Catalina Lauf Wants More Young Women To Speak Up Against Child Trafficking

On this afternoon, though, it’s oddly quiet. The lighting is dim and warm, the walls crowded with old paintings and taxidermy. The long wooden tables feel more like someone’s slightly eccentric dining room than a New York restaurant.

Catalina Lauf arrives in a navy pantsuit, looking like a much more beautiful version of who you would imagine has spent the last few years on campaign trails and television panels. 

Lauf is used to having to explain herself to reporters, voters, critics, and strangers on the internet. It’s a skill she’s had to develop quickly.

Before she ran for Congress, Lauf worked in the Trump administration at the Department of Commerce. It was 2018, and Washington was already in a kind of political fever dream. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had just arrived in Congress, the “Squad” was dominating headlines, and progressive women had become a cultural force almost overnight.

“I remember looking around and thinking, who is the counter voice?” Lauf tells me.

At the time, she was in her mid-twenties. She had always loved politics but felt alienated by what she calls the “buttoned-up establishment Republican” mold. Trump’s arrival had cracked that world open. He wasn’t a typical candidate, but a New York City Democrat who lived in a golden palace with a supermodel wife. 

“When I came into the administration, I thought, okay. These are people disrupting the whole game,” she says.

When Lauf later launched a congressional campaign, the media quickly found a convenient label for her: the anti-AOC.

“I mean, it was useful for the time,” she says. “But really it represented something bigger. Young people in the movement who were willing to speak out.”

The conversation drifts between politics and personal history as our food arrives. 

Lauf grew up in Illinois. Her mother immigrated from Guatemala. Her father ran a small business. They lived in a farming area where, she says, work was just part of life. She is, in many ways, the “American Dream.”

“We grew up with humble beginnings,” she says. “You just worked hard.”

After COVID, her family left Illinois and moved to Florida.

“We became blue-state refugees,” she says.

Florida, she says, felt immediately different.

“You can literally feel the freedom when you land,” she says. “In Illinois there was always this tension. Even in Republican areas.”

In Florida, she says, people speak more openly about politics. It’s not unusual to see Trump flags on boats or people wearing campaign hats in everyday life. As someone who lived in Miami for a few years, I know exactly what she’s talking about. 

“You don’t realize how much pressure you’re under until it’s gone,” she says.

For Lauf, the move was also personal. She had recently gotten married and was thinking about where she wanted to build a life and eventually raise children.

“I just thought, there’s no way I’m raising my kids somewhere that’s going in that direction,” she says.

But the conversation quickly moves beyond politics.

At one point, Lauf begins talking about a company she started with her sister. The original idea was baby formula when the sisters had grown concerned about what was actually in many products marketed to infants.

“We’d walk through grocery stores and look at the ingredients and think, 'why is this okay?'” she says.

They started researching the industry and quickly ran into the reality of federal regulation.

“The FDA approval process basically protects the big incumbents,” she says. “For a startup like ours, it was almost impossible.”

So they pivoted.

Instead of formula, they developed a children’s prebiotic supplement designed to help rebuild gut health naturally, especially for kids dealing with digestive issues, antibiotics, or restrictive diets.

Lauf lights up when she talks about it.

“We started it literally at the kitchen table,” she says. “And now we’ve helped thousands of kids.”

But the conversation eventually drifts somewhere heavier.

Lauf brings up something she says rarely gets attention in political coverage: child trafficking at the southern border.

She tells me about speaking with a border agent who described witnessing a three-year-old girl being sold multiple times during a border crossing.

“It’s horrifying,” she says quietly.

She mentions reports that tens of thousands of migrant children have attempted to contact federal hotlines meant to help minors placed with sponsors in the United States. Calls that reportedly went unanswered.

This issue shouldn’t be partisan.

“If you care about protecting children, this should be something every woman can get behind,” she says.

This issue shouldn’t be partisan.

She sounds less angry than frustrated.

“Where are the feminists talking about this?” she asks. 

And do they even know what’s happening?

The moment shifts the tone of the conversation. Much of the media attention around Lauf has focused on ideological labels, but her motivations seem rooted in something more visceral: family, children, and what she sees as cultural blind spots.

Eventually the conversation turns to women in politics more broadly.

Lauf says one of the strangest parts of running for office wasn’t criticism from the left, but from within her own party.

Because she wasn’t married at the time and didn’t have children, some opponents argued she wasn’t qualified to represent families.

“I had people sending mailers saying that,” she says. “It was ridiculous.”

The logic still confuses her.

“If you don’t have kids yet, you actually have more time to build something,” she says.

She’s particularly frustrated by the way women on the right are often forced into narrow cultural categories—either hyper-traditional “tradwives” or career-obsessed “girlbosses.”

“Why do we have to choose?” she asks.

Her answer is simple: women can want families, careers, public influence, and meaningful work at the same time.

“I want to do both,” she says.

It’s a perspective that’s increasingly common among younger conservative women, even if it rarely shows up in media coverage.

Lauf mentions several women she admires in politics, including Anna Paulina Luna, who she sees as part of a new generation.

Women can want families, careers, public influence, and meaningful work at the same time.

“They’re not in it for fame,” she says. “They’re doing it because they believe in it.”

By the time lunch winds down, the restaurant is still quiet. Our waiter appears again, this time with glasses of champagne on the house.

Politics, Lauf admits, has been harder than she expected. There are online attacks, threats, constant scrutiny. There’s also the strange experience of being flattened into a headline or stereotype.

At one point early in her career, she says, she was standing outside in Washington feeling overwhelmed and wondering if she should continue.

She carried a pocket Constitution at the time and opened it randomly.

It landed on the final line of the Declaration of Independence:

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

“That moment stuck with me,” she says.

Compared with what the founders risked, she says, modern political backlash feels smaller.

“You’re going to get bruised a little,” she says. “But that’s part of the journey.”

Outside, the Lower East Side is starting to fill with late afternoon traffic. Inside Freeman’s, the lights are still dim and the champagne glasses are nearly empty.

Before we leave, I ask her how she hopes people will ultimately see her.

The anti-AOC label never quite fit.

What she wants instead is simpler.

“Common sense,” she says.

Then she pauses.

“And hopefully proof that there are a lot of women out there like me.”