my policies and the kind of the city I want to build aligns with the goals of DSA.

Do you think you’ll seek the WFP’s line and backing

I will seek the support of the Working Families Party as well as its affiliates.