Mónica Ramírez Almadani, an immigrant rights attorney who led and backed cases against Trump-era immigration policies, was confirmed to a seat on the Los Angeles-based federal trial court.
The Senate voted 51-44 on Thursday to confirm Ramírez Almadani, president and CEO of Public Counsel, a national pro bono firm that provides free and low-cost legal services for public interest litigation.
The former federal prosecutor and Kamala Harris adviser during her days as California attorney general is headed to the US District Court for the Central District of California.
Ramírez Almadani, 43, has moved between government and public interest work in the nearly two decades since she graduated from Stanford Law and clerked for late Ninth Circuit Judge Warren J. Ferguson.
She’s worked on behalf of immigration and immigrant rights issues throughout her career, whether challenging workplace raids by the Bush administration for the ACLU or running the University of California, Irvine Law School’s immigration law clinic.
She’s represented “families separated and harmed because of our broken immigration system, victims of human trafficking and child exploitation” and “low wage workers taken advantage of,” Almadani said during during a Berkeley Law commencement keynote in 2022.
Immigrant Rights
Out of law school, Ramírez Almadani worked at the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project, where she was involved in challenging an Arizona law denying bail to immigrants in the US illegally. The Ninth Circuit reversed a district court’s decision, and found the bail law in Lopez-Valenzuela v. County of Maricopa unconstitutional.
Ramírez Almadani has also challenged the Trump administration’s immigration policies on numerous occasions.
In Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., she represented University of California administrators working to protect students who risked being deported after the Trump administration slashed the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. She helped secure an injunction against the termination decision, and the Supreme Court later upheld the injunction in June 2020.
Ramírez Almadani briefly taught at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and co-directed their Immigrant Rights Clinic, where she represented indigent clients facing deportation, employment, and civil rights issues.
Harris Adviser
Ramírez Almadani joined the Justice Department during the Obama administration, working in senior roles under future Labor Secretary Tom Perez when he headed the Civil Rights Division, and former Deputy Attorney General James Cole on civil rights and immigration matters.
Afterward, she returned to Los Angeles for a brief stint as a federal prosecutor on general criminal and later public corruption and civil rights cases. The experience showed her that “we need more diverse voices within government, and especially in prosecutorial offices that have so much power,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2021.
As an appointed special assistant attorney general in California, she advised Harris on immigrant rights, criminal justice, and civil rights issues.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder and other colleagues from her time at the Justice Department said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of her nomination that Almadani “distinguished herself as an uncommonly strong courtroom advocate, as a thoughtful and rigorous lawyer, and as a warm and gracious colleague.”
Early Life
Ramírez Almadani is a child of Mexican immigrants and attended public schools in southeast Los Angeles. Her high school principal told her freshman class that half of them wouldn’t graduate.
“We were accustomed by that young age, sadly, to know that our prospects were bleak,” she told graduating students during last year’s Berkeley Law commencement keynote. “That graduating high school, much less going to college, was not for everyone, and especially not for kids like us, from an inner city, working class, and immigrant background.”
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