Q&A with Bernardo Cruz, affirmative litigation attorney at the El Paso County Attorney’s Office

As the only affirmative litigation attorney at the El Paso County Attorney’s Office, Bernardo Cruz doesn’t just wait for cases to land on his desk. His job is to proactively enforce laws protecting individuals’ and communities’ rights.

Recruited by the county attorney’s office in 2023 to build its work in this area from the ground up, he joined Public Rights Project’s Affirmative Leaders Fellowship to gain key skills and to get insights from other government attorneys. We sat down to talk about his role — one that is reshaping what a county attorney’s office can do.

As a government attorney, you proactively identify legal needs in the community rather than simply responding to cases brought to you. Can you walk us through how that process works in practice?

A lot of it starts with relationships — specifically with the county commissioners’ court. Building trust with commissioners matters because they need to feel comfortable reaching out the moment their constituents raise a concern. Beyond that, I make time to sit in on legal coalitions focused on immigrant rights and environmental issues. Part of my role there is also to help troubleshoot and point people toward solutions.

What’s an example of a recent action you took in response to concerns raised by the community?

Recently, community members have raised concerns with a commissioner about a new immigration detention facility planned to hold more than 8,000 people. Three deaths have already occurred at Camp East Montana in El Paso, and detainees there have described horrible conditions, including a lack of medical care and physical violence by guards.

Plans to build the facility were only discovered through property deeds, not through any sort of public acknowledgment from the federal government itself. When there was no response from federal agencies about its plans to build this facility, we filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. It was a real test case in figuring out what was actually possible for our office to do.

Your first case out of law school was to represent farm workers in Yakima, Washington. What were the most significant challenges and victories from that work?

I was working as an attorney for Washington legal services in Yakima, an area that’s primarily farmland. Farmworkers were fired by a grower after going on strike because one of their colleagues had collapsed in the field in the extreme heat and was let go. Because these workers were on visas tied to their employment, more than 200 people — most from Mexico — lost their immigration status overnight. They slept in tents in the backyard of a local farmer with nowhere else to stay.

We negotiated with the growers to recover the wages owed and cover travel costs back to their home country. There was also a trafficking dimension to the case: employers were using contractors as middlemen to recruit foreign workers, putting an already vulnerable population at even greater risk. I helped bring a federal lawsuit in Washington. This case came with its own complications — including the fact that many of the plaintiffs were back in Mexico while the case proceeded in a U.S. court.

That experience underscored just how difficult our legal system can be for ordinary people to navigate — something most attorneys never really have to reckon with. It’s shaped my entire career since.

Can you speak to how the Affirmative Leaders Fellowship has impacted your work as a government attorney?

Public Rights Project’s Affirmative Leaders Fellowship was crucial because I was literally at the stage of initiating and starting the local attorney’s office’s affirmative litigation work. And to me, getting to see other offices throughout the country on how local government conducts this type of work was a very useful and crucial step.

So this ongoing community that explicitly provides that support to local offices was crucial, as well as meeting other trainees, some of whom have been doing this type of work for many, many years.

What advice do you have for local government attorneys?

Look at what other offices around the country are already doing. Take stock of the expertise you already have in-house, and figure out where you want to grow from there. Reach out to people who are currently doing this work — even a cold email can open a door.

And the limits on what a county can do vary from state to state. In Texas, this makes litigation harder to pursue in some cases. That’s where legislative advocacy comes in. Can you approach the city council, state delegates, or the state legislature? Can you plug into legislative advocacy efforts that already exist? One challenge I ran into was that the community simply didn’t know the county attorney’s office could do certain things in the first place — so part of the job is making that visible.

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Bernardo Cruz is the Assistant County Attorney-Affirmative Litigation Attorney at the El Paso County Attorney’s Office. He was a 2023 Affirmative Leaders Fellow.

Learn more about our Affirmative Leaders Fellowship and how to apply