Tom Perez

Some Lesser Known Facts About Thomas Perez

• Tom Perez hit the headlines when Barack Obama nominated him as the nation’s 26th Secretary of Labor in July 2013. Since then he has held many prominent positions including senior advisor to the president of the United States and director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.

• He has served under five presidents (two Republican and three Democratic) – Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.

• Tom, the youngest of five children of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, grew up in Buffalo, New York.

  

• After World War II, his father enlisted in the U.S. Army and earned U.S. citizenship. Before moving to Buffalo, his father worked as a doctor in Atlanta.

• Tom’s father worked as a doctor in Atlanta and later moved to Buffalo, where he worked as a physician at a Veterans Affairs hospital.

• His father died when he was 12 years old.

• In 1930, his mother arrived in the United States after her father, Rafael Brache, was appointed as the Dominican Republic’s Ambassador to the United States.

• All his siblings followed their father’s profession to become physicians. Perez decided to pursue a different career after he fainted while watching one of his brothers perform surgery.

• Tom studied at Christ the King in Amherst, New York, until the 8th grade and later attended Canisius High School, an all-boys Jesuit school in Buffalo, where he graduated in 1979.

  

• While studying at Brown University, Tom joined the Sigma Chi Fraternity.

• Apart from Pell Grants and scholarships, Perez covered his college expenses by working in a warehouse and as a garbage collector.

• During his college days, Perez worked for the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights.

• While studying at Harvard, Perez worked as a law clerk for Attorney General Edwin Meese.

• After graduating from Harvard, he became a civil rights attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and served as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights under Attorney General Janet Reno.

• Before serving in the Department of Justice, Perez worked as a law clerk for the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.

• In the final years of Bill Clinton’s administration, Perez worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the Director of the Office for Civil Rights.

• In 2002, Perez became the first Latino member of the Montgomery County Council. He later became its president in 2004 and served until 2006.

• From 2001 to 2007, he taught in the clinical law and the law and health program at the University of Maryland School of Law.

• In January 2007, Governor Martin O’Malley appointed him Maryland Secretary of Labor.

• In 2010, the Brown Alumni Association honored his civil rights work with the William Rogers Award.

• In 2014, Brpwn University honoured him with an honorary Doctorate of Laws.

  

• In the 2016 Presidential Election, he was considered one of the most probable running mates of Hillary Clinton; however, he later campaigned for the Clinton-Kaine ticket.