# Maxwell Frost

Maxwell Alejandro Frost (born January 17, 1997) is an American politician and activist serving as the U.S. representative for Florida's 10th congressional district since 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he was previously the national organizing director for March for Our Lives. Elected at age 25, Frost is the youngest member and the first Generation Z member of the United States Congress.

## Early life

Frost was born on January 17, 1997, to a Puerto Rican mother of Lebanese descent and a Haitian father. His biological mother had several children. He was adopted from birth; his adoptive mother is a special education teacher who migrated to the United States from Cuba in the Freedom Flights, and his adoptive father is a musician from Kansas. He reconnected with his birth mother in June 2021. Frost attended Osceola County School for the Arts in Kissimmee, Florida. In high school, he was part of the Technology Student Association. He attended Valencia College but did not graduate.

## Early career

Frost has been organizing since around 2012, when he was active with Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign. He also volunteered with the Newtown Action Alliance, an organization created in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. He has identified Occupy Wall Street, the Columbine High School massacre, the killing of Trayvon Martin, and the Orlando nightclub shooting as events that affected his thinking. He later volunteered for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Margaret Good.
Frost survived an incident of gun violence at a Halloween event in Downtown Orlando in 2016.
Frost was an organizer with the American Civil Liberties Union and worked to support Florida's 2018 Amendment 4 and to pressure Joe Biden to stop supporting the Hyde Amendment in 2019. He was the national organizing director for March for Our Lives. In November 2021, Frost was arrested at a voting rights rally in Lafayette Square led by William Barber II and Ben Jealous.

## U.S. House of Representatives
### Elections
#### 2022

In August 2021, Frost announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Florida's 10th congressional district. During the primary campaign, he released a television ad in Spanglish, telling The Hill, "Latinos are in a place where their first language is Spanish but they speak English as well, and quite frankly that's me ... We speak Spanglish in the house, and I know that's the same for a lot of Latino families in the district."
Frost beat state senator Randolph Bracy and former U.S. representatives Alan Grayson and Corrine Brown, among others, in the August 23, 2022, primary. Due to the district's Democratic tilt, Frost was expected to win the general election in November 2022, which he did, defeating Republican Calvin Wimbish by a 19% margin, which was smaller than the 32% margin by which Biden won the district in 2020. Frost is the youngest member of Congress. He was endorsed by numerous national and local political figures, including Jesse Jackson, former NAACP president Ben Jealous, civil-rights activist Dolores Huerta, and U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

### Committee assignments

For the 118th Congress:
* Committee on Oversight and Accountability
** Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce
** Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs
* Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
** Subcommittee on Environment

### Caucus memberships

* Congressional Black Caucus
* Congressional Equality Caucus
* Congressional Caucus for the Equal Rights Amendment
* Congressional Hispanic Caucus
* Congressional Progressive Caucus

## Political positions
### Environment

Frost supports a Green New Deal. He has identified environmental justice as a priority of his campaign.

### Guns

Frost is a strong advocate for gun control.
In January 2023, Frost and Representative Jared Moskowitz sent House speaker Kevin McCarthy a letter asking him to convene a classified meeting to address mass shootings. The letter called for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to conduct the meeting.

### Healthcare

Frost supports single-payer healthcare and investing in pandemic prevention. He introduced with Representative Doris Matsui in 2024 the EPIPEN Act, which seeks to cap out-of-pocket costs for epinephrine autoinjectors used for severe allergic reactions at $60 per two-pack for individuals with health insurance.

### Criminal justice

Frost wants to "build toward a future without prison". He supports the decriminalization of sex work and the decriminalization of cannabis use.

### Housing

Frost is a proponent of affordable housing. He supported Kamala Harris's plan to build 3 million new housing units in her first term and believed that increasing housing affordability and accessibility should be a policy priority in a Harris administration. He was endorsed by the Florida chapter of YIMBY Action, a YIMBY group.
Frost co-sponsored the End Junk Fees for Renters Act in 2023, which aims to eliminate extra fees imposed by landlords, ban application fees, and increase transparency in rental agreements.

### Iran

Frost believes that the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) "certainly fell short in ways, but it blocked Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon, which was an important success". In 2022, he supported restoration of the JCPOA but stressed "we must make it longer, stronger, and broader to cover not just the issue of nuclear weapons, but also the full range of destabilizing and threatening actions Iran engages in, like Iran's ballistic missile program and the country's support for terrorist proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas."

### Israel-Palestine

Frost supports a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and has indicated his intent to travel to Israel to promote "US leadership in bringing peace to a region that so desperately needs and deserves it". He has called himself pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. In 2022, he supported unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel. He has criticized the Palestinian Authority's martyr's fund that compensates the families of dead and wounded militants, likening it to a recruitment tactic of Hamas for the purpose of committing politically motivated violence against Israel. Frost opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and accuses it of harboring leadership from terrorist organizations.
Frost had formerly participated in pro-Palestine activism, signing pledges with the Florida Palestine Network (FPN) and the Palestinian Feminist Pledge, calling for support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, ending military aid to Israel, and rejecting the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. In early August 2022, the Jewish news website Jewish Insider published a candidate questionnaire from Frost's congressional campaign that showed a shift in Frost's foreign policy positions on Israel and Palestine. Jewish Insider characterized his responses as a reversal that distanced himself from his past while declaring an aggressive stance against the BDS movement, calling for unconditional military aid to Israel, and stating his opposition to anti-Zionism. His campaign later released a position paper that formalized these positions.
Following the war in Gaza, Frost has shown a shift in his views on Israel-Palestine. While Frost voted to provide Israel with initial support following the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, as of April 2024 he has voted against providing Israel with further aid, has accused Israel of violating international law during the war, and has stated that "the bombing campaign in Gaza must stop".

### Crypto regulation

During his campaign, Frost announced a "crypto-advisory council" that would advise him during his campaign. He received $8,700 in contributions from convicted Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother and nearly $1 million in help from the Super-PAC Protect Our Future, almost all of it after announcing the council.

### Immigration

Frost is against building a southern border wall. During a January 2024 House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing on immigration Frost proposed removing the Statue of Liberty in response to Republican bill H.R. 2 Secure the Border Act.

## Personal life

Frost can speak both English and Spanish. He is a jazz drummer and plays the timbales. His nine-member high school band Seguro Que Sí (from Spanish 'of course') performed in the parade during Obama's second inauguration in 2013. He also enjoys the trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh!, having played the game since his younger years.
Frost is a Baptist.
In December 2022, Frost said he was denied a rental apartment in Washington, D.C., due to a "really bad" credit history. He said his credit rating was bad because he "ran up a lot of debt running for Congress for a year and a half".
Frost was among a handful of Democrats who received about $1 million in support from former billionaire and felon Sam Bankman-Fried's Protect Our Future PAC, as well as the maximum individual donation of $2,900. In December 2022, the U.S. government indicted Bankman-Fried after alleging that he gave investor money to progressive political candidates, among other fraudulent crimes. After the announcement of charges against Bankman-Fried, Frost donated the individual donation to the Zebra Coalition, an LGBTQ charity.

## Electoral history

Electoral history of Maxwell Frost :
| Year | Office | Party | Party | Primary | Primary | Primary | General | General | General | Result | Swing | Swing | Ref. |
| Year | Office | Party | Party | Total | % | P. | Total | % | P. | Result | Swing | Swing | Ref. |
| 2022 | U.S. House | | Democratic | 19,288 | 34.77% | 1st | 117,955 | 59.00% | 1st | Won | | Hold | |
| 2024 | U.S. House | | Democratic | 33,208 | 81.77% | 1st | 181,455 | 62.37% | 1st | Won | | Hold | |
| Source: Secretary of State of Florida | Election Results ||||||||||||| |