THOMAS PEREZ

• Was appointed by President Obama to be Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division
• Served in the Justice Department during the Bill Clinton administration

The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Thomas Edward Perez was born October 7, 1961 in Buffalo, New York. He earned an A.B. in international relations and political science from Brown University in 1983, a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1987, and a Master of Public Policy from the JFK School of Government also in 1987.

From 1987-89 Perez was a law clerk for Judge Zita Weinshienk of the U.S. District Court in Colorado. In the early 1990s he served as a prosecutor, and later as deputy chief, with the Civil Rights Division of Bill Clinton's Department of Justice (DOJ). From 1995 to 1998, Perez was Special Counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy.

In 1996 Perez was instrumental in facilitating the passage of the Church Arson Prevention Act, a bill founded on the false premise that black churches were being targeted with disproportionate frequency by arsonists.

From 1998 to 1999, Perez returned to the DOJ's Civil Rights Division as Deputy Assistant Attorney General. In this role, he helped establish the Worker Exploitation Task Force, which sought to improve the working conditions of illegal aliens. Moreover, he worked to eliminate the disproportionate assignment of black and Hispanic students to special-education programs; to increase the number of such students in "gifted and talented" programs; to prosecute federal civil-rights cases involving police misconduct and hate crimes; and to eliminate racial profiling by law-enforcement.

Also during his tenure with the Clinton DOJ, Perez volunteered for – and later (from 1995-2002) became a board member of – Casa de Maryland, a George Soros-funded advocacy group for illegal aliens.

From February 1999 until the end of the Clinton administration, Perez served as director of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

From 2001 to 2007, Perez was a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. He is currently a part-time faculty member at the George Washington University School of Public Health.

In 2008 Perez worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and then served on the transition team after Obama’s electoral victory. On March 31, 2009, President Obama nominated Perez to be Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division (CRD). The U.S. Senate confirmed Perez in October 2009. Perez stated that, by his reckoning, CRD's mission was to help those Americans who were “living in the shadows” – a reference not only to illegal aliens, but also to “our Muslim-American brothers and sisters subject to post-9/11 backlash”; “communities of color disproportionately affected by the subprime meltdown”; “LGBT brothers and sisters ... forced to confront discrimination”; and “all too many children lacking quality education.”

Once he began his post with the Obama administration, Perez pledged to greatly expand DOJ's prosecution of alleged hate crimes, which he depicts as a predominantly white-on-black phenomenon. Perez also made it clear that he would view “disparate impact” -- such as when a company makes its promotion decisions based on exams where whites as a group score higher than blacks -- as prima facie proof of discrimination.

In Perez's view, compensatory payments to plaintiffs who win judgments in civil-rights cases should not go only to the actual victims of discrimination, but additionally to “qualified organization[s]” approved by the Justice Department. Such a policy enables DOJ to funnel cash into the coffers of activist groups that share the presidential administration's political agendas.

In 2009, Perez and CRD pressured several universities to discontinue an experimental program whereby students could purchase their textbooks in digital formats which they could read via the Amazon Kindle because the Kindle, despite the device's text-to-voice feature (for the narrative of books) was not fully accessible (in its menu options) to blind students. Until the Kindle rectified this injustice, said Perez, universities that made their textbooks available on the e-reader would be investigated for possible violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Also in 2009, Perez and CRD launched an investigation of Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. This investigation grew out of a February 2009 demand -- by Democratic Reps. John Conyers, Zoe Lofgren, Jerrold Nadler, and Bobby Scott -- that the Justice Department look into allegations of Arpaio's “discriminatory” police practices toward illegal aliens. Though the accusers had no evidence of any wrongdoing by Arpaio, CRD initiated its inquiry within a month.

Perez has emphasized CRD's “critical work” of “monitoring federal, state, and local elections across the country to ensure that voting takes place free of unlawful intimidation.” But in June 2010, J. Christian Adams, a five-year DOJ veteran, resigned to protest the “corrupt nature” of DOJ's dismissal of a case involving two Philadelphia-based members of the New Black Panther Party who had intimidated white voters with racial slurs and threats of violence on Election Day, 2008. Adams cited Thomas Perrelli (the Associate Attorney General) and Thomas Perez as the two DOJ officials most responsible for dropping the case. In July 2010, Adams gave damning public testimony about how Perez and other Obama DOJ officials believed that “civil rights law should not be enforced in a race-neutral manner, and should never be enforced against blacks or other national minorities.”

In September 2010, Christopher Coates – Voting Section Chief for the DOJ – testified to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and corroboated Adams' assertion that the Department had routinely ignored civil rights cases involving white victims. For more than a year, Perez had denied the Commission's requests to hear Coates' testimony and had instructed Coates not to testify. But in September 2010, Coates finally chose to go public with his story and asked for protection under whistleblower laws. For the full text of Coates' testimony, click here.

Also in 2010, Perez and CRD led the fight against an Arizona bill deputizing state police to check the immigration status of any criminal suspects who they believed might be in the U.S. illegally. Five months later, Perez would lead the Obama Justice Department in filing a lawsuit against Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his aggressive policies against illegal immigration.

On April 20, 2010, Perez testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject of his efforts to combat discrimination in housing, money lending, employment, and police work. For a brief summary of his testimony, click here.

In 2010-11, Perez played a key role in opening investigations of several large urban police departments for systematic civil-rights abuses such as harassment of racial minorities, false arrests, and excessive use of force.
As of May 2011, the Justice Department's CRD under Perez had initiated a high-profile push to reform the New Orleans Police Department, "pattern and practice" investigations of police departments in Newark and Seattle, and a preliminary investigation of the Denver Police Department. These investigations were consistent with what Perez had stated in September 2010: "In case you haven’t heard, the Civil Rights Division is once again open for business. There were very few [pattern and practice] cases during the prior administration." "Criminal prosecutions alone, I have learned, are not enough to change the culture of a police department," Perez said on another occasion.

In December 2011, the Justice Department blocked a new South Carolina law requiring voters to present valid identification at their polling places on election day. Claiming that the law discriminated against minority voters, Perez wrote: “Although the state has a legitimate interest in preventing voter fraud and safeguarding voter confidence … the state’s submission did not include any evidence or instance of either in-person voter impersonation or any other type of fraud that is not already addressed by the state’s existing voter identification requirement.” Perez further contended that the law requiring voters to present one of five forms of photo ID at the polls violated Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act because 8.4 percent of the state’s registered white voters lack photo ID, compared to 10 percent of nonwhite voters.

The Voting Rights act was passed to combat systemic disenfranchisement of minority voters, but applying it here was a dubious exercise at best. In 2005, the DOJ itself approved a Georgia law with the same provisions and protections, and in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board that an Indiana law requiring photo ID did not present an undue burden on voters. Furthermore, South Carolina’s law explicitly addressed potential disenfranchisement by offering state-issued IDs free of charge, and free transportation to anyone who needed a ride to a location where a picture ID could be obtained. An extensive data review conducted by Department of Motor Vehicles Director Kevin Shwedo, which found that more than 900 deceased people had "voted" in recent elections in South Carolina, demonstrated that a voter ID policy was necessary in South Carolina.

Perez has been a featured speaker at events held by the American Constitution Society, telling its members that “your mission and ours [at CRD] share a lot in common.