The Mayor's Right-Hand Man

 

The day after Proposition 187 was approved, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) joined a team of organizations—including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)—to challenge its constitutionality. The ACLU’s Mark Rosenbaum was to be the plaintiffs’ lead counsel for the initial hearing, arguing that the law pre-empted the federal government from regulating immigration issues.

 

Enter Thomas Saenz, fresh out of law school. Saenz had offers to join some high-level law firms but chose instead to join MALDEF, hoping to make a difference in the world. Saenz, who had drafted a secondary challenge to Prop 187 on due process grounds, didn’t expect to play a large role. But the judge in the case said he was interested in hearing the due process argument, and Saenz was thrust into the spotlight.

 

“Mark [Rosenbaum] asked if I would do the argument about the due process claim,” Saenz says of his baptism by fire. “I had little choice because my boss was sitting next to me. So I said yes. I had maybe an hour to put together my thoughts on due process.

 

“The argument was, quite honestly, designed to be a terminal loop,” Saenz continues. With a team of lawyers, he devised the argument as a clever tactic that would ultimately cause the law to be overturned on pre-emption grounds.

 

“Other people thought those were the weak arguments,” says Antonia Hernandez, MALDEF’s president and general counsel from 1985 to 2004. “We thought those were the strong arguments. The legal footing that we put forward that eventually got the law struck down—it was Tom who insisted on it. He has an uncanny ability to interpret the law that other people can’t seem to see.”

 

Because he fared so well in that initial hearing, Saenz took on an increasingly prominent role in the case, and eventually became co-lead counsel, doing many of the arguments for the plaintiffs in district court.

 

In a dozen years at MALDEF, Saenz won several stunning and precedent-setting victories, including the rollback of Proposition 187. Described by numerous colleagues as one of the brightest young legal minds in the country, Saenz and his success at MALDEF attracted the attention of then-California Assembly speaker Antonio Villaraigosa.

 

When Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 2005, he tapped the 39-year-old lawyer to be his legal counsel. Since then, Saenz has been instrumental in several of the mayor’s key achievements, including helping to create the legal framework that enabled Villaraigosa to gain partial control of Los Angeles’ sprawling school system.

 

 

When Saenz arrived at MALDEF in 1993, he was assigned to monitor the various anti-immigrant ballot initiatives that were floating around California at the time. Proposition 187 may have been the most extreme of all the proposals, but it was hardly the only one. For example, the 1998 California ballot initiative Proposition 227 required all public school instruction to be conducted in English. MALDEF again worked with a coalition of groups, and Saenz began the case as one of a team of lawyers. “Eventually, a claim that was my responsibility became the only claim left in the case.”

 

Ultimately, however, the courts refused the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction, and English-only instruction remains the law in California schools. “We weren’t so successful in that case,” Saenz says. “We made some very good arguments, but unfortunately, the result was not in our favor.”

 

More fruitful was a 2004 class action suit against Abercrombie & Fitch on behalf of women, Latinos, blacks and Asian Americans who were denied high-visibility positions in the company’s stores. “Abercrombie & Fitch was pursuing a certain look; it was reflected in their models and they wanted their employees to look like their models,” says Saenz. “As a result, they had abysmal employment figures.”

 

Saenz and his fellow lawyers at MALDEF, the NAACP, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and the private law firm Lieff Cabraser saw an obvious instance of employment discrimination. But as the case dragged on through months of mediation, Saenz was surprised to see arguments in the media questioning the need for employment discrimination laws at all.

 

Saenz says the public and media discussion of the case focused on “what I consider to be the really extreme idea that somehow employers have a right to hire whoever they want based on whatever discriminatory prejudices they might want to employ.” In the end, though, Saenz and his colleagues reached a $50 million settlement: $40 million for the class of women, blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans, and $10 million in attorney’s fees and injunctive relief.

 

“Tom is an extraordinarily well-trained and creative lawyer,” says Vilma Martinez, a partner at Munger Tolles & Olson, and someone Saenz considers a mentor. They first met when Saenz was a summer associate at her firm during the 1980s. “But what pulls it all together,” Martinez says, “is that he cares so much about what his clients are looking for, and how best to get those needs met.”

 

 

Saenz’s legal victories haven’t gone to his head. “I lost more cases than I won at MALDEF,” he’s quick to say. But he allows himself the luxury of remembering “we were doing cutting-edge civil rights cases in a court system that’s not as amenable to cutting-edge civil rights cases as it once was.”

 

Soft-spoken and modest, he credits most of his successes to hard work, citing persistence and tenacity as two of his most valuable traits. “You’ve got to keep at it.” But he also gives his mother and father a lot of credit for stressing the value of education—both of his parents went to night school to get their associate degrees while Tom was growing up—and for instilling in him a sense of social justice.

 

Saenz’s father, Edward, worked for the L.A. Department of Water and Power, starting as a cable splicer and working his way through the civil service system to a district superintendent before retiring. He was also strike captain for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union. “I remember waiting in the car while he took care of business on the picket line,” Saenz says. Saenz’s mother, Margaret, was at times a stay-at-home mom, a classroom aide and a secretary. She was instrumental in teaching him “about advocating for others and recognizing injustices when they might be occurring.”

 

Growing up in the Alhambra suburb of Los Angeles, Saenz enjoyed what he calls a “typical blue-collar” childhood. Both his parents were born in the United States and spoke mostly English with their children. “To be honest,” Saenz says, “my Spanish is not that good.”

 

Tom and his older brother, James, shared a bedroom until they went to college: Tom to Yale, James to West Point. Tom skipped eighth grade, so the brothers graduated from college in the same year, 1987, whereupon Tom went to Yale Law School and James became an officer in the U.S. Army Special Forces. He saw action in the first Gulf War and is currently a lieutenant colonel stationed in Vietnam.