On the last Saturday in February, Griselda Vega Samuel set out with two volunteers to introduce herself to voters in the McKinley Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side of Chicago. She walked down the icy sidewalks of Western Avenue, past the 72-acre park that gives the neighborhood its name, then crossed under the large railroad bridge and emerged by a row of modest worker cottages, where she began knocking on doors.

“My name is Griselda. I’m running for judge in this subcircuit,” Vega Samuel said quickly, in English or Spanish, when people cracked open their doors to the brisk chill of the sunny late morning. “I’ve been a public-interest lawyer for the last 22 years, representing the community — mostly low income folks. And I’d love to continue my public service as a judge, so I’d love your support.”

Two days later, on an unseasonably warm afternoon, Steve Demitro wore a white T-shirt and blue baseball cap emblazoned with “Steve Demitro for Judge” and stood outside a Walgreens on Cermak Road in Pilsen handing out glossy, bilingual campaign cards he had stashed in a small cross-body bag. A couple hesitantly took a card as they walked toward their hulking beige SUV. Minutes later, the man pulled up to Demitro and beckoned him to the open passenger side window. He had read the text on Demitro’s card and felt compelled to say he’d won their support.

“I’m going to vote for him because his parents are immigrants, and the United States needs immigrants to survive,” the man told Injustice Watch before driving away.

Vega Samuel and Demitro are running for a judicial seat in Cook County’s 14th Subcircuit, a majority Latinx district that was recently redrawn into a shape vaguely resembling the number seven, uniting portions of Hermosa, Logan Square, and Humboldt Park on the Northwest Side with Pilsen, McKinley Park, and Back of the Yards on the Southwest Side.

The two candidates’ backgrounds are a Venn diagram with a significant overlap, and they share the life experiences of many 14th Subcircuit residents. Both grew up in working-class immigrant households with parents who spoke little to no English. They were the first college graduates and the first lawyers in their families. Both reported raising just $2,000 this election cycle as of the beginning of March, and both were found qualified for judge by bar associations.

But the similarities end there; their paths diverging in their teenage years. Vega Samuel was a straight-A student whose successful public-interest law career has taken her from coast to coast before returning home to Chicago. Demitro dropped out of high school, took several tries to get into law school, and still lives on the same McKinley Park block where he grew up, managing a small solo personal injury law practice.

In a primary with many subcircuit vacancies but few contested races, this matchup represents competing visions of what a subcircuit election should be: a path to the bench open to even the most politically unconnected neighborhood lawyer or a hyper-local version of every other political arena in which candidates with impressive resumes have the upper hand. As they campaign, Vega Samuel and Demitro are emphasizing the different ways they say their personal and professional backgrounds represent the 260,000 people carefully gerrymandered into a subcircuit designed as an electoral kludge to increase the ranks of Latinx judges.

The odds are stacked in favor of Vega Samuel, a first-time candidate with broad support from local elected officials and an appealing ballot name for the subcircuit’s electorate. But Demitro has been fighting against long odds his whole life and has come to expect many losses in anticipation of success.

‘It’s my duty to start recruiting judges for office’

When the subcircuits were originally drawn in 1991, their purpose was to increase diversity in the circuit court — giving a chance to Black, Latinx, and suburban Republican communities to elect judges who represent them in a county whose judiciary had historically been disproportionately composed of white, male, Irish Democrats. The following year’s judicial election was intensely competitive and led to the ascension of more women, Republicans, and people of color.

Being elected from a subcircuit has no bearing on a judge’s assignments and doesn’t factor in future retention elections, which are always countywide votes. A judge also has no obligation to continue residing in the subcircuit they are elected from. But once vacant, a subcircuit seat is filled by voters who reside within its boundaries.

Among the original 15 subcircuits, four had been drawn with a majority-Black population and two — the 14th Subcircuit on the Southwest Side of Chicago and the 6th Subcircuit on the Northwest Side — had been drawn as majority Latinx. A mix of changing demographics and gentrification turned the 6th Subcircuit predominantly white, while others on the Southwest Side and in the suburbs swelled with Latinx residents. The law establishing the subcircuits did not require the Legislature to redraw the boundaries to reflect population changes, so they stayed the same for 30 years.

The 14th Subcircuit, which captured Pilsen, Little Village, Bridgeport, Back of the Yards, and parts of west suburban Cicero, had become the only majority-Latinx subcircuit. And yet the majority of the judges elected from that subcircuit were white.

22nd Ward Ald. Michael Rodriguez, who got his start in politics in the early 2000s working with the independent political organization founded by his mentor, U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, said judicial campaigns just weren’t in their sights, even as they were fighting for Latinx representation in the state Legislature, the Chicago City Council, on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, and in Congress.

As he door-knocked in the Mexican neighborhoods on the Southwest Side, “not once did I support a judge for office,” Rodriguez recalled.

The fact that judges were not on the radar of Rodriguez, Garcia, and their allies showed on the ballot. Between 1994 and 2016, not a single 14th Subcircuit election was contested. Of the 14 judges elected in that period, just three were Latinx.

Rodriguez wondered why and found an answer when he was elected in 2016 as a Cook County Democratic Party committeeperson. He quickly learned about “the disproportionate impact and power that committeepersons had in recruiting and supporting judges for office,” he said. Longtime 14th Ward Ald. Ed Burke, who chaired the party’s judicial slating committee, was “the most influential individual” in their shared 14th Subcircuit.

Rodriguez said he tried talking to Burke about judicial races early in his tenure as a committeeperson, but his engagement wasn’t welcomed. “After that conversation, I thought, ‘It’s my duty to start recruiting judges for office,’” Rodriguez said.

In 2018, Rodriguez and his allies supported Beatriz Frausto-Sandoval for a 14th Subcircuit seat. She beat Marina Ammendola, an associate judge who had been Burke’s attorney in a custody battle with his foster son’s biological mother. Latinx candidates backed by Rodriguez won each of the four 14th Subcircuit vacancies on the ballot in the two subsequent election cycles.

In 2022, the state Legislature redrew the subcircuit map for the first time and added five new subcircuits. The remap pushed Rodriguez’s 22nd Ward out of the 14th subcircuit and into the 16th. Both are now among the four subcircuits with a majority-Latinx population.

In this year’s primary race, the first using the new maps, both of the judicial candidates Rodriquez is backing in the 16th Subcircuit — Cecilia Abundis and Pedro Fregoso — are running unopposed. In the 14th Subcircuit, he and his progressive allies whose political fiefdoms intersect the subcircuit are supporting two candidates: Stephanie K. Miller, a Puerto Rican associate judge who is running unopposed and is one of the few openly gay judges in Cook County; and Vega Samuel, who faces Demitro as he makes his fourth attempt to get elected judge.

‘I’m just a small guy from the neighborhood’

Demitro, 62, knows as a white man, he’s at a disadvantage in a subcircuit drawn to have a Latinx majority. But he says he’d be exactly the kind of judge the subcircuits are supposed to pull onto the bench. “The subcircuits are for the people of the community to elect someone who understands the community,” he said. “I’m just a small guy from the neighborhood.”

Demitro’s parents came to the U.S. from western Ukraine, his mother a refugee of a Nazi forced labor camp. He was the youngest of nine children. His father, a steel mill worker, died when he was in the fifth grade, and his mother worked long shifts as a custodian at downtown office buildings. He said he decided to drop out in his sophomore year at Thomas Kelly High School after seeing a recent graduate he knew working at a Burger King. Demitro thought his time would be better spent trying to become a professional hockey player. His mother was too busy to try to stop him. He ended up working at a Jewel-Osco grocery store.

Being a high school dropout is central to Demitro’s pitch to voters. “A lot of people are, and they relate,” he said. Crisscrossing the streets of Pilsen on his electric scooter in the eerie haze of a 70 degree afternoon in February, he mentioned his inauspicious educational roots to nearly every person he stopped to chat with.

“It’s a judge for Pilsen?” a boy who looked to be in his late teens setting up for a sidewalk cookout asked Demitro as he took a moment to scan his campaign card. Demitro summed up what the subcircuit is, then added that he dropped out of high school. “Oh, you dropped out?” the young man said, grinning. “Yeah, you interested in that?” Demitro shot back with a laugh.

After dropping out, Demitro met a criminal defense lawyer and a former Cook County prosecutor playing pickup hockey games, who became a mentor and encouraged his interest in becoming a lawyer. He got his GED, then an associate’s degree at Wright College, then a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He hit a major snag trying to get into law school, though, failing two times to get sufficiently high LSAT scores. In 1991, he published an article in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin about how the standardized test wasn’t a good predictor of a person’s success in law school or in a legal career.

“A question that should concern the legal community is something an LSAT score cannot predict or produce: an attorney whose main concern will be to improve society,” Demitro wrote. The article ultimately helped him convince the dean of John Marshall Law School to offer him admission on the condition he pass two prerequisite courses. But Demitro just missed the cutoff for the passing grades.

For the next four years, Demitro continued to lobby John Marshall to give him another chance. Finally, he was allowed to matriculate in 1997, even making the dean’s list in his last semester. He started his own private practice, and in the early years, he got a lot of guidance from the prominent local personal injury lawyer Terry Mahoney. Besides managing his solo practice, Demitro has also served as the chair of the Illinois Education Funding Advisory Board, a hearing officer for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and is an arbitrator in the Cook County Circuit Court.

Demitro said his desire to become a judge had roots in his youth, when he saw his friends wind up in court and witnessed the way judges impacted their lives.

When he decided to run for a countywide judicial vacancy for the first time in 2012, he estimated he collected about 5,000 nominating petition signatures himself. But he was soon confronted with the full force of the Cook County Democratic Party, which endorses candidates who run countywide and spends significantly to make sure they win.

“It was crazy; I’m going against the machine, and they’ve got unlimited resources,” Demitro recalled. He was one of eight candidates who filed to get on the ballot and was challenged by associates of the party’s slated candidate, Pamela Leeming. Though Demitro survived the petition challenge, he finished second to last, with 6.5% of the vote.

After that, Demitro realized he couldn’t compete with the party for a countywide seat and decided to set his sights more locally. In 2020, Demitro ran for the first time in the 14th Subcircuit. He didn’t participate in bar association evaluations, which resulted in negative ratings. He lost to now-Judge Gerardo Tristan Jr., who received nearly three times more votes and was backed by Rodriguez, the 22nd Ward alderperson.

In 2022, Demitro tried again, facing two opponents, Jorge Cazares and Viviana Martinez. This time, Demitro had a full suite of positive bar association ratings, unlike both of his opponents. But days before the election, he recalled, the subcircuit was inundated with mailers for Martinez, who was backed by Rodriguez and his allies. “I can’t compete with that,” he said. “I got outspent five to one.” He came in second with nearly one-quarter of the votes cast.

The losses haven’t discouraged Demitro. “Just because you lose one, two, three times — what, you’re gonna give up?”

Last year, Demitro ran for 11th Ward alderperson, finishing last in a seven-way race against incumbent Ald. Nicole Lee, who had been appointed by then-Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Though he only received 159 votes, Demitro said he felt his campaign forced other candidates to address some of the issues that most concerned him, including crime. “I ran to make a statement that PAC money and special interest money were ruining our neighborhoods,” he said. He ultimately hosted and moderated a forum between Lee and her runoff opponent, Tony Ciaravino.

Demitro says he is proud he collected his nominating petition signatures for this judicial run on his own, rather than using paid petition circulators. He survived a petition challenge from Vega Samuel’s campaign by personally collecting affidavits from voters who swore they signed to get him on the ballot. 

“The momentum is building. There’s nobody else doing what I’m doing. Nobody. I don’t care what office you’re running for,” Demitro said. “They’re not just driving around on an electric scooter talking to people at random, meeting people and just having conversations, asking them how their day is, how their life is, what concerns them.”

Demitro has a new trophy this cycle: the endorsement of the Chicago Federation of Labor. He said he almost didn’t bother going to the endorsement session. “I thought, ‘There’s no way.’ I’m running against a Hispanic woman in a predominantly Hispanic subcircuit who’s politically backed,” he said. He couldn’t believe he got the unions’ vote.

Around McKinley Park, everyone seems to know Demitro from the streets, neighborhood Facebook Groups, or his blog, Our Neighborhood Journal. He is also active with the Ukrainian community, volunteering to help refugees arriving in Chicago since Russia launched its war in 2022, and serving on the board of the Ukrainian National Museum. As he campaigns, Demitro highlights his community service track record, rather than his professional accomplishments. He’s proudest of the annual fishing competition and charity hockey games he organizes for kids.

He says he knows he’s the underdog, but he thinks he’d be the kind of judge the residents of the 14th Subcircuit need. “When they leave the courtroom, they will know they had a fair shake regardless of the outcome.” He can hear them thinking: “This guy was a straight shooter, and he was fair, and he listened. And he didn’t rush.”

‘I need a little bit more work-life balance’

Vega Samuel, 49, was born and raised in Rogers Park on the far north side of the city. Her parents had immigrated from Guanajuato in central Mexico. Like Demitro’s mother, her dad worked as a custodian, and her mom made airplane parts in a factory. The oldest of four children, she shouldered a lot of responsibility to link her family to the broader, English-speaking society and its resources.

Vega Samuel said she saw early on lawyers made a positive difference in her parents’ lives, helping them buy a house and become naturalized. “I knew there was this person who understood the law and was able to help them, advocate for them,” she said.

Despite being a good student with a lot of extracurricular involvement, Vega Samuel said her high school counselor encouraged her to think about secretarial school. She ignored that recommendation and set her sights on a small liberal arts college in Sioux City, Iowa — the kind of place where she could focus on her studies and be just out of the distracting reach of friends and family.

While in college, Vega Samuel got a job translating at a local jail for Spanish-speaking migrants who were working in meat-processing plants across the river in Nebraska and faced communication barriers as they tried to resolve criminal charges. The experience solidified her desire to pursue a legal career and help people deal with the courts. By the time she applied to law school, she said she knew she “was probably going to end up being a public-interest lawyer.”

After attending law school at the University of Iowa, Vega Samuel began her career representing migrant farmworkers at Columbia Legal Services in Washington. There, she was a member of the legal team that established the first state-level mandatory medical monitoring program for workers handling certain toxic pesticides. Later, she moved to New York City to work for the Global Workers Justice Alliance, then for the Safe Horizon Anti-Trafficking Program. Over time, her work expanded beyond litigation to advocating for worker-oriented policy changes at the local, state, and federal levels.

In 2018, she returned to Chicago as the Midwest regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a national nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of Latinx civil rights. Vega Samuel’s accomplishments at MALDEF include pushing the Illinois Legislature to pass the Immigrant Tenant Protection Act in 2019, which prohibits landlords from evicting tenants based on their immigration status or threatening to report them to immigration authorities. She subsequently represented immigrant tenants in the first two civil lawsuits filed in Illinois against landlords under the statute.

In her first week on the job, people were already asking her whether she was also planning to become a judge, “because I had so many predecessors who have become judges,” she said. These include Cook County Associate Judge Patricia Mendoza, Federal Magistrate Judge Maria Valdez, and retired Chief Judge Rubén Castillo of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

Last year, she started thinking seriously about it. “As much as I love that work, part of the reason I came back home was to be with my family; my parents are older, and I’ve missed a lot of birthdays,” Vega Samuel said. “I need a little bit more work-life balance.”

Vega Samuel said figuring out how to become a judge has felt like applying to law school. Her biggest problem as she set her sights on an elected judgeship in Cook County was she was living in Will County, in a secluded house she and her husband bought in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. By the end of August 2023, she submitted an affidavit forfeiting her homeowners’ tax exemption in Will County; rented an apartment from a friend in a red-brick, three-flat in McKinley Park; and filed to run in the 14th Subcircuit.

“It’s a neighborhood that I’m familiar with,” she said, adding it was attractive because of its affordability, a favorite neighborhood restaurant, friends in the area, and its proximity to Pilsen, where she worked at the National Museum of Mexican Art for two years between college and law school. She also figured running countywide would be more expensive than what she could afford on a public-interest-lawyer salary.

“These are the folks that I’ve been working with my entire career,” she said of the residents of the 14th Subcircuit. “I understand their lived experiences. When they come before me (as a judge), I hope that I am someone who can see and understand them.” She added ensuring language access in the courtroom would be a top priority for her if elected.

Asked why her campaign — namely her friend who is also her landlord — decided to spend the time and the money to challenge Demitro’s petitions to get on the ballot, Vega Samuel said it was just a “strategic decision” she had no regrets about, and that “at the moment, it made sense.” Petition challenges are a common tactic for candidates to thin out competition on the ballot.

In January, Vega Samuel took leave from her job at MALDEF and officially launched her campaign. She still does legal work on the side with the Resurrection Project, helping process temporary protected status applications for migrants who have recently arrived in Chicago.

Vega Samuel has garnered the endorsements of many of the elected officials whose districts intersect with the subcircuit, which could mean big assists with campaign mailers, lawn signs, and ad buys. Her campaign treasurer, Juan Morado Jr., is the former chair of the Latino Leadership Council, a powerful political action committee that supports Latinx candidates for elected office.

‘It’s very important to have strong judges’

On a recent Tuesday evening, Demitro and Vega Samuel stood before members of the 12th Ward Independent Political Organization (IPO) for an endorsement session. The 14th Subcircuit and the 12th Ward intersect in McKinley Park.

In a room with bare walls and bright fluorescent lights, about two dozen people gathered as the two contenders highlighted their backgrounds, guided by state ethics rules that prohibit judicial candidates from speaking negatively about their opponents or making statements about political issues so as not to undermine the perception they could hold impartial hearings on any matters.

Vega Samuel went first, her voice echoing as she summarized her long career representing working class, immigrant communities. When it was Demitro’s turn, he focused on the fishing derby, explaining to the audience how he personally stocks the fish children compete to catch in the McKinley Park lagoon and how the event has grown over time.

“My goal with that,” he said, “is to make the McKinley Park lagoon the best fishing spot in the entire city of Chicago.”

At a short debate after candidates left the room, the questions centered on experience. One IPO member said it was clear to him Vega Samuel had the experience required to be a judge, but when they had asked Demitro about his experience, he had fumbled.

“He talked about fishing, and that’s where I got lost,” said Peter Mendoza, an IPO leader and a McKinley Park resident.

IPO President Bill Drew Jr. said Demitro clearly cares about the community. Others agreed, adding they should volunteer at his fishing event. A member then motioned to endorse Vega Samuel. “Seconded,” another member said.

“All in favor?” asked Drew.

“Aye,” said the crowd unanimously. Vega Samuel got every vote.

The endorsements from the IPO and Democratic Party leaders may make the difference in a race in which voter awareness about the contest is, unsurprisingly, low.

Vega Samuel said she’s gotten all kinds of responses while canvassing, including requests for help with legal issues, such as tickets or filing for divorce. Others ask her about her name. Is it Griselda, like the title character in the new Netflix show portrayed by Sofia Vergara? The Griselda in the show is the “Godmother of Miami’s drug empire,” so Vega Samuel emphasizes she shares the name but “none of the crime and none of the drugs.” Still, she’s thankful for the name recognition.

As he meets voters, Demitro also gets questions about resolving individual legal issues; other people ask him about where they’re supposed to vote and whether they have to be citizens to cast a ballot. Demitro hands out his information to anyone who’ll take it, regardless of their age and citizenship status.

Injustice Watch interviewed about a dozen residents, business owners, and workers around the subcircuit. Most said they didn’t know the candidates and didn’t recognize the names, and they acknowledged they don’t pay much attention to the races at the bottom of the ballot. When they do, they said what matters to them is their understanding of issues that affect communities of color and their legal experience.

Leone Bicchieri, a longtime Pilsen resident and the founder and executive director of Working Family Solidarity, said he usually asks whether the candidates ruled or litigated against big corporations or in favor of workers rights. For his research, he leans on his network — worker organizers and nonprofit leaders. If he doesn’t know the candidate’s background, he often votes for a diverse-sounding name — or a woman. His mother was a community organizer who became an attorney and later an administrative law judge. She wore a traditional Mexican garb to court, and Bicchieri admired her for it.

Like Bicchieri, other subcircuit residents said race and ethnicity play a part when deciding who to elect but only if they don’t know anything about the candidates. Overall, they said they want more diversity in the courts.

Yailin Sotelo, a McKinley Park resident, said she wouldn’t vote for a person just because they are Latinx. She’d want the candidate to also understand the community and the needs of all communities of color. “It’s more complicated,” she said.

For others, the issue at the forefront is mass incarceration and other ways the legal system has perpetuated inequities for Black and Latinx people.

“It’s very important to have strong judges,” said Fionnuala Cook, who manages a community garden in McKinley Park and said she’s an abolitionist. “I definitely wouldn’t go for the prosecutors.” Typically, the judicial candidates “are just names” to her, but she said she does know Demitro from the neighborhood. “I think I voted for him before. He was the only person I had any personal connection to, and that made a big difference to me,” she said.

At the City Lit bookstore in Logan Square, assistant manager Charlie Schumann said they usually pick judges based on the endorsements in the “Girl, I Guess Progressive Voter Guide,” and that they hadn’t heard of Vega Samuel or Demitro. “I would describe my politics as pretty left leaning,” they said. “I’m not going to be voting for a law and order candidate.”

Some judicial election observers say having a Latinx name and being a woman give Vega Samuel a leg up for voters who don’t research candidates’ backgrounds. They note while voter education about judicial races is improving, these down ballot contests are still a random pick for many.

“I’d say Griselda is the heavy favorite because of the demographics of that district,” said Frank Calabrese, a political consultant who’s worked on dozens of judicial campaigns and was also a redistricting consultant for the state Legislature when they were drawing the new Cook County subcircuit map.

Though the subcircuits delineate communities with boundaries that presume unity based on race and ethnicity, they don’t define what community means. Whether a candidate has lived in one neighborhood all his life or spent her career fighting for the rights of its residents may not matter to voters as much as the perception that the judge-to-be is a reflection of them: woman, white, Mexican, immigrant, working-class, genderqueer, etc.

But the things that matter most to many voters — a candidate’s values — are often the hardest things to tell about people running for judge. The voters of the 14th Subcircuit may not find out whether they picked a candidate who represents them until they end up before them in court.

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