Raised in Buffalo, N.Y., he was the only child who did not follow his father into the medical profession; three siblings are doctors, and another is a clinical psychologist. He turned instead to public service, harking back to an earlier generation of his family, that of his grandfather who was a Dominican ambassador to the United States.
His worldview was shaped by both generations that lived under the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. His grandfather was declared persona non grata by the regime and lived in exile in the United States; his father was active in the anti-government student movement in the Dominican Republic and also sought refuge here.
Perez became a trial attorney in the civil rights division of the Justice Department in the late 1980s. He prosecuted a case involving corruption on a drug task force in Oakland, Calif., and another against a group of white supremacists accused in shootings in Lubbock, Texas. Adding to his civil rights credentials, Perez was on loan to work on hate crime legislation and other issues for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat.
Later, as head of the civil rights office at the Department of Health and Human Services, Perez ran across cases involving a maternity ward in New York City segregated by how patients paid - a proxy for race and class, he said - and a hospital in McAllen, Texas, on the Mexican border, that chose uniforms for its security guards that resembled those of the Border Patrol, presumably to ward off illegal immigrants without insurance.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that "of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane," Perez notes.
"He's quick to absorb facts about complex health issues," said Diane Rowland, executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, a health research group in Washington on which Perez has served. "He's keenly interested in helping the poor and most vulnerable."
Perez says he left federal service at noon Jan. 20, 2001, the moment President George W. Bush took office. He went to work at the University of Maryland's law school and the next year became the first Latino elected to the Montgomery County Council. He served as council president for a year and worked on affordable housing, development limits and a plan to import prescription drugs from Canada - later rejected by federal officials.
