Marissa Roy is one of two candidates running in the November 3, 2026 general election for Los Angeles City Attorney. Roy, currently a deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice under Rob Bonta, launched her campaign in early 2025 to be “the people's lawyer,” as she has previously stated. 

If elected, the 34-year-old would become the city’s 44th city attorney and the second woman in the history of L.A. to hold such a position.  

She sat with CALÓ News almost two months before the upcoming election to discuss her campaign and what a city attorney can do on issues of immigration, housing, wage theft and more, as well as how she will represent the 3.87 million people living in L.A., the majority of whom are Latinos.

“City attorney is probably one of the most important and least understood positions on the ballot,” she said within the first couple of minutes of the interview.

What does a city attorney do?

As the city attorney, she will sit in a very unique position, being an elected official who works for the people of L.A. and also the city government, including the mayor and city council members, as well as other city departments. 

She would also counsel the City of L.A. in legal matters, write and draft city laws and ordinances requested by the city council and defend and represent the city in lawsuits and prosecute misdemeanor crimes, such as minor offenses. 

But for Roy, one of the most important roles that she looks to carry throughout her term, if elected, is “fighting for the people, not the powerful.” 

“People don't realize they have an attorney, that any of these abuses that they might be shouldering right now, they should not have to do that alone. They have an attorney who should be fighting for them,” she said. “What people are electing in this position is something frankly at times much more powerful than a single council member or even a mayor.” 

Roy, who has already been endorsed by both individuals and groups, including the U.S. Senators Alex Padilla and Bernie Sanders, L.A. County Supervisors Hilda Solis and L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, as well as the L.A. County Democratic Party, California Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America—Los Angeles, said she hopes to transform the L.A. City Attorney's office into the largest public interest law firm in the city.

"The reason I decided to run is because this is a moment when we need our city attorney's office to be fighting for working families,” she said. 

Roy grew up in Monrovia, a city in the San Gabriel Valley of L.A. County and about 30 minutes away from Downtown L.A. She said her decision to pursue a career in public service came from a very personal place. She said when California's Proposition 8 passed in 2008, banning same-sex marriage, she saw firsthand the adverse impact this could bring to millions of people, her younger brother being one of them. 

As the San Francisco City Attorney's Office filed the lawsuit to overturn Prop 8 and city lawyers successfully led the battle for marriage equality, Roy knew she wanted to become a lawyer. 

“I [saw it was] the San Francisco City Attorney who sued and overturned that law. That was my light bulb, the ‘I-want- to-become-a-lawyer moment,’” she said. 

Years later, as she was in law school, she had the opportunity to work with the San Francisco City Attorney's Office and the very attorneys who worked on Proposition 8.

“I know the power that a city attorney's office has because I've experienced it in my own family and throughout my legal career,” she said. 

She is running againstJohn McKinney, a police union candidate who focuses heavily on public safety and neighborhood protection. Both Roy and McKinney advanced to the general election after ousting incumbent City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto in the June 2026 primary. 

Restoring trust in city officials

Roy said she hopes to bring a new sense of accountability and safety to L.A., a city that has been hit with immigration raids, housing instability and fraud. 

“Truth is, time and time again, we have seen the government fall short. We've seen government fail us. We've seen the federal government be weaponized against us,” she said. “Particularly for the Latino and immigrant communities, the government has not been serving the way that it should and I know that if I am elected, it will be my job to help rebuild trust in government, but that won't happen overnight.”

When it comes to building trust among Latinos and working-class immigrants, she said she will be guided by the same values she has used throughout her career, one being her work in bringing justice to L.A. carwashers who were getting paid as little as $4.50 an hour. 

Roy, who at that time worked under the L.A. City Attorney’s Office, helped in the securing of a more than $1 million settlement for immigrant employees who had been victims of wage theft in Silver Lake Car Wash Inc. and Catalina Car Wash Inc.

Roy said that the case was especially complex because many of the workers who had been underpaid and had received no overtime pay or breaks. Many of them feared retaliation due to their immigration status. 

“They knew their rights were being violated, but they feared to bring a lawsuit forward because they were being threatened with immigration consequences and when you bring a lawsuit in your own name, even if you are able to jump through all the hoops of finding pro bono representation and your evidence is good, when you file it in a private action, you have to put your name on it, and there's that exposure to retaliation,” she said. “The beautiful thing about the city attorney's office is we file in the name of the people of the State of California and we were able to keep people's identities confidential.” 

She said that in this lawsuit, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office was able to work with organizations such as Bet Tzedek, a nonprofit public interest law firm based and trusted advocacy groups like the CLEAN Carwash Worker Center. 

“Wage theft disproportionately impacts Latino immigrant women in particular in Los Angeles. We need to make sure then that that is the population we are working extra hard for,” she said. “I plan to bring unions and worker rights organizers into the process of building cases like this because we want to make sure that our cases reflect the stories and the realities of the people that they're trying to serve.” 

Today, Roy is a deputy attorney general working in the state Department of Justice’s consumer protection section, working mainly on tenants’ rights. 

ICE in L.A.

If elected, Roy said one of her priorities will be to take more aggressive legal actions involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the federal government’s compliance with the racial profiling of thousands of Latinos in L.A., which has amounted to more than 65,700 people being held in detention centers and the detention of more than 610,000 people. 

“The city attorney has the ability to level the playing field against the most powerful corporations and entities in the world, including ICE,” she said. “The city attorney needs to be fiercely taking the Trump administration and ICE to court.

Last July, Feldstein, joined by Mayor Karen Bass, announced that her office—along with the County of L.A. and other cities—filed a motion to intervene in a federal lawsuit that challenged unlawful immigration raids. The lawsuit asked the court to prevent the federal government, including ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), from engaging in unconstitutional raids without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. 

Despite this, Roy said she felt like the L.A  city attorney fell short on what they could have done to protect the immigrant communities of L.A. 

“The California Department of Justice has sued the Trump administration over eighty times since the raids, and they've won in over eighty percent of those cases, and it has prevented a lot of the harmful policies from taking effect. We need to be doing the same thing here. San Francisco, San Diego and Sacramento have also been doing a lot of that work [but] L.A. has been largely absent,” she said.

Despite not being fluent in Spanish, Roy said she looks to have language justice and accessibility as a top priority if elected. The city attorney's office has over 1,000 legal professionals and support staff, with 550 of them being lawyers, including deputy and assistant city attorneys who handle civil litigation, general counsel duties and misdemeanor prosecutions. 

"I think one of the most important things we need to do as well is make sure that our office is acting accessible in all ways and that we move forward with language justice and that our websites and materials are available in multiple languages,” she said. “When ICE came into LA, the city attorney could have been at the forefront, providing information to people in their language, working with on-the-ground organizations and going out in the community to do know-your-rights training.” 

Homelessness

According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, overall homelessness in the City of L.A. increased by 3.4% to 45,194 people in 2026. 

Last week, multiple federal homelessness corruption and fraud cases in L.A. were made public, including that of Alexander Soofer, executive director of the nonprofit Abundant Blessings, who agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of wire fraud and money laundering and founder of Culver City-based nonprofit Home At Last (HAL)Michael Young, who was accused of receiving more than $118 million in public funds and using a sham vendor scheme to misappropriate over $7.5 million to open an Inglewood nightclub, fund luxury trips to Tahiti and purchase commercial real estate.  

Roy said that three ways a city attorney can address the homelessness crisis in L.A. are through aggressive enforcement against abusive landlords, ensuring the city attorney's office is not an obstruction to constructing affordable housing and ensuring homeless people cited for misdemeanors are connected with services instead of “cycling them between our jails and the streets.” 

In 2021, the L.A. City Council had banned encampments in zones near locations including libraries, senior centers and freeway overpasses, but last week the council voted to remove homeless camping bans at 12 sites in Hollywood, Silver Lake and Echo Park. 

This sparked debate among city leaders on L.A.’s approach to homelessness, especially the city's Section 41.18 ordinance, which allows restrictions on homeless encampments in specific areas.

As one of the issues impacting thousands of Angelenos daily, Roy said housing rights will be one of her biggest priorities if elected. 

“I think a very common misconception people have is that the city attorney has a role in enforcing the city's Section 41.18 ordinance,” she said. “Our number one priority at the city attorney's office should be making sure we are doing everything to keep the community safe and address our homelessness crisis in a way that will actually work.”

She said that as a city attorney, her role in enforcing laws involving homelessness, encampments, and public spaces will be tackled through a preventative, care-first approach. 

“There are ways that people experiencing homelessness encounter or get cited for misdemeanors like trespassing, public intoxication or multiple kinds of traffic citations that can add up,” she said. “What the city attorney should be doing in those circumstances, with these non-violent misdemeanors, is trying to get the person connected with the mental health, addiction or housing services that are actually going to help them,” she said. 

Roy said that this is not a process that avoids accountability but implements court-supervised accountability, composed of different check-ins and metrics.

“Diversion has been shown as a way to actually sustainably solve the underlying problem, and then when we've addressed that, there's a lower likelihood of re-offending. It’s preventative public safety," she said. “It's preventing the next misdemeanor or possibly the next felony. That is really the approach that I plan to take.

Roy also said creating affordable housing units is an essential solution to the homelessness crisis. “We need to make sure the city attorney's office is not an obstruction to constructing affordable housing,” she said. 

Roy is referencing the Venice Dell, a fully approved supportive and affordable housing project in Venice, California, which looked to provide 140 affordable apartments, 68 apartments for individuals and families experiencing homelessness, 34 apartments for low-income households, and 34 apartments for low-income artists. The city-owned land, to be transformed into 100% affordable housing, was approved by the city council in 2021. But today, the project is so far behind its official completion date that it has not broken ground.  

Lawsuits have been filed by housing advocates, accusing Feldstein Soto and L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park (District 11) of closed-door sabotage and unlawful blocking of Venice Dell. 

A 2024 lawsuit stated that Park’s and Soto’s obstruction practices consisted of not answering emails and stalling on city approval contracts, which are needed for the finalization of the housing project. 

Despite Feldstein Soto's defeat in the primary election, her office has continued seeking new trials and closed-door council action to prolong the litigation.

“We need to make sure that the city attorney's office is not an obstruction to constructing affordable housing and the other solutions we need,” Roy said.

Lineage Fire

When it comes to Latino issues, the Lineage is something that Roy said she wished city offices such as that of the city attorney would have taken a more proactive role in. 

“Too often, the Latino community has been overburdened and underserved,” she said. “It was the most impacted by the Lineage Fire, where Latinos have been disproportionately subject to corporate pollution. Those are all things that the city attorney can be fighting.” 

Despite not having an official city position, Roy did volunteer with local community organizations that have been providing resources to the people directly affected by the fire and the economic burden that the air quality and unsanitary conditions left behind for weeks after. 

One of the organizations Roy volunteered with was Protect L.A. Now, which has been helping educate community members and equip them with resources on post-fire recovery. 

Victoria Burdin, one of the organizers with Protect L.A. Now, said the weekly teach-ins and resource days they host are attended by an average of 50 people looking for economic, social and educational resources. 

Burdin said people had reported to them there had been alleged attorneys and lawyers calling and leaving flyers in many Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles homes offering immediate cash incentives or being pressured with guaranteed payout amounts if they signed representation agreements immediately. 

She said the organization warned members about aggressive solicitors, who many times target vulnerable residents dealing with displacement, foul odors or health concerns by using high-pressure sales tactics. 

“It was scary because many of the community members wanted accountability, but many said they did not know who to trust or what was in their best interest,” Burdin said. “We are not an organization that works with lawyers, and we have made that very clear with our members, but given that that was a concern among many of the members, we started trying to figure out what could be our role, and someone in our group brought up the power the city attorney's office had in cases like this.” 

She said that is when Protect L.A. Now invited Roy to do a teaching for community members after talking to them about it. 

“We made sure people knew she was not going to give any legal advice but that instead she would do a teach-in on the function of a city attorney's office in stances like this and what we could as people be demanding from the city attorney's office. It was a very educational teach-in, with no cameras or press or anything,” Burdin said. “What's happening to the people who live here is very unjust, and many have not felt supported by the elected officials now, but why is there a lot of mistrust in government? It was refreshing to see there is someone there who would be willing to make the uncomfortable decisions that might [need] to be made when there are injustices that are happening in the city. [Roy] has shown, particularly to this community, a level of dedication to make the office of the city attorney, like, work for everyday people.” 

Elections are scheduled to be held on November 3, 2026.

To locate an early voting location near you, visit CAEarlyVoting.sos.ca.gov or contact your county elections office. You may personally deliver your ballot to any polling or ballot drop-off location in California by 8:00 p.m. on election day.