Thomas E. Perez was nominated by President Obama to serve as the nation’s 26th Secretary of Labor, and was sworn in on July 23, 2013. The son of Dominican immigrants, Perez was raised in a modest home in Buffalo, New York. The constant encouragement from his family and mentors and an unwavering commitment to working hard ultimately led him to pay his way through college by working as a garbage collector and working at a warehouse.
He attended Brown University and Harvard Law School. After earning his law degree, Secretary Pérez has had an impressive career in both elected and appointed office, most recently as Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
Under his leadership, the division successfully implemented the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act; expanded equal housing opportunity by bringing and settling the largest fair-lending cases in history; protected schoolchildren from discrimination, bullying and harassment; dramatically expanded access to employment, housing and educational opportunities for people with disabilities; protected the right to vote for all eligible voters free from discrimination; took record-setting efforts to ensure that communities have effective and democratically accountable policing; and safeguarded the employment, housing, fair lending and voting rights of service members.
Perez has spent his entire career in public service. From 2002 until 2006, he was a member of the Montgomery County Council. He was the first Latino ever elected to the Council, and served as Council president in 2005. Earlier in his career, he spent 12 years in federal public service, most as a career attorney with the Civil Rights Division.
As a federal prosecutor for the division, he prosecuted and supervised the prosecution of some of the Justice Department’s most high profile civil rights cases, including a hate crimes case in Texas involving a group of white supremacists who went on a deadly, racially-motivated crime spree.
He later served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under Attorney General Janet Reno. He also served as special counsel to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, and was Senator Kennedy’s principal adviser on civil rights, criminal justice and constitutional issues. For the final two years of the Clinton administration, he served as the Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Perez was a law professor for six years at the University of Maryland School of Law and was a part-time professor at the George Washington School of Public Health. He lives in Maryland with his wife, Ann Marie Staudenmaier, an attorney with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, and their three children.