Democratic immigration lawyer wants to fix broken system with run for U.S. Senate in Kansas
Immigration attorney Anne Parelkar, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, speaks at the Aug. 5, 2025, Lenexa City Council meeting. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
TOPEKA — An immigration attorney from Overland Park traveled across the state in March to a town hall in western Kansas to confront U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, and now, she is running for his seat.
Anne Parelkar is one of three Democrats challenging Marshall, a Republican who said he will run for reelection in 2026.
“I did tell him that day, I said, ‘I’m going to take your job,’ ” Parelkar said.
Parelkar said she is tired of watching Kansas’ elected offices being used for self-enrichment.
The 2026 election cycle will be her first time running for an elected position. She wants to give voters another option, she said.
“I think that the rule of law is under attack right now,” Parelkar said in an interview for the Kansas Reflector podcast. “I’m worried about our constitution not being followed. I renew my oath to the Constitution every year when I renew my law licenses, so that’s a big deal to me.”
Parelkar’s opponents in the 2026 Democratic primary would include Christy Davis of Cottonwood Falls and Michael Soetaert of Wellington.
Parelkar is licensed to practice law in Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. She was raised Presbyterian in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and still practices. She graduated from Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas, in 2005 and graduated in 2011 from law school at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has lived in Kansas for more than a decade. Parelkar is married to a first-generation immigrant, and they have two children.
Americans first
Kansas voters have not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932, and Republicans have held both Senate seats since 1939.
While running as a Democrat, Parelkar isn’t fully on board with party labels. When political parties come up, she said, tensions arise, emotions get high.
She is taking a people-first, America-first approach to her campaign and said she rejects the custom of loyalty to party. However, she also said she doesn’t think “the Republicans are the answer to our problems at all.”
“I do think it’s time for something else, something new, and I think I bring that to the table,” she said.
As an immigration attorney, Parelkar is attuned to the impacts of immigration locally and across the country.
“We have a very big problem with immigration in our country right now, in the sense that there’s a lot of confusion over it, there’s a lot of anger over it and there’s a lot of good people being impacted by it,” she said.
Immigration reform is necessary, she said, but that reform must be a solution, not another problem.
Immigration for Parelkar has historically been a professional and personal issue. As it’s becoming political for her, she said she believes in the rule of law. She said she wants violent criminals off the street but that the current approach is not the right one. She said she does not want people who have been established in the United States with jobs and children who are citizens to be punished for their immigration status.
“I don’t want children taken away from their mothers,” she said.
She believes she can bridge the gaps between differing party ideologies.
“We are Americans first. We are one nation, indivisible, and we’ve gotta start acting like it,” she said.
Fixing the broken things
One of Parelkar’s biggest concerns leading up to her campaign is how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — or the “big ugly bill,” as she called it — is going to impact Kansans. In particular, she worries about access to health care in rural areas of the state and how farmers will fare.
Parelkar has bound copies of the act, which President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4. It is dense reading material, she said.
“If I have to put in so much effort to understand this, how can I possibly expect that people who have dedicated their lives to anything other than the law are going to make it through this and understand it?” she said. “That’s not going to happen.”
The way she sees it, voters have two options: re-elect the ones responsible for cuts to health care, or elect new officials who might be able to fix it.
Parelkar is opposed to eliminating funding for public schools. She said she is concerned about curricula, including mingling church and state and the prevalence of screens in schools. Families ought to have the right to choose what kind of education their kids receive, she said, but “I do not want anyone indoctrinating my kids.”
In addition to the U.S. Senate election, Kansans in 2026 will also be voting on a state constitutional amendment that attempts to change the way Kansas Supreme Court justices are appointed to the bench. Currently, the process is merit-based, through which three nominees are selected by a group of people, more than half of whom are attorneys, and the governor appoints a justice to the bench. Justices must go up for retention votes after their appointments. Republicans are proposing a popular vote system. Candidates would campaign much like other elected offices and voters will select the candidates they deem most appropriate.
Parelkar said she believes the current system is the best way to do it.
“And I’ve heard people say, ‘Well, it’s hard to find out if they’re Republican or Democrat.’ Good,” Parelkar said. “I don’t want to know if they’re Republican or Democrat.”
She added: “There should be no Republican or Democrat influence over our judiciary. We see the circus that is our campaign system today that is throwing mud at each other, tearing each other down.”
Parelkar said she never dreamed she would run for public office. People have asked why she didn’t run for local office.
“And my simple answer to that is I have no interest in holding office for a long time,” she said. “I have an interest in going and fixing the things that are broken, and finding ways to help people while I’m there.”