By David M. Greenwald
Executive Editor
Davis, CA – A few weeks ago, we got an announcement that Clara Levers, a Deputy Attorney General, announced she was running in March for the vacant Yolo County Superior Court judgeship vacated by the retirement of Judge Rosenberg at the end of the year.
According to her campaign, for the past 15 years Levers has worked as a Deputy Attorney General, serving in the Criminal Division, Appeals, Writs, and Trials Section.
Having covered a few judicial races, you don’t get a lot of details about the candidates because they are very limited by judicial canon.
However, there is a public record that can fill in some gaps—and a press story helps us immensely with Levers.
In 2018, there was a story by KCRA that Clara Levers along with Maggy Krell—a former Deputy AG who ran for DA in Sacramento and then became the lead attorney for Planned Parenthood, went to the Port Isabel Detention Center to “provide translation services and legal aid for separated families.”
“The stories of family separation and the horrific images of children being torn from their parents, and as a mother and attorney it was unacceptable—it is unacceptable to me,” Levers said after returning to Sacramento.
According to KCRA, “her role during the trip was working with the Catholic Charities of McAllen as they provided direct services to migrants who had just arrived at the border. Then, she worked with the Texas Civil Rights Project and performed intake of detained parents who were separated from their children.”
“They were taking accounts from those people, interviewing them to see how they had come to be separated from their children and then to try to link them up with attorneys to assist them to get to their kids,” she explained.
Meanwhile, Krell served as an attorney fighting “to reunite a Honduran mother and her 6-year-old son.”
Planned Parenthood sent her to the border, “believing this kind of casework is a part of the group’s core mission.”
“We believe in health access for everyone, no matter what language they speak or where they’re from or what they look like,” Krell said. “And for this woman and her son, they were being deprived of that [in Honduras]. We were also acutely aware of medical experts and what they’ve said about the trauma and what is caused by separating kids from their parents.”
The article noted, “Krell said she now represents the Honduran woman who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in search of asylum. She was fleeing violence in her home country, according to Krell.”
“She was subjected to very serious abuse and violence from a young age, and she was abused, frankly, with impunity,” Krell said. “So, she was escaping that violence, taking her son with her to try and find a better life.”
At the time, more than 2300 minors had been separated from their families crossing the border “under a Trump administration ‘zero-tolerance’ policy.”
“It was surprising to me that the federal government refuses to distinguish between detainees who have come to this country fearing crises at home,” Levers said.
She also said “the experience was not just overwhelming for the detainees but for the attorneys who appeared confused by the process.”
That confusion, she said, “was exacerbated by the federal government not communicating well with its various entities.
“It seems at the time that we were there that Border Patrol, Department of Homeland Security, ICE, the Department of Justice U.S. Attorney branch—no one is speaking to each other. They’re just not talking to each other,” Levers said. “So, it’s impossible to get information about cases and they, too, are overwhelmed with the amount of people that they’re processing. It’s a very challenging, and at times, frustrating system.”
That definitely gives her a different perspective from most of the judges we have in Yolo County and it will be worth watching to see who else emerges prior to the March primary.
