While the President’s Office continues to issue anti-immigrant messages and signing a series of executive orders aimed at militarizing the border between the U.S. and Mexico, the State of California, together with the San Diego District Attorney’s Office, seek to increase the number of Hispanic employees who are fluent in both English and Spanish so they can better serve the hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans living in the region.
The main goal is to be able to provide service whenever a crime is committed, someone is a victim of fraud or work abuses, or witnesses a violent act and truly needs immediate help from the authorities.
“As far as we’re concerned, of course we hear what the President is doing, but we still have the same responsibility and the same obligation to serve everyone in the nicest, most professional way possible, regardless of their economic, political, or immigration status,” stated San Diego District Attorney’s Office spokesperson Jesse Navarro.
The San Diego DA’s Office currently has about 1,000 employees, including 324 Deputy District Attorneys, and routinely files about 40,000 cases each year, which are handled in a wide variety of languages, including English, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Armenian, Japanese, and Spanish.
Having a workforce that is at least 30 percent  Hispanic at the second-largest DA’s Office in California, and the fourth-largest nationwide, has been the key to success in some recent successes, they say, because it is important for a larger number of employees and prosecutors to be able to communicate effectively and truly know the needs and the culture of those impacted by crime in San Diego.
“We are public servants and are here to protect people, to keep them informed, so all the politics at the National level have no room here. There can be no doubt that our office is dedicated to protecting everyone, all the accusations and everything that’s happening at the national level, that simply does not apply to this region,” added Jesse Navarro.
Gender equality has been another great challenge, but with the addition of 24 Deputy District Attorneys to its ranks, 14 of them women and 10 men, they have achieved a perfect balance in the number of men and women working at the DA’s Office.
Jazmin Ramirez is one of the new prosecutors who joined the team. She says being a woman has always presented interesting challenges to overcome, but her dream is to bring help to all the women who are victims of violence and anyone else in the community who does not speak English, so they can participate in the most important process for justice in the U.S.
“When I was 12, I witnessed a murder and no one came to interview us, no one came to ask us what happened, and no one investigated anything,” said Jazmin. “Those are images that I will never forget, so I wanted to do something to help the community, that’s why I became a prosecutor,” Ramirez said.
“I want to be a model for young Latinos who think they cannot aspire to having an important position in the community. I have an 11-year-old sister, so I also want to serve as an example for her,” Ramirez added.