Kevin de León

His mother moved from Guatemala to Tijuana, Mexico in the 1960s.

She moved to Los Angeles to work as a housekeeper.

A single mother with two children, she met Leon's father who was largely absent.

His mother married a man of Mexican descent, taking the name Carmen Osorio Núñez, and relocated to San Diego.

She divorced and raised him in the Logan Heights neighborhood in San Diego.

He also spent part of his youth in Tijuana where his stepfather's family was located.

He strongly identifies with Mexican culture.

De León attended Perkins Elementary School, Albert Einstein Elementary School Roosevelt Middle School, and San Diego High School.

The first in his family to graduate from high school, he briefly attended the University of California, Santa Barbara before dropping out.

Kevin Alexander Leon (born December 10, 1966), known professionally as Kevin de León and colloquially as KDL, is an American politician serving as the Los Angeles City Council member for District 14 since 2020.

He later became a labor organizer for the California Teachers Association, and campaign manager for Fabian Nuñez's campaign for California State Assembly in 2002.

De León and Nuñez have been close political allies for most of their careers.

He later earned a bachelor's degree from Pitzer College in 2003.

While attending UC Santa Barbara, he began going by Kevin de León though he has never legally changed his name.

After dropping out of college, de León worked for One Stop Immigration Center, a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles that assists undocumented immigrants.

From 2006 to 2010, de León represented the 45th district in the California State Assembly.

De León first ran for office in 2006 defeating Christine Chavez, the granddaughter of labor leader Cesar E. Chavez, to replace the outgoing Jackie Goldberg as the California state assemblymember for the 45th district, covering Hollywood and much of Northeast Los Angeles.

In 2008, eyewitnesses on the floor of the state assembly observed de León casting a so-called ghost vote for assemblywoman Mary Hayashi on an affordable housing bill, opposite the way she would have voted, when Hayashi was away from the assembly floor.

De León said he had no memory of the incident but also said he did not deny it, either.

De León was investigated by then-state assembly speaker Karen Bass, but did not face any punishment and the vote was later changed.

As a result of the controversy, Bass changed assembly rules to enforce a ban on ghost voting.

In 2009, de León was defeated in a bid to become speaker of the California state assembly, after many assembly members found de León's ambitious nature grating, eroding his support, according to reports in the Los Angeles Times.

He represented the 22nd state senate district from 2010 to 2014, and the 24th state senate district from 2014 to 2018.

De León was elected to the California state senate in 2010 and became state senate president pro tempore in 2014.

As a California state senator, De León has been generally regarded as a liberal and describes himself as a "proud progressive."

De León sponsored SB 100, which would have required the state of California to generate 50% renewable electricity by 2026 and 100% renewable electricity by 2045.

He was President pro tempore of the California State Senate from October 15, 2014 to March 21, 2018.

In late 2017, de León was criticized for playing a role in killing a bill that would have blocked the controversial Cadiz Water Project, a proposal to mine and transfer groundwater from protected desert habitat in Eastern San Bernardino county to parts of Orange county.

Opponents of the project blamed De León, then president pro tempore of the senate, and pointed out that the company behind the project had donated $5,000 to De León's political campaign.

Fabian Nuñez, a close ally and donor to De León, also represented company as its lobbyist.

De León criticized the state's high-speed rail project, arguing that construction should have started in major cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, rather than the state's Central Valley.

De León is an advocate of gun control.

A member of the Democratic Party, he was defeated in the 2018 United States Senate election in California against incumbent Senator Dianne Feinstein and came in third place in the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral election.

In 2018, the bill passed both houses of the California state legislature and was signed into law by governor Jerry Brown on September 10.

He was elected to the city council in 2020.

Since October 2022, there have been widespread calls for his resignation after an audio recording of him and other council members making racist, homophobic, and derogatory remarks was leaked.

He was formally censured by the Los Angeles City Council in a unanimous 12–0 vote on October 26, 2022.

In December 2022, De León gained further notoriety when he was videotaped in a physical conflict with an activist, in which de León "grabs [the activist] and throws him into a table."

Kevin Leon was born in Los Angeles, to Carmen Osorio and Andrés Leon.

Both his parents were born in Guatemala with his father being of full or partial Chinese descent.