Ex-Chicago activist seeking Mexican seat

CHICAGO, June 27 (UPI) -- A Mexican woman known to Chicagoans as an immigration activist who sought sanctuary in a church says she is running for Mexico's congress, observers say.

Elvira Arellano created controversy in Chicago in 2006 when, as an illegal immigrant, she holed up in a Methodist church in an attempt to keep U.S. immigration agents from deporting her. Now she is running a long-shot congressional campaign to represent a district in Tijuana, Mexico, the Chicago Tribune reported Saturday.

The newspaper said Arellano is aligned with the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, while Mexico's two other major parties dominate the state of Baja California. In an interview, Arellano, who heads a group that tries to reunite families split by deportation, said her party has given her $20,000 for a contest in which she is running against the brother of the state's governor.

"It's true that I didn't really know Tijuana," Arellano told the Tribune. "What I do know is the needs of families. I know the reasons we have to (emigrate) to the United States. I lived the same things that thousands of people here in Tijuana have lived."