Thomas A. Saenz

On two successive mornings in October 2004, Redondo Beach police officers posing as employers pulled up to the men waiting for work along the city's streets. The men walked to the cars. Officers arrested thirty-five of them. Two weeks later they arrested twenty-one more, and two weeks after that four more laborers and one contractor who had stopped to hire. The charge was Redondo Beach Municipal Code section 3-7.1601, which made it unlawful for any person "to stand on a street or highway and solicit, or attempt to solicit, employment, business, or contributions from an occupant of any motor vehicle." Bail was $100. A man who pleaded guilty received three years' probation, a suspended 180-day sentence, a $314 booking fee and an order to stay 150 yards from the corner where he had been arrested.

Saenz, then MALDEF's vice president of litigation, filed suit for the Comité de Jornaleros de Redondo Beach and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network on November 16, 2004. Judge Consuelo B. Marshall entered a temporary restraining order on December 6 and a preliminary injunction on December 15. On April 27, 2006, she granted summary judgment for the workers, permanently enjoined the ordinance and ordered the city to rescind the fines and penalties it had collected under it.

The city appealed. In June 2010 a divided three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit reversed. The full court voted to rehear the case, and on March 21, 2011, Saenz, by then MALDEF's president and general counsel, argued it before the en banc court. On September 16, 2011, the court ruled 9–2 for the workers. Judge Milan D. Smith Jr.'s majority opinion treated a request for work on a public street as speech in a traditional public forum and asked whether the ordinance was narrowly tailored to the city's traffic concerns. Read as written, it reached children selling lemonade in front of their homes, Girl Scouts selling cookies on the sidewalk and schoolchildren shouting "carwash" at passing cars, and it applied citywide when the city's own evidence concerned two intersections. Existing traffic, jaywalking and parking laws could deal with the cars. The court overruled its own 1986 decision upholding a nearly identical Phoenix ordinance. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, joined by Judge Carlos Bea, dissented: the ordinance regulated the conduct of an impromptu labor market, he wrote, and the city had lived with traffic, litter and harassment complaints at those corners for fifteen years. The Supreme Court denied Redondo Beach's petition on February 21, 2012.

The Year California Drew a Line

Saenz was born and raised in Southern California and went to public schools in the Los Angeles neighborhoods that Cal State L.A. serves. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale College, took his law degree at Yale Law School and clerked for Judge Harry L. Hupp in the Central District of California and Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit. In 1993 he joined MALDEF as a staff attorney. He had been there a year when, on November 8, 1994, California voters passed Proposition 187 with 58.9 percent of the vote.

The measure would have barred undocumented children from public schools, denied non-emergency health care and other public services to undocumented immigrants, and required teachers, nurses and clerks to question anyone they "reasonably suspected" of being undocumented and report them to federal authorities. In the weeks after the vote, a twelve-year-old boy named Julio Cano died after his parents, afraid of what the new law would do to them, delayed taking him for medical care.

MALDEF and the ACLU of Southern California filed Gregorio T. v. Wilson in federal court on November 9, the morning after the election. Saenz worked the case from that first filing and came to lead it for MALDEF; when the Ninth Circuit heard an appeal in the litigation in 1997, he was MALDEF's counsel of record. Chief Judge W. Matthew Byrne issued a temporary restraining order on November 16. On December 14, Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer preliminarily enjoined most of the measure. She granted partial summary judgment in November 1995, ruled in November 1997 that the measure intruded on federal authority over immigration, and in her final judgment of March 17, 1998, held Sections 1 and 4 through 9 preempted, leaving only the document-fraud provisions. The school-exclusion section was never enforced. In April 1999, Governor Gray Davis sent the state's appeal to mediation; on July 29, 1999, the state withdrew its appeal, the plaintiffs withdrew their cross-appeal, and the injunction became permanent.

Saenz became MALDEF's Los Angeles regional counsel in 1996, national senior counsel in 2000 and vice president of litigation in 2001. In those years he also brought two challenges to Proposition 227, the 1998 initiative that replaced bilingual instruction with English immersion in California classrooms, and drafted MALDEF's friend-of-the-court brief in Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 case in which the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan Law School's consideration of race in admissions.

Stockroom or Overnight

Abercrombie & Fitch had built a retail empire on what it called the “classic American” look. In 1999, Juancarlos Gomez-Montejano filed a discrimination charge against the company. Four years later, in June 2003, MALDEF, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein filed Gonzalez v. Abercrombie & Fitch in federal court in San Francisco, with Saenz leading the case for MALDEF. Eduardo Gonzalez, a Stanford student, applied at the Santa Clara store and was told by a manager that he might work in the stockroom or on the overnight shift. Anthony Ocampo, a Stanford graduate, was told there were "already too many Filipinos." Jennifer Lu, a University of California, Irvine student, and five other Asian American employees at the Crystal Court store were let go after a visit from senior management and replaced with white staff. Carla Grubb, a Cal State Bakersfield student and the only Black employee at her store, was assigned to dust, wash windows and clean the floors.

On November 16, 2004, Judge Susan Illston approved a consent decree. Abercrombie paid $40 million to the class and roughly $10 million more for monitoring and attorneys' fees. The decree ran for a minimum of four and a half years and up to six, and it changed how the company hired: a vice president of diversity reporting to the chief executive, twenty-five recruiters assigned to minority hiring, benchmarks for hiring and promoting Latino, Black, Asian American and women employees, an end to recruiting from particular fraternities, sororities and colleges, diversity training for everyone with hiring authority, marketing that included people of color, an internal complaint procedure and a court-appointed monitor who reported on compliance. "This agreement promises to transform this company," Saenz said the day it was approved. The money went to the people who had been turned away. The decree decided who would be hired next.

In August 2005 Saenz left MALDEF to become counsel to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, one of four members of the mayor's executive team, and spent four years inside the ordinances and budgets he had been suing over. In July 2009 MALDEF's board named him president and general counsel, and he took office that August.

Ten Minutes for Three Mothers

In January 2015, three women from the Rio Grande Valley, from Edinburg, McAllen and Donna, asked to intervene in Texas v. United States, the suit by Texas and twenty-five other states to stop the deferred-action guidance announced in November 2014 for parents of citizens and lawful residents. They were identified in the filings only as Jane Doe #1, #2 and #3. The first had lived in the United States for fifteen years and had four children. The second had a son in second grade and a daughter in preschool, both born in Texas, and cared for her mother, who had Alzheimer's disease. The third had arrived eleven years earlier and had a two-year-old daughter who was a citizen. The Border Patrol checkpoints north of the Valley meant none of them could safely leave it. Each would have qualified for deferred action under the guidance the states had sued to stop.

Texas and the federal government both opposed their participation, and Judge Andrew Hanen denied it. In November 2015 the Fifth Circuit reversed, holding that the mothers had a concrete, personal interest in avoiding deportation that neither government would represent. When the Supreme Court heard United States v. Texas on April 18, 2016, Saenz argued for them: ten minutes, after Solicitor General Donald Verrilli and before Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito spent most of it on standing, on whether the cost of issuing driver's licenses to deferred-action recipients gave Texas an injury a court could redress. Saenz's answer was that it did not, and that his clients were the only people before the Court whom the guidance would touch personally. They brought, as he put it, "the perspective of the only non-institutional, human participants." Jane Doe #2 had said of what the guidance would mean, "Sentí mucha emoción": a job she could hold openly and a driver's license she could carry without fear.

Section Seven

Section 7 of Proposition 187 would have required every public elementary and secondary school in California to verify the immigration status of each child and each child's parents, to report those it suspected, and to exclude the children who could not establish lawful status. The Supreme Court had already answered that provision in 1982, in Plyler v. Doe, when it struck down a Texas law that withheld state funds for the schooling of undocumented children; MALDEF had represented the Plyler families.

On March 18, 2026, Saenz testified before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government at a hearing on Plyler itself. He told the subcommittee that roughly 430,000 students educated under the decision had since become citizens or lawful permanent residents, that the great majority of the children at issue had not chosen to come, and that even the 1982 dissenters had called the Texas law folly. He quoted Justice Powell: such children should not be left on the streets uneducated. Harvard Law School's course schedule lists him and Nina Perales, MALDEF's litigation vice president, as instructors of a reading group on current topics in Latino civil rights for the spring 2027 term. He had by then served nearly twenty years on the Los Angeles County Board of Education and taught civil-rights litigation at USC's law school for eight.

At Cal State Los Angeles's commencement on May 20, 2017, receiving an honorary doctorate from a university whose neighborhoods he had grown up in, Saenz told the graduates to "live each day of your post-graduate careers with appropriate audacity." He was a year out of law school when he went to work against Proposition 187. Thirty-two years later he was in a House hearing room defending the 1982 decision that Section 7 had been written against.