Nina Perales

Nina Perales tried the Voting Rights Act claim for the American GI Forum of Texas before a three-judge court made up of Judges Patrick Higginbotham, T. John Ward, and Lee Rosenthal, and on March 1, 2006, she argued the District 23 appeal in the United States Supreme Court. The Legislature had answered the loss of District 23 with a new District 25 that wound from McAllen and the border towns north to Austin, about half its people in Hidalgo County and half in Travis County, the two communities 300 miles apart. On June 28, 2006, in LULAC v. Perry, the Court held by a vote of five to four that the redrawing of District 23 violated Section 2 of the Act. Latinos in the district could form a majority, Justice Kennedy wrote, they voted cohesively, and Anglo voters voted as a bloc to defeat their preferred candidate; the state’s policy of protecting its incumbent, “whatever its validity in the realm of politics, cannot justify the effect on Latino voters,” and District 25, with its 300-mile gap, was not compact enough to make up for what had been taken away. “In essence the State took away the Latinos’ opportunity because Latinos were about to exercise it.” The Court reversed on District 23 and sent the case back for a remedy.

December 12, 2006

Fifteen days after the decision, on July 13, 2006, Perales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee as Congress weighed renewing the Act’s temporary provisions, and described the line through Laredo to the senators. On August 4, 2006, the three-judge court adopted a remedial map that placed Webb County whole in District 28 and moved parts of Bexar County, including San Antonio neighborhoods, into District 23, which became about 61 percent Latino, and it ordered a special election in the redrawn districts for November 7, 2006. Bonilla took 49 percent against a field of challengers, short of the majority he needed, and went to a runoff with Ciro Rodriguez, a former congressman who had finished second with 22 percent. On December 12, 2006, Rodriguez defeated Bonilla, 54 percent to 46, by 6,082 votes; Bexar County cast 65 percent of the district’s ballots, and Rodriguez took 56 percent of them.

Accept and Use

Arizona’s Proposition 200, adopted by its voters in 2004, required county recorders to reject any voter-registration application that did not come with documentary evidence of citizenship, including the federal mail-in form, on which applicants already swear to their citizenship under penalty of perjury. Jesus Gonzalez, a newly naturalized citizen, was rejected twice; officials said they could not confirm his citizenship even after he gave them his driver’s license and the number of his naturalization certificate. On May 9, 2006, MALDEF sued in the District of Arizona for Gonzalez, other applicants, and civic organizations including the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, Valle del Sol, Chicanos Por La Causa, Project Vote, and Common Cause. In 2010 a Ninth Circuit panel held that the documentary-proof requirement conflicted with the National Voter Registration Act as applied to the federal form, and the full court agreed to rehear the case. Perales argued for Gonzalez before the en banc court, which reached the same holding on April 17, 2012.

Arizona took the case to the Supreme Court, where Perales was counsel of record for the Gonzalez respondents, and the Court heard argument on March 18, 2013. On June 17, 2013, in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, the Court ruled 7–2, in an opinion by Justice Scalia, that the Act’s command that states “accept and use” the federal form precluded Arizona from requiring a federal-form applicant to submit information beyond what the form itself requires. On September 11, 2013, the district court entered a permanent injunction barring Arizona from demanding documentary proof from federal-form applicants, ordered the form made available through all reasonable channels, and awarded the plaintiffs $1,940,000 in attorney’s fees.

A Rental License in Farmers Branch

Beginning in 2006, the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch passed a series of ordinances meant to keep unauthorized immigrants from renting homes. The last of them required every prospective tenant to disclose his or her immigration status and obtain a rental license from the city’s building inspector, who would decide whether the applicant was lawfully present, and it exposed landlords and tenants who violated it to arrest and prosecution. MALDEF, the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, and the ACLU of Texas sued for landlords and tenants in Villas at Parkside Partners v. City of Farmers Branch, and federal courts blocked each ordinance before it took effect. Perales argued the case before the en banc Fifth Circuit, and on July 22, 2013, the court held, nine judges to five, that the ordinance conflicted with federal immigration law under the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision on Arizona’s S.B. 1070. The court, she said, had rejected “the city’s attempt to create its own immigration laws.”

San Antonio, 1996

Perales graduated from Brown University and Columbia Law School and spent five years at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York City. In 1996 she joined MALDEF’s San Antonio office, where she took up voting rights, and she has since served the organization as staff attorney, national senior counsel, Southwest regional counsel, national litigation director, and Vice President of Litigation, supervising its legal staff and docket from California to Washington, D.C. She has argued more than a dozen cases in the federal courts of appeals and has testified before Congress and state legislatures on voting rights. She defends the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program on behalf of its recipients in the multistate challenge pending in Texas, and in October 2025 she represented plaintiffs at the nine-day El Paso hearing on Texas’s newest congressional map. At Harvard Law School she is a Lecturer on Law and teaches Current Topics in Latino Civil Rights, offered in the spring of 2027.

House District 90

Texas redrew its legislative maps after the 2010 census, and MALDEF represented the Texas Latino Redistricting Task Force and individual voters in the challenges tried before a three-judge court in San Antonio. In 2011 the Legislature, pressed by MALDEF, raised the Latino population of House District 90 in Fort Worth to make it a Latino opportunity district and moved the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Como out of it. Como’s residents and Representative Lon Burnam objected, and in 2013 the Legislature moved Como back, dropping the Latino share below half, then moved more Latino voters in to restore it. Texas did not dispute that race had predominated in drawing the district; it argued it had good reasons to believe Section 2 required the design. On August 24, 2017, the San Antonio court held District 90 a racial gerrymander, and the state appealed. MALDEF alone had presented the District 90 claim.

The Supreme Court heard Abbott v. Perez on April 24, 2018, and decided it on June 25, 2018. “We hold that HD90 is an impermissible racial gerrymander.” One group’s demand for a district at least 50 percent Latino and the results of two Democratic primaries were “simply too thin a reed” to carry the state’s burden of showing the lines were narrowly tailored, the Court said; it affirmed the district court on District 90 and returned the case for the court to consider a remedy. Perales said the ruling warned Texas that it “cannot use race to manipulate district boundaries to favor incumbents.”

June 30, 2023

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, and Pasadena, Texas, a city of about 150,000 people southeast of Houston, 62 percent of them Latino, no longer had to clear its election changes with the Justice Department. Within weeks Mayor Johnny Isbell proposed replacing the city council’s eight single-member districts with six districts and two at-large seats; voters narrowly approved the change in November 2013, and the council adopted the new map in 2014. Asked why he had made the change, Isbell said the Justice Department “can no longer tell us what to do.” His director of community relations, Richard Scott, asked a mailing vendor to “pull out Hispanic names” from a list. In the 2015 election under the new plan, Oscar Del Toro ran for an at-large seat, received 39 percent of the citywide vote and 28 percent of the white vote, and lost.

MALDEF sued for Alberto Patino and other Latino voters on November 12, 2014, in Patino v. City of Pasadena. Latinos were 42 percent of the city’s registered voters by 2016, up from 30.6 percent in 2000, and 48.2 percent of its citizens of voting age; under the eight-district map they had been a majority of voting-age citizens in four districts. Perales tried the case over seven days, from November 17 to December 2, 2016, before Chief Judge Lee H. Rosenthal, who had sat on the three-judge court in the Texas congressional case thirteen years earlier. On January 6, 2017, in a 113-page opinion, Rosenthal found that the change diluted Latino votes in violation of Section 2 and that the city had adopted it intending that result; the effect, she wrote, “was foreseeable and foreseen.” Her judgment of January 16, 2017 enjoined the six-and-two plan, ordered the May 2017 election held in the eight single-member districts, and placed Pasadena under Section 3(c) of the Voting Rights Act for six years, so that no change to its election map or procedures could take effect without preclearance by the Attorney General or the court. Rosenthal denied a stay on January 18; Perales argued against one before the Fifth Circuit on February 1; and on February 3, 2017, Judges Owen, Elrod, and Costa denied it. Pasadena voted on May 6, 2017 in eight districts. Jeff Wagner, elected mayor that year, took office in July, and on September 27, 2017, the city agreed to drop its appeal and pay the plaintiffs $1,097,341 in attorney’s fees and costs; the council approved the settlement on October 3, the Fifth Circuit dismissed the appeal on October 18, and Perales said the city would now have “an election system that is fair for all of its voters.” The preclearance period ran until June 30, 2023.