Teresa Sánchez-Gordon was just a girl when federal immigration agents came for her.
She and her mother had been on their way to drop off a jacket at the dry cleaners when they spotted a group of suspicious-looking men, watching intently from down the street.
Sánchez-Gordon remembers her heart pounding with dread that the men were there to haul them away for being in the country without papers. Her mother grabbed her and they beelined back to their house. From their hiding place in a closet, they could hear loud knocks on their front door, Sánchez-Gordon recalled.
The agents’ demeanor turned “cordial,” Sánchez-Gordon suspects, only after her light-skinned father let them in.
“Dad could pass — he had blond hair, blue eyes,” she said in an interview earlier this year. “So when he opened the door and these agents are there, they just assumed he was an American citizen.”
Looking back decades later, Sánchez-Gordon, 74, said that that experience would shape her views and career. In her new role as president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, she will help guide a Los Angeles Police Department that faces questions about how to handle the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign.
Sánchez-Gordon said she recognizes the fear and desperation felt by the immigrants even while living in so-called sanctuary cities such as Los Angeles, which try to shield immigrants from deportation unless they have committed serious crimes.
“Even my housekeeper today said, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen, but I’m even afraid to go outside and go to the market, because I’ve got the ‘nopal en la frente,’” she said, pointing to her forehead while using a popular expression for someone who appears to be of Mexican descent. “So my perspective, as an East L.A. girl: I’m horrified, I’m angry.”
After her close brush with deportation as a child, Sánchez-Gordon eventually gained citizenship. An early adulthood steeped in Latino activism led to a career in law, first as a federal public defender and later a Los Angeles County judge. She retired in 2017 after two decades on the bench and was appointed last October by Mayor Karen Bass to lead the Police Commission.
Much like a corporate board of directors, the commission sets LAPD policies, approves its multibillion-dollar annual budget and scrutinizes shootings and other serious uses of force to determine whether the officers acted appropriately.
Sánchez-Gordon was born in the western Mexico state of Jalisco. Her father, a butcher by trade, emigrated and found work as a bracero picking crops in fields up and down the West Coast. He sent for his family when Sánchez-Gordon was 3. She recalled how her mother bundled her and her siblings into a bus that took them to the border, where they hired a “coyote,” or human smuggler, to get the rest of the way. They eventually settled in East L.A.
The government granted a path to legal status to laborers like Sánchez-Gordon’s father that no longer exists. In recent months, she said she has been troubled by “the way that people are being treated and the separation of families in our community … and this level of hatred toward the immigrants, the people that sustain this city.”
Of particular concern for Sánchez-Gordon is the perception that LAPD officers are working closely with federal immigration agents.
“The optics of the military being here, the optics of the National Guard being in our city, the optics of our community seeing the LAPD in some of these raids is troubling,” she said.
Sánchez-Gordon said she is open to revisiting “certain language” in Special Order 40, the policy that bars officers from stopping people for the sole purpose of asking them about their citizenship status. But she doesn’t think it necessarily needs to be overhauled in order to add more protections.
At commission meetings, she has pushed harder than her colleagues to get answers from LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell about the department’s response to the immigration raids and the protests that ensued — but stopped short of openly challenging the chief.
Sánchez-Gordon replaces Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent who is now a security official at USC, as president of the commission. Southers may still remain on the body, pending a decision by the City Council.
The commission has been down a member for months, since former member Maria “Lou” Calanche resigned so she could run for City Council. A lack of quorum has led to the cancellation of roughly a third of its meetings this year. To fill Calanche’s seat, the mayor has nominated Jeff Skobin, vice president at Galpin Motors Inc. and the son of a former longtime police commissioner.
Activists have long denounced commissioners as being puppets of the Police Department who are disconnected from the everyday struggles of Angelenos. Week in and week out, some of the board’s most vocal critics show up to its meetings to blast commissioners for ignoring the threat of mass surveillance, hiding their affiliations with special interest groups and failing to curb police shootings, which have risen to 34 from 21 at this time last year.
Sánchez-Gordon said she was surprised at first by the intensity of the meetings, but that she also understands the desire for change. Early in her career, she organized to improve conditions for people who had moved to the U.S. from other countries as part of the AFL-CIO’s Labor Immigrant Assistance Project.
She got her first taste of politics volunteering for the City Council campaign of Edward R. Roybal, who would go on to serve 15 terms in Congress. She later enrolled at the People’s College of Law, an unaccredited law school in downtown, where she rubbed shoulders with other Latino political luminaries such as Gil Cedillo and future L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
She credits conversations around the breakfast table with her husband and father-in-law, both prominent civil rights lawyers, with inspiring her to pursue a law career. After working for several years as a federal public defender, she decided to run for judge at the prodding of a mentor. Like many activists of her generation, she thought that the best way to effect change was from the inside.
Since retiring from the bench, she has continued to work as an arbitrator and is a partner at a local injury law firm.
Sánchez-Gordon said her to-do list on the commission includes understanding the department’s ongoing struggles with recruiting new officers, and getting the department ready for the upcoming World Cup and Olympic Games. Once she gets settled, she said she intends to spend more time outside the commission’s meetings attending community events.
Given the recent rise in police shootings, she said it’s also important that officers have the right training and less-lethal options so they don’t immediately resort to using their guns.
She sees her new role as an extension of the work she’s been doing her whole career: “I just see it as what I’ve always done as a judge: You ask questions.”
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