{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreieraeaw6c2kurhiekhftjmqgr4x7tv4b4furgpp4nomtypbi4rjky",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:brbfxknpinpcv53otqnq7pxe/app.bsky.feed.post/3mkg3tzkyq632"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreib2uj3mz2hjoyvolv47jm4xljyl5gej6423mbp6g7dmdt375mq3ty"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/png",
    "size": 977128
  },
  "description": "\"I grew up with such values instilled in me of being curious, critical thinking, but also civility, respect and hard work. That's what I've carried throughout my career today, and that's what I plan to carry to the bench.\"",
  "path": "/judicial-candidate-andrea-garcias-interview-transcript/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-26T17:36:45.000Z",
  "site": "https://ielaw.news",
  "tags": [
    "election guide",
    "here",
    "‘La Prenda’"
  ],
  "textContent": "The Inland Empire has only one judicial race in the upcoming June 2 election. Three candidates are vying for election to a single seat in Riverside County.\n\nAndrea Garcia specializes in immigration law at the San Bernardino Public Defender’s Office. She joined the State Bar in 2007, and practiced immigration law, creating her own firm, Garcia Immigration Law Group, in 2016. She was recruited to the Riverside County Public Defender's Office in 2018, to create their first immigration unit. She joined the San Bernardino Public Defender’s Office, as their first attorney focused on post-conviction relief for foreign-born clients, in 2023. In addition to representing clients, she provides immigration and constitutional legal advice to public defenders. She volunteers in San Bernardino’s mobile defense program and homeless courts. She has taught at the La Verne University College of Law, and Monterey College of Law, and provides training in criminal defense of foreign-born people throughout the United States. She is a mother, and lives with her family in Riverside.\n\nAdditional reporting on the election can be found at the election guide. The transcript of the interview with Jennifer Loflin can be found here, and with Michelle Paradise here. These conversations are lightly edited.\n\n**Q: Tell me a bit about what you did before you became the lawyer, before you joined the ball.**\n\n**Garcia:** Before I was a lawyer—I still love to travel—but I loved to travel a lot. So while I was in undergrad, I studied abroad in France, because my grade school that I went to kindergarten through the end of high school taught us French. I did spend a semester there studying which really triggered the travel bug. So after that, I ended up, after undergrad, going to Bangkok, Thailand, and teaching English there for a year, and then going into law school after that year.\n\n**Q: You spent some time in Oaxaca, was it?**\n\n**Garcia:** I did, I did. I spent two years after graduating law school in 2005 in Oaxaca, Mexico, which is in southern Mexico. At the time, when I graduated, I took a one way ticket. I bought a one way ticket to Mexico while I was waiting for my bar exam results. The plan was to backpack for six months as a post bar trip that a lot of people did at least back in the day when I graduated. To be truthful, I didn't even have enough money to purchase both ways. So I ended up staying in Mexico for two years, where I was able to learn how to speak Spanish fluently. Living in a culture and immersed in a language not your own, you really learn how to speak the language fluently. Volunteering with a human rights organization and a human rights attorney named Yesica Sanchez Maya in an international Mexican nonprofit called Don Miguel Mexicano de los Derechos Humanos. Attorney Maya no longer works there, she started her own nonprofit, but they focused on rates of femicide, domestic violence against women, government overreach, government abuse, and she would take data and present it before the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, which at the time was in Washington, D.C.\n\n**Q: How do you find your way to work with her?**\n\n**Garcia:** It's just by luck. You know, in law school, I went to DePaul College of Law in Chicago, and I got my JD degree, but I also engaged in a specialty of international law and international human rights law. So I was on the lookout, as well, for an experience to sort of use that knowledge I had learned in law school in a real life, practical sense. While I was in Oaxaca, after about seven, eight months, I was looking for a place to volunteer and work, and one of the organizations recommending me to go interview and talk to her about what she was doing, and she took me on.\n\n**Q: Going back a bit, why did you decide to become an attorney?**\n\n**Garcia:** The funny answer is, I didn't have any attorneys in my family growing up. The attorneys that I saw were going to be on TV and movies. However, there was the movie called Silence of the Lambs, if you remember, from the 90s. I loved that movie. My freshman year of college, I took this really cool class, it was like career pathways. We just studied on how to build a career in different ways. How to be successful in college, but also how to set goals. We had one assignment of ‘write and research your dream career.’ And I was 18, and I thought, I want to be a forensic psychologist. I actually did a whole paper on it, and to become a forensic psychologist you go to law school and you have a Criminal Justice background and sometimes even a master's. So, as I went through undergrad, I kept the Law School part.\n\n**Q: You wanted to be more on the prosecutorial side of things in the beginning, gathering evidence against people, right?**\n\n**Garcia:** Well, I was more interested in the mind of people. I don't know if I would say prosecutorial–probably not. I was just interested in what motivated people behind their decisions, and that's what really interested me in the forensic part about it. But as I progressed through my undergraduate studies and decided on political science, the world began to open up to me about the different uses of a law degree and all the different types of careers. I actually had an amazing experience besides being able to study abroad in France, because I had studied French for so long and it was my other major for a while. I ended up minoring in it, but it was something that I extensively dedicated time to, and even had classes that were like ‘The First Literature in French in the 1700s.’ I had a writing intensive course in French back in college. I did a program in Washington, D.C. called the Justice Program, where I interned with a superior court judge in Washington, D.C., and I also interned with the French Embassy during part of this program. In lieu of regular college classes, we had one teacher who was a lawyer. She was a corporate lawyer, and she basically arranged all these trips and speakers. We would do papers on the FBI, we went to the FBI place, we visited penitentiaries from minimum security, all the way to maximum security and death row, we visited death row inmates. So this semester covered all aspects of basically different legal careers. We had people from the immigration agency, executive Office of Immigration Review, which houses immigration courts, come and talk to us. Then we went over there to their agency, because we were in Washington, D.C., where everything was. So that's kind of how I got inspired even more to go to law school.\n\n**Q: Who was that judge that you interned for?**\n\n**Garcia:** Her name was Judge Patricia Broderick, and she was on the DC Superior Court for several decades. When I started to intern for her, she only had, maybe five years as a judge, but it was an amazing experience.\n\n**Q: What are some of the biggest lessons you learned just watching her adjudicate cases?**\n\n**Garcia:** Her calendar was interesting, and at the time, I had no legal experience and had not even been in a courtroom because I was still a student, but the way they had it set up at the time I was there, is that she would have a split calendar. She was hearing felony cases, and then on some mornings, she heard dependency and neglect cases, which is a different area of law. What I learned is that superior court judges need to be able to pivot from one area to the next, because she had two very different areas of law that she was handling in one week. I was raised to be respectful and civil, but the court staff and the clerks at the window, you need to, you know, always be respectful, because they're going to be the ones to help you the most with everything. I worked a lot with her judicial assistant who would send me down and, like, run errands and stuff around the courthouse and do things. She was like, ‘make sure you get more bees with honey.’\n\n**Q: Who were some of the other people you met through that program when you were in DC, that kind of caused you to go the path that you went?**\n\n**Garcia:** I had two roommates that were assigned, randomized, because we lived on this special campus. I think my professor was the most interesting. She was just fabulous, and she worked full time as well. I think she had taken a break, because it was a lot. She was probably the main person that truly inspired me, and then, Judge Patricia Broderick. I would also say my classmates at the time, because in this program, people came from all over the country. I met people from California, because I'm from the Midwest, from Kansas City, and from the East Coast, the South. I had a really good friend from Georgia. All of us were interested in legal careers, so I think together as a community, we sort of inspired each other.\n\n**Q: Your first job as an attorney would be the work that you were doing down in Oaxaca?**\n\n**Garcia:** I was a volunteer, I was not licensed to practice in Mexico. My first job as an attorney was when I returned from Mexico, fluent in Spanish, and I began a career in immigration law. I am an immigration lawyer.\n\n**Q: Did you immediately create the Garcia Immigration Group, or did you work at other firms prior to that?**\n\n**Garcia:** I worked for other people for several years prior to starting my own firm. Mostly in Los Angeles, actually. When I returned from Mexico, I did live in Kansas City, just for a short while, and to get my bearings. I had passed the California bar, and then when I was able to buy a vehicle, I drove across the country with a dear friend, and I ended up finding a job in Los Angeles at an immigration firm in LA.\n\n**Q: We were talking earlier about how you passed the California bar despite not going to a California law school, and the kind of different difficulties that you had with that.**\n\n**Garcia:** I mean, I don't know if difficult would be the word, but it was different because I went to law school in Chicago. So, you know, even specifically, my law school didn't really study for any bar, because Chicago is such a large city, The other people in my class and in the law school, many of them were going to stay in Chicago or Illinois, but many of them came from other states as well, because such a huge city attracts a lot of people. So we didn't study for any particular bar. I took a family law class, and I do recall that we did have our Horn Book focused on Illinois family law, because the state law, family law, wherever you're at. So it was different, because I can't speak to what people who go to law school in California at the time I was in law school, but I do know that certain law schools now that I have worked will teach aspects of California Bar. I had none of that training before I took California Bar.\n\n**Q: The California bar is one of the most difficult bars in the country, so it's kind of a testament to Europe that you were able to pass that. In the immigration firms that you were working at prior to starting your own, who are some of the partners that you worked with that were the most influential to you developing your title and just legal ideas.**\n\n**Garcia:** That's going to be an attorney named Vera Weisz. She's in Los Angeles. She's a legend. We call her ‘The Godfather’, ‘The Godmother’ of immigration law in LA. She's won countless awards. I had already been an immigration attorney for several years when I began to work for her, and doing a lot of high volume, fast paced work. When I began to work with her, it was still fast paced and high volume to an extent, but she had been practicing–she started in late 70s, and it was 2010, you know, for decades through the different transmutations of immigration law that had happened. Her wealth of knowledge was just enormous. She basically taught me how to look at the law, immigration law, specifically, while doing a handstand, because the way she applied the law to her cases, and the way she was so successful and so dynamic and so interesting in the way she handled cases. It changed the way I looked at cases and the way I practice law.\n\n**Q: Then you started Garcia Immigration Group. What year was that?**\n\n**Garcia:** That was 2016.\n\n**Q: Why did you know, go out on your own, and decide to start your own firm like that?**\n\n**Garcia:** I should probably talk about the second most influential person, and he may even be more. An attorney, Michael Mehr. I worked with him in Santa Cruz. He's a nationally known expert in the intersection between criminal and immigration law. He also had started practicing law in the 70s. He writes a chapter in the continuing education of the bar, Chapter 52, ‘Criminal Law Practice and Procedure.’ I ended up working with him, because I wanted to learn more about the intersection between criminal and immigration law and specifically what we call Post-Conviction Relief. I changed gears a little bit at first, when I started to work with him. I still did regular immigration law, which is defending people from deportation. But I worked with him, and then me and my husband wanted to buy a house, and we were going to have another child at the time, and so he basically inspired me to create a firm here in the Inland Empire modeled after him, a private firm that not just represented people in the federal immigration side, but also specialized in our foreign born persons who have criminal histories and representing them in the federal side when they're getting deported for prior convictions. That was 2016.\n\n**Q: Was there anything like that, any other films that were approaching it from that angle, that he was approaching it from in the Inland Empire?**\n\n**Garcia:** in the Inland Empire, at the time, no. Subsequent to me, someone who I met when I moved here, Jonathan Mendoza, who's now a judge here opened his own firm to specialize in that area, but at the time, he was a public defender, and that was his passion project, and what he wanted to do. There was a firm, and there are now persons who do specialize in the intersection of criminal and immigration law. I don't know of any at the time, any persons who were immigration attorneys who practiced all across California and the country who then merged into the criminal and immigration world. I do know that there are, oftentimes, criminal defense attorneys who then pick up part of the immigration side. I think I was unique and rare in that aspect in the Inland Empire.\n\n**Q: Before you started that firm, can you talk about the foreign-born people in the Inland Empire who have faced criminal charges, and how that lack of representation might have negatively affected them?**\n\n**Garcia:** To answer that question, the question being, to not have a resource to help persons who are not born in the United States, who are facing criminal charges or have convictions, yes. To kind of fast forward, I know you're probably going to ask a question about this, when I had my practice here in the Inland Empire, I still represented people in the federal realm, in federal court. Immigration courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is the appellate court in the ninth circuit, which is the highest federal court we have here in California, it's right below the Supreme Court. Every region has its own circuit court federally, but because foreign-born persons facing crimes or having been convicted of crimes need special types of advice and representation that sometimes traditional defense will not cover. That's how I merged into public defense and public service – taking the knowledge I had from a decade of practicing immigration law, which is a conglomerate of so many things – of representing children and victims of domestic violence and persons facing deportation, and just love stories. Just couples who fell in love. One of them was born in a different country, and one is born here in the United States. And helping them go through the process so they can stay together and create that future together. With that bundle of knowledge, I was asked to join public defense here in the Inland Empire and I started at the Riverside County Public Defenders, where they had not had a formal position prior to my joining an immigration public defender, essentially, they called it an immigration specialist public defender. In the state criminal courts, when a person who is not born in the United States is facing a charge and they end up pleading guilty to something they could face lifelong, permanent consequences to that conviction that can never be overcome in federal immigration law. So the goal of having my role here is to make sure we're telling them specifically about that, not just ‘You're going to get deported’, and navigating alternative plea bargains, because in criminal proceedings, I know trials get all of the attention, and they're very exciting, right? But 95% of criminal cases resolve in plea bargaining. This is what's happening. In the plea bargaining, when we are representing persons who are not born in the United States, we look for alternative schemes that can satisfy the prosecution, working openly and very cordially with the prosecution to work out a deal that pays the price to the criminal justice system in any harm caused, but will avoid what we call Mandatory Immigration Consequences, which, in plain language means that if the person has lawful status here, they get to keep it, or if they are going to face deportation, they are able to still fight in Immigration Court to try to stay here.\n\n**Q: How would a defendant be able to make a deal like that? Is it your normal contender? How is that possible?**\n\n**Garcia:** In a criminal proceeding, the defendant does have a lot of rights, and so they can have the right to proceed to trial, and there's many steps before they even get to the trial aspect. So any plea, a plea of no contender or no contest, or guilty, are all the same. But when someone enters a plea bargain, regardless of where they're born, it's usually because they're getting a benefit from that, and the prosecution is getting a benefit. That's why the deal is reached, and that's why we have appointed counsel in criminal proceedings for defendants who cannot afford an attorney, so that sometimes very complicated plea bargaining can occur that an average person may not totally understand the parameters of. A judge, their role is not to engage in the plea bargaining with them. So to answer your question, yeah, it's usually done because both parties are coming together in negotiations.\n\n**Q: You joined the Riverside Public Defender's Office because they created the position for you, because they were trying to come into compliance with a law that said that they had to provide a special infrastructure to you. Is that correct?**\n\n**Garcia:** Yeah, they created the position for the community and for the non-citizen population, but I was the right person at the time to take that job, and it was offered to me, and to comply with federal and state law. So we have federal law, a Supreme Court case called Padilla V. Kentucky. The decision had come out almost 10 years prior to the creation of the immigration position in Riverside County Public Defenders. It said that defense counsel must meet these constitutional obligations in providing effective representation for foreign-born clients. Which is to provide investigation, research, and specific alternative convictions, essentially, that this foreign born person could plead to to allow a pathway if consistent with that person's goals. Not everybody wants to stay here, but there's this informed decision making, and there is a deep and meaningful discussion between defense counsel and their client about the immigration issue, and it's based in fact and law and the application of the law to the facts. Then we have state laws that the legislator passed that basically doubled down on that. In 1987, California had its own case law called People v Soriano that placed a duty on defense counsel to do something similar to Padilla V Kentucky. Here in California our defense attorneys have had this duty since 1987, but it was slightly different and it rests in the California State Constitution, about the provision on effect, effective representation.\n\n**Q: What are some of the lessons you learned from setting up a program like this, a program that the county didn't have before and that the county had to do in certain ways to comply with these kinds of previous rulings? That's not something that's easy to do for the people who are listening. There's a lot of things that you have to comply with. So what are some of the lessons you learned from that process?**\n\n**Garcia:** Number one, humility – and listening. Listening to my defense attorneys, who taught me so much. It's a different language, criminal law and immigration law. Being able to not know something coming from a decade of practicing Immigration Law, and at that time, when I transitioned from private practice of solely immigration law, I was already a Certified Specialist by the State Bar California. My role as an immigration public defender when I first started, was called an expert. But at the time I was then learning criminal law from within the criminal justice system. Now, of course, I was aware of it, and had been applying criminal law from the immigration perspective, so there were lots of things I understood. In criminal incrimination law, which was the intersection between criminal immigration law, we're already looking at jury instructions and case precedents and statutes to determine the immigration consequences, because it's a reading between criminal state law and immigration law that I was doing in the federal system. But the way you do it in the state criminal justice system is totally different. One reason is because it's preventative, mostly in the criminal justice system to prevent that, whereas in the immigration system, we're already dealing with what could be deemed called a disaster and trying to fight against it or unwind it.\n\n**Q: You mentioned that you were selected as the best qualified person for that role. Can you talk a bit more about that selection process, who chose you and what qualities you think you had that set you above the other potential candidates?**\n\n**Garcia:** They say location, timing, and luck plays a lot. I was here in Riverside, and I had a reputation already of being a pretty fierce removal defense attorney, and also very adept from the immigration side of analyzing the intersection between defending persons with criminal convictions or criminal histories. I had already created and taught the course contemporary issues and civil rights, specifically identifying immigration consequences. I had this background in this record already, so Kathy Brady, who was basically the Head of the Immigration Legal Resource Center up in the Bay Area, and also a giant in the legal field, generally. I had known her through my work with Michael Mayer, my former boss, and he drafted legislation, so I was part of that process with him. I met her, I saw her at a conference, I told her I moved to Riverside and I had this firm now, and she said they were looking for someone. At that point, she invited me, this was 2018, before I even became a public defender – she invited me to basically get on a call with Riverside County Public Defenders. There were very eager leaders in the office that wanted to get a handle on the immigration issue in the criminal justice system, and make sure they were obliging with their duties, and also making sure they want to do the best for their clients. I was on this pro bono providing advice on this call with Riverside County Public Defenders, but they also had other public defenders offices. Most offices had already had an immigration expert in their office at that time in 2018. They would also volunteer their time to provide advice and assist the Riverside County Public Defenders. By this process of getting to know the public defenders in that office, and by Kathy Brady and leaders in this legal field, I became a top candidate for the position.\n\n**Q: Was it three years that you spent in Riverside doing this job?**\n\n**Garcia:** Three and a half years.\n\n**Q: Was it more of managing the cases or more of setting up the program and creating internal policies? How would you describe that split?**\n\n**Garcia:** It was totally different, I went from a boots on the ground immigration attorney doing what we call merits hearings, which are immigration trials, they are basically a bench trial without a jury, handling all my own cases, screening clients to being in a consulting position in the public defender's office. My main contact with people were public defenders, which again, allowed me to learn so much and learn criminal law from them, but then make it so I could advise on the immigration consequences. It's so different, and plus the shock, because I would be like, ‘Okay, they should probably keep that strike offense,’ which is a terrible offense in criminal law because it can set you up for extra prison time in the future. But certain strike offenses were better for immigration, and if that person wants to keep their lawful permanent residence, they might need to do something like that. In this case, you probably really should go to trial, and they’re like ‘But it’s just silly…why are we going to trial? I have a good deal.’ That's a terrible disposition, it's not like a life case would be like stealing a car or something. They may have a traditionally, objectively great deal from the criminal law perspective, but from immigration, if they weren't able to plea bargain around it, they need to do the more traditional defense.\n\n**Q: Can you tell me a bit about the move to the San Bernardino public defender's office?**\n\n**Garcia:** Back in 2022, the state of California provided a bunch of grant money to public defenders offices. Part of that money was to create a program to basically represent people in post conviction relief, which is undoing a plea, and always generally redoing it when there is a constitutional error in that criminal proceeding. San Bernardino County had already had an immigration attorney since, I believe around 2009 at least part time, so they had already been doing the advising. I was informed about the position, and their actual immigration attorney, Her name is Nada Higuera, who's amazing, was the me that I was in Riverside, but in San Bernardino. My understanding is that they wanted the office San Bernardino wanted to get into the post conviction world, but that was just too much. You know, one person cannot be advising 130 public defenders and litigating, researching, and writing motions and litigating them. So I went on board with San Bernardino. They also promoted me, which was awesome. I had a partner, I call her, my partner in crime, Narita, so it wasn't just me. That motivated me so I could then transition fully into criminal law by actually, what I do now. I have my own cases, my own caseload that deals with post conviction relief. From the litigation aspect, it's double litigation. I look at the case from an immigration and criminal perspective, and I have to identify if there's an error or not an error, and then fit it into the elements of the specific types of legal motions that will only work to vacate, meaning remove a conviction for immigration, and not be a lifelong penalty for them. Then apply criminal law to it because it's a criminal law that I'm working with, and then litigate that motion, and then once it's vacated, if we don't have a deal before, which I always try and work with my prosecutors, who have a very close relationship with San Bernardino County, tt's a specific unit, but it's an appeals unit, then the case is open from the beginning again and marches towards trial. So it is a double litigation than a regular. It could be litigated to undo it and then litigating in the case again to a trial.\n\n**Q: How many cases do you manage? What is your caseload there?**\n\n**Garcia:** Currently, the post conviction cases I've probably done this year – I don't even remember in 2026, I'm thinking about like the past year, – 70 to 80 motions or more. A lot of them are stipulated. We work it out, which is a lot of legal work in the upfront, right? But in terms of going to court, we're not doing a big show. We've worked out all the kinks, me and the prosecution. In terms of ideas, I mean, these are 1000s of cases that we're advising on, but actually there's three of us now so on the advising side. So it's not just me, and it’s not just me doing post conviction. We hired a second immigration post conviction attorney last year. They replaced me in the grant. Now the other thing is, we have a second person, still handling post conviction cases, but I also am doing traditional line work. I do our jail arraignments, and then we have mobile outreach to the community. We have Mobile Court, we have Homeless Court. So I also am engaged in those programs and our record clearing services when we go into the communities to dig legal fares. This is work helping everyone, and it's not just someone who's not born in the United States. It's the work of public defenders affecting the community positively, and I think, helping to prevent further, further crime.\n\n**Q: From your time as defendant to any public defender across both counties, can you talk about some of the cases that you're most proud of?**\n\n**Garcia:** I'm going to go back to my early career on the first 10 years, because I've been a public defender for eight years, but I was in immigration training for 10 years. A case that I'm most proud of, which reflects many cases that I did this way, was an 11 year old girl was smuggled in by traffickers after her parents had died of HIV complications and drug addiction. She was caught at the border and placed in a detention center for children. Her grandma, who lived in the Los Angeles area, was able to get her and take her back, but she was facing deportation back to Central America, where she was from, and so I represented her twofold. I went through the state proceedings, so state court, not immigration court, where I was able to obtain a special type of guardianship for her grandmother to become her guardian in the United States so she could have a home that also opened up the door for her to remain in the United States as an abused, abandoned and neglected child. With that state order, with the guardianship, I was able to fight her deportation, and we won, and she became a lawful resident today. There were many cases like that I did for children, before I even was a public defender, where I straddled the state system, court system and the federal system. We were going in both courts at the same time. I have another case from my early years, not actually that early, but he was a Coachella resident, and actually he became a client in LA, but the federal government and the immigration judgment immigration prosecutor were asserting that he had already been deported and that he was not a lawful resident anymore. He saw me in court one day, and he came up to me and he told me a story, and I was about to go have my first child and going on maternity leave. I always think, ‘Oh, he saw how big and pregnant I was, she's gonna get a long continuance.’ I questioned his story, because he's like, ‘I'm a lawful permanent resident, this is a mistake they're making.’ I was like, “Okay, well, we're gonna continue. Let's do some investigation.’ I pulled all his records, and it was a mistake. The federal government had deported him under the wrong set of laws. They deported him in the early 90s. They had order, and they considered him an undocumented person, but he was a lawful permanent resident. Now, years later, they're trying to kick him out of the country based on an error and the immigration court was ready just to close the hearing and just take him out. But I fought the case, the air came to light. You know, light cleanses everything.The Department of Homeland Security prosecutor agreed, the judge agreed when they saw the facts of the case in the law, and they cleared that air. Today he's still living here in the Inland Empire happily. He didn't get deported, and he was right. It was a mistake, and I'm so glad that I was able to help him with that. So those are my early years of private practice in public defense, there's a lot of success. I feel like post-conviction relief, what I do for people who are committed for crimes almost feels like a magical moment, because with my clients, usually, the conviction is from decades ago, but they're still facing the consequences. I'm going to talk about a Vietnamese refugee client who had some issues with shoplifting in the 80s, and they're all misdemeanors, but because you can get so many, you can get a felony for it, because it's repeat offenders. She had lived through the Vietnam War, lived in a refugee camp, and lived through domestic violence when she came to the United States with her husband. She raised all her children on her own, left, and then in her elderly years, was a lawful permanent resident, was able to bring card. But she could never become a citizen, and she could face deportation for about three shoplifting incidents she had back in the 80s and early 90s. She wasn't advised of the immigration consequences of those misdemeanors. Especially for back in the day defense attorneys, misdemeanor is not like the most serious case. But for a non-citizen, this is a life and death case for her, because she was going to be facing deportation back to Vietnam. So this is a success story, because I was able to undo the pleas and even get some of them dismissed, and she's, lawfully living here today. Not facing permanent exile for behavior she already paid the price for in the criminal justice system by doing her time, paying her fines, and avoiding the hammer of the federal immigration system. The laws don't have any discretion making authority on the federal immigration side in that situation that she was facing without undoing the police.\n\n**Q: Who was your favorite judge in immigration court, or in federal court?**\n\n**Garcia:** In immigration or federal court, I would probably have to say Judge Ashley Tabaddor. She’s a superior court judge now in LA, she just got appointed, but she was an immigration judge for a long time. She was an expert in asylum law. Oh, she denied so many of my cases early on. She is so smart and wonderful, she presided over one of my cases that actually turned into a documentary. I had a client, I took it as a pro bono case from kids in need of defense. My client was kidnapped, abducted and raped and held for ransom, and her family sent her to the country because, after they were able to get her release, she still faced death threats and extortion. They wanted more money, so the family sent her to the United States, where she was processed by federal immigration and given and asserted her right to claim asylum here because she feared death or bodily harm in her home country. I did a lot of pro bono work as a private attorney, so I took her case pro bono, and we fought it for two or three years during that time period Basically, Judge Tabaddor was our judge. Immigration cases can take a long time, but ended up being profiled in the documentary because I was looking for an expert witness, and by word of mouth, this case came to the attention of a filmmaker in New York who was putting together a three part story on femicide, and he followed us around for about a year until the end of the case, which which we won. The court didn't know that this documentary was going on, neither did the prosecution. It was this really, like moment by moment, like, what's going to happen, type of thing. And Judge Ashley Tabaddor was our judge, and I do look up to her, not just because that case was granted, but she actually took the time. She was going to grant something called Convention Against Torture, but she was the one who sort of prodded and pushed the Department of Homeland Security prosecutor to kind of let down the sales on such an aggressive prosecution and allow us to do asylum relief. My argument to her because, there was a legal issue there, there's a higher burden for asylum than Convention Against Torture, I don't want to get into the whole rigor mortis of all that. Basically, because of Judge Ashley Tabaddor, I remember it was like the first time that I felt really empowered. Like, ‘No, I'm going to go for this for my client, we need to work out this deal on this end,’ because by getting asylum, my teenage client was going to be able to have a pathway to citizenship, whereas Convention Against Torture, she would have always been a second class citizen, because legally, you just get protection from not returning, but you don't get a way to ever become a citizen. My argument to the prosecutor who accepted it was like ‘She's so young, she has a life of being a second class citizen. Let's just do asylum. I know you don't agree. We may not have met our total burden, but we can agree on it,’ and we actually did. Yeah, she's a citizen today.\n\n**Q: What's the name of the documentary and the filmmaker?**\n\n**Garcia:** It’s called ‘La Prenda’ and the filmmaker is Jean Cosne.\n\n**Q: What about in County Court, who’s your favorite judge at the local level?**\n\n**Garcia:** Two of them. Judge Michael Knish, he's in San Bernardino. I just love his style. He is the kindest person – he could be delivering the most terrible decision, but it almost feels warm and fuzzy, because he's just so patient and he listens, and his courtroom is just very balanced. And then Judge Joni Sinclair, and this is because I've had a lot of cases in the past with her, and she is very measured. She listens to both sides. You know, it's kind of cool. She also worked in Riverside County and San Bernardino County Library too.\n\n**Q: Nice. You also educate people on the national level, is that correct? Can you talk a bit more about those education offerings?**\n\n**Garcia:** Immigration law, and even criminal immigration law, (although the state law will change for criminal immigration law), is national. So I do provide training. I've provided trainings for the National Immigration Project for criminal immigration law. I was on their board for a while. I've been a member of their organization over the entire time I've been an immigration attorney. I've also provided trainings to lawyers in southern and northern California and across the state. I've even provided a training that I call ‘The Symposium’ between Riverside County public defenders and Riverside County prosecutors when I was at Riverside County. I brought in a retired immigration judge, a retired Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervisor, and then a former Department of Homeland Security prosecutor, and I was the moderator, and there were questions. I teach a lot, and then I'm also an adjunct professor, but I teach students in law school.\n\n**Q: What’s your focus as an adjunct professor at La Verne, is that correct?**\n\n**Garcia:** I'm not teaching this semester, but it's the immigration consequences of criminal activity, and also the intersection with civil rights, like the modern day view of civil rights, looking at the immigration issue from that lens.\n\n**Q: You mentioned earlier that you volunteer in mobile court. Can you talk about that a bit?**\n\n**Garcia:** So this is a great thing my office does. Anybody and everybody can volunteer, they always need volunteers. San Bernardino County is the largest county in the country, and so people, especially indigent people, people who don't have money. There aren't buses coming down from, you know, far off places in the county, so the court goes to them. If the court goes to them, so do the public defenders. I haven't seen any prosecutors usually there, but they're on Zoom, and so part of it is taking care of old tickets and different things like that, and the other part is for outreach, for record clearing, for people who have, you know, old convictions. They just want to expunge or get lowered based on rehabilitation, the changes they made in their life since then.\n\n**Q: How long have you been volunteering in that program?**\n\n**Garcia:** Part of my job when I first started, required me to do that — volunteer. So almost four years now.\n\n**Q: They have an upcoming round, don’t they? In a couple of weeks?**\n\n**Garcia:** We do, yes, we always have them. I wish I could give you more details, I'm so busy at work, and then my evenings are this.\n\n**Q: Homeless Court – can you explain that program and your involvement in that as well?**\n\n**Garcia:** Yes, I've been involved in the Homeless Court, and it's similar. So we go to a park, and basically it's been advertised. We have an amazing supervisor who runs it, her name is Prisca So. Homeless people can take care of, again, old tickets, warrants for misdemeanors, and there's a judge that comes. They set up the court in the park with a tent. There's the flag, the seal, and to basically clear backlogs. Then there is a DA there who sits next to the judge, and then there's a couple of public defenders. When I went, we also had a bunch of law clerks, and they can make appearances and help out and stuff like that.\n\n**Q: You’re going to the judicial race now. What were you thinking when you decided to run?**\n\n**Garcia:** The moment I decided to run, which was a quick decision, there's three of us in the race, and I was the last one to jump in. I was aware that, ‘Okay, I'm making this a three party race.’ My thought process was, ‘This is an opportunity and an experience that will probably never come up again for me,’ and it triggered my highest excitement, which I take as like an internal compass. If something sounds really interesting and exciting and I'm motivated, I gotta do it, and I'm gonna work hard doing it. I'm gonna dedicate myself.\n\n**Q: I think we talked earlier about what Judge you want to emulate. You mentioned the three of them. Are there any other judges that you would like to emulate if you were elected to the position?**\n\n**Garcia:** Well, there's characteristics of judges, and the characteristics of those three focused on bringing the parties together to resolve disputes. When we think about superior courts, which is positioned as superior court judge, superior courts are not just criminal courts. They are probate, civil, family – and people end up in our superior courts because they have a problem they can't resolve on their own. Nobody really wants to be there, right? But something has happened that they can't work out on their own, and so I think all three of them have a characteristic of being diplomatic, which is a characteristic I have had my entire life. Even in high school, I was described as diplomatic, and to move the parties together to reach a joint resolution, which now, when we look at my entire job and public defense is focused on civil negotiations in this adversarial system with the prosecution to reach fair and balanced decisions that also honor and and blend credibility to our judicial system. We've looked at everything at all corners, and come to a decision. Everybody is aware of the moving parts.\n\n**Q: Is there any other aspect of the judicial philosophy that we haven't touched on?**\n\n**Garcia:** Oh, do I have a judicial philosophy?\n\n**Q: You might have an idea.**\n\n**Garcia:** Yeah, I have an idea of a judicial philosophy. So fundamentally, I believe that an independent judiciary is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy. What that means to me in the separation of powers of our three branches of government is that the judiciary is free from any political pressures and always maintains impartiality. A judge is not a legislator, they're not a lawmaker. Judges interpret the law and apply them to the established facts. Judges review evidence and decide whether to admit evidence or not, but the lawmaking part is up to a legislator and the will of the people who vote on that. I also believe in a close reading of the law. I don't know if this is judicial philosophy or not, but this is what I do everyday. Looking at the statutes and the laws and reviewing legislative intent behind the law and reviewing common law and even going to Black Laws dictionary. I still have my black laws from law school. Finding the most common, universal accepted meaning for legal terms, and going from there and interpreting the law. So, really, a fundamental and step-by-step process in interpreting and applying the law as close to legislative intent as we can get. But while also considering the real world impact of judicial decisions, but remaining faithful to the law. I would also understand that in applying the law, it's not a game and abstract possibilities, right? We have to be real and see what's happening on the ground must also be taken into consideration.\n\n**Q: What do you think sets you apart from the other two candidates in the race?**\n\n**Garcia:** I don't personally know either of them, our legal careers have never crossed paths. I have briefly met Miss Loflin and she's very civil and a lovely person. But what I can say is that I think I am the better candidate, and the community should vote for me for several reasons.\n\nNumber one, I think that everyone should research and look at endorsements. That's a really good way to look at what kind of candidate – to research the candidates and see the list of endorsements. Me and one of the other candidates, we have an equal number of judicial endorsements, I might actually have one or two more. When I say public judicial endorsements on our websites, the difference is, my judicial endorsements span across southern California. They're not limited to Riverside County. My judicial endorsements come from other counties and other county judges, so I think that my broad and comprehensive experience and my support by judges, not just in this county and not just by persons and leaders in this county, show that I have a broad competence, and I traverse different areas of law and in different legal systems, between different counties, but also between federal and state. I've been applying the law to the facts in all these realms. That makes me the better candidate.\n\nSecond, this comprehensive experience, which includes my teaching of law school, which has allowed me to look at the law not just from this adversarial perspective, or the side of the defense, or looking at what's the side of the prosecution, but from a very objective perspective of reading and looking at the law. With students interacting in not an adversarial setting, this is just the words and the meanings and what does this mean, right? This also gives me an advantage in being a judicial officer, because although the judge who retired and left his seat open, Judge Hopp is in a civil assignment right now. If elected judge, I could be placed anywhere. Any one of us who's elected judge, it does not mean we're going to be in the civil courtroom. I could be placed anywhere the presiding judge, it’s like the head judge, the boss judge, needs me to be. My record and my experience shows that I am able to pivot into various areas of law that I think I am more equipped and agile at doing due to my diverse background, both personal and professional, that make me the best candidate for judge.\n\n**Q: Anything else to add?**\n\n**Garcia:** Gosh, there's so much more to add.\n\n**Q: We have a little bit of time, wherever your mind takes you, we can go there for a little bit.**\n\n**Garcia:** We talked about everything, I think. We talked about my law school, Kansas City. I don't know if we talked about how I grew up in Kansas City.\n\n**Q: Oh, we didn't, if you want to talk.**\n\n**Garcia:** I'm a Riverside County resident. I'm raising my children here in Riverside, and I've lived here for 10 years. I've lived in California for almost 20 years, but the majority of my time, where I am a homeowner and built my life, is here in Riverside. But I do carry with me the Midwestern values that my family instilled in me. My mom was a pediatric nurse and my dad a railroader with the Union Pacific Railroad, so I grew up in a working class background. My parents fostered critical thinking. So I just think of my childhood. I was curious about the world since I was a kid. I think being curious and open minded is so important to being a judge, because when you have a case, whether it be in a probate court dealing with comprehension issues, like who's going to take care of this kid, or divorce a family court dealing with child support issues. The mind must be clear of any bias, and it must be open and the mind of a judge must be able to know when they sit down in their chambers or their court, that they don't have a decision made up. The next brief could change their mind in a case because it's providing more information to make a balanced decision on, an incredible decision on. I think even my personal background of being a third and fourth generation Kansas woman, from Missouri, which is the slogan is the show me state, makes me a very different in a very qualified candidate, because I grew up, I grew up with such values instilled in me of being curious, critical thinking, but also civility, respect and hard work. That's what I've carried throughout my career today, and that's what I plan to carry to the bench, and being humble, which I think is the most important aspect of the judges – humility and understanding. Whatever amazing things I did and then things I know, I know nothing. As a judge, I will be ready to learn day one, as a blank slate, of what I need to do for that job, and I understand that a judge is a community service role to help the community and interpret and apply the law. I've been thinking about this. Judges everyday are talking to the community – not lawyers. There are lawyers in criminal court, but in the majority of these courtrooms, there's no appointed counsel, like in family or probate. So the judge has to be a great communicator with people who don't know legalese and that can speak directly. I am very good at speaking directly to people and conveying meaningful understanding of the real life impact of what's going on in that case, and being patient, listening, and fostering an environment in the courtroom where parties feel comfortable to make arguments to the best of their ability.\n\n**Q: It's been a pleasure talking with you.**",
  "title": "Judicial candidate Andrea Garcia's interview transcript",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-26T17:36:46.406Z"
}