Martin Estrada: The U.S. Attorney in Charge of the Nation’s Most Populous District (Stanford Lawyer)
Illustration courtesy of Stuart Bradford.
By Nadra Nittle, Stanford Lawyer, June 22, 2023
While visiting his relatives in Guatemala as a child, Martin Estrada and his family were held up at gunpoint—a terrifying ordeal that sparked his interest in the law. Now 45, he remembers the experience vividly, especially how the local authorities responded.
“They just laughed,” recalls Estrada, JD ’02. “They weren’t going to do anything. In Guatemala, the law just wasn’t meant for people who didn’t have money and power.”
Seeing firsthand a flawed legal system in his parents’ native country inspired him to become a lawyer dedicated to public service. Today, as the United States Attorney for the Central District of California—the largest district in the country, serving seven counties and nearly 20 million people—Estrada does just that. He was nominated by President Joe Biden and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in September.
“To be a Latino who is connected to his community and fluent in Spanish and has worked for years doing pro bono public interest work, it meant a lot to me,” Estrada says of his confirmation.