Today the Eric Holder Justice Department sued Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The civil rights lawsuit was filed by the notorious Civil Rights Division, headed by truth-challenged Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez. Perez formerly headed the illegal alien advocacy organization Case de Maryland. But the radicalism of the legal team aligned against Sheriff Joe does not end with Tom Perez.
Let’s meet the radical Justice Department lawyers who drafted and filed this complaint.
Special Litigation Section Chief Jonathan Smith is already well known to PJ Media readers.
Smith replaces a section chief who was unwilling to serve as a lapdog to Perez and bring sketchy cases. Smith served 8 years as Executive Director of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia. Prior to his time at the Legal Aid Society, he served as Executive Director of the Public Justice Center. He also was Executive Director of the D.C. Prisoners’ Legal Services Project which served essentially as a law firm for prisoners against prisons and prison guards.
Also on the complaint are attorneys Winsome Gayle, Sergio Perez and Jennifer Mondino. PJ Media exposed the radical backgrounds of these civil service attorneys, all hired after Obama’s inauguration. For example, Sergio Perez once worked for a group called the “Junta for Progressive Action.” Here’s more from the Every Single One report on the Special Litigation Section.
Sergio Perez: (Resume here) Mr. Perez is another attorney fresh out of law school. As of the date this article was drafted, he continued to boast on his Facebook page of his active role in Junta for Progressive Action, an organization that promotes the rights of illegal aliens in the United States. From the group’s website:
“Junta has worked with Unidad Latina to promote rights for the undocumented, encouraging [a Connecticut mayor] to issue a municipal identity card. … Immigrant rights groups, such as Fair Haven-based Junta for Progressive Action, are working with the city’s police department to establish a policy that would forbid police from asking about the legal status of immigrants who are crime victims or turning over any such information to federal immigration authorities.”
Sergio Perez
[Perez omitted helping this militant organization that aids lawbreakers from his resume.] Mr. Perez also was the student director of Yale Law School’s Legal Services for Immigrant Communities Clinic and the co-director of the school’s Human Rights Project. He clerked one summer at a large law firm, but appears to have spent all of his time there working on a habeas corpus petition on behalf of a death-row inmate in Louisiana.
Upon arriving in the Civil Rights Division, Mr. Perez began working on the Special Litigation Section’s investigation (or, as I have previously written at length, harassment) of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County (Ariz.) Detention Facility because of the Sheriff’s participation in the federal 287(g) program.
Jennifer Mondino
Jennifer Mondino: (Resume here). After working at the Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion rights group, Ms. Mondino apparently decided that her work would be easier if she had the enforcement machinery of the Department of Justice behind her. She previously served as a staff attorney at the Safe Horizon Domestic Violence Law Project in Brooklyn and an attorney in the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s Office. On her resume, she proudly lists her volunteer activities with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Election Protection Campaign, the Legal Aid Society, the New York City Bar Refugee Assistance Project, the “Unite! Local 169 Fair Wages Campaign” (on behalf of Spanish-speaking green grocer employees), Bay Area Legal Aid, and Human Rights Watch. She also proudly touts her membership in the “National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights”, whose website openly proclaims its real desire “to spread understanding of liberal ideas and advance progressive values.”
Mondino also fought in court to facilitate abortions for sex selection in Oklahoma.
Winsome Gayle
Winsome Gayle: (Resume here). Ms. Gayle is a financial thoroughbred for the Democratic Party. FEC records reveal that she contributed nearly $5,600 to Obama in the 2008 campaign, and gave another $200 in 2009 to a very liberal (and ultimately unsuccessful) congressional Democratic candidate in Kansas, Raj Goyle. She worked as a staff attorney at the Public Defender’s Service for the District of Columbia, interned at the ACLU in New York, and clerked for a liberal federal judge in Florida appointed by President Clinton.
During law school, Ms. Gayle was a member of the Harvard Civil Liberties Union, Harvard Law School Lambda, the Harvard Black Law Students Association, and the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. In fact, she continues to be the head of the Washington chapter of the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus. She also wrote her undergraduate thesis on “Consensual Sodomy Laws: The Place of Morality in Law Where Justice is Concerned.”
If you want exercise your First Amendment rights to petition your government about your views of the lawsuit, the complaint has contact information.
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