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Cesar A. Perales
Cesar Augusto Perales (born November 12, 1940, in New York City) is a civil rights attorney and co-founder of the nonprofit Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, now known as LatinoJustice PRLDEF. He currently serves as President and General Counsel of the organization.

Early Life
The son of a Puerto Rican father and a Dominican mother, Perales grew up in New York City He has said he first considered becoming a lawyer as a kid, after his dad's business went bankrupt.

"It really cost us a lot. I'm talking about losing furniture in the house, having it repossessed and things of that nature. It was a very terrible period for our family. And my father once told me that if he had had good legal help this wouldn't have happened."

Perales went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from City College 1962 and graduated from Fordham Law School in 1965.

Upon graduating from Fordham, Perales worked at the legal unit for a Ford Foundation-funded program on the Lower East Side of New York called Mobilization for Youth.

In 1968, when the federal government began to open neighborhood legal services programs as part of the War on Poverty, Perales, at 27 years old was selected to establish the first Brooklyn Legal Services Office.

His experiences working in New York’s Puerto Rican neighborhoods led him to become the legal advocate for New York’s Latino community. In April 1969, he represented the students who took over his alma mater, the City College of New York to demand the admission of more minority students. In January, 1970, he represented the Young Lords Organization when they took control of a church to provide community services to poor community in El Barrio. Perales negotiated the early morning non-violent arrest of over 100 members the Young Lords who refused to leave the church.

"The Young Lords were seen as a radical young Puerto Rican group that, actually in that situation had taken over that church and were offering breakfast to the kids," Perales said. "These young people had a right to have a lawyer. I was doing my job as a lawyer for a group that I thought was doing good things."

Founding the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund
In 1972, Perales, along with two other young Puerto Rican attorneys—Jorge Batista and Victor Marrero—raised enough seed money to open the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, a legal organization modeled on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Perales served as the first Executive Director and Marrero was Chairman of the Board.

In its early days, the fund, known by the acronym PRLDEF (pronounced pearl-deaf), brought many important civil rights lawsuits on behalf of Latinos living in New York City and across the U.S.

In 1974, the consent decree issued in PRLDEF’s suit Aspira v. New York City Board of Education became central to the United States’ establishment of bilingual education programs in schools across the country. And, in several lawsuits against the New York Civil Service Commission, New York Police Department and New York Sanitation Commission, PRLDEF was able to get the courts to strike down numerous civil service requirements that kept Latinos from public employment and eliminated barriers to government benefits for non-English speaking applicants.

In 1975, a PRLDEF lawsuit had national impact when Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to include the right to bilingual voting procedures—which was modeled on a decision won by PRLDEF in the federal courts in 1973.

Government Service
In 1977, Perales was appointed head of the regional office of the then-Department of Health, Education and Welfare, overseeing several jurisdictions including Puerto Rico. Two years later, in 1979, he was recruited to Washington to become Assistant Secretary for Human Services in the new Department of Health and Human Services, where he went on to play an important role in the White House task force on the Cuban-Haitian refugee crisis. In 1981 Perales responded to the Board’s request that he return to PRLDEF. Within six months PRLDEF was at the forefront of litigation to get the Justice Department to block the election of the New York City Council until district lines were redrawn in a nondiscriminatory manner. The subsequent court order halting the elections was perhaps the most dramatic application of the Voting Rights Act in the North.

In 1983, Perales returned to government service as Commissioner of the New York State Department of Social Services under Governor Mario Cuomo, and 1991 was named Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services for New York City by Mayor David Dinkins.

Perales left government in 1994 to assume the position of Senior Vice President at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. During his tenure at the hospital, he developed a Community Health Care system that received national recognition. In before returning once again to the organization he founded in 2003.

Returning to LatinoJustice PRLDEF
In 2003, Perales returned to the organization he had founded. PRLDEF quickly gained new prominence as an advocate and defender of the rights of immigrants. The fund’s attorneys won a major victory against the Town of Brookhaven, New York in 2005 when a judge ruled that the town had to halt its policy of selectively enforcing its housing code laws against Latino households and its practice of evicting tenants without prior notice. And the group’s case against Hazleton, Pennsylvania’s anti-immigrant ordinance in 2007 was the first of its kind to go to a full trial, and ended with a federal judge issuing the precedent-setting ruling that immigration legislation is a matter reserved to the federal government.

Under Perales’ leadership, the group was also among the first to challenge violent early morning raids of private homes by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. And attorneys have also filed a unique petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, arguing that the United States’ aggressive immigration enforcement policies create a climate that fosters bias crimes.

In mid-2008 the fund’s Board of Directors, along with Perales, decided to change the name of the group to more accurately reflect changes in its mission, its client base, and the make-up of its Board. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund changed its name to LatinoJustice PRLDEF. “Latinos are beginning to see themselves as a group, as a community,” said Perales. “There is a coming together of identification in a common struggle.”