Former San Francisco supervisor Hillary Ronen is returning to the Mission District about 16 months out of office and after a long sojourn in Spain: She will head La Raza Centro Legal, a 53-year-old Mission-based legal nonprofit, as executive director.
She is returning to an organization where she worked as an attorney before spending 15 years at San Francisco City Hall.
“I’m very excited to be coming back to the organization that basically launched my justice-fighting career,” Ronen said by phone from her apartment in Las Palmas, a seaside town on the Canary Islands off the coast of Western Sahara, where she has been living with her husband and 13-year-old daughter since June last year.
Ronen has begun part-time, but will start full-time in August when she returns to San Francisco. She will head the $2.5 million organization and a 22-person staff that has been on the frontlines of immigrant legal defense in the Trump era.
La Raza Centro Legal attorneys were some of the first in San Francisco to file habeas corpus petitions, which have become the go-to means of quickly releasing immigrants after they are arrested in court.
Its lawyers are in court often as part of the “attorney of the day” program, helping immigrants navigate proceedings and understand when they may be detained.
The group, headquartered at 474 Valencia St. in the Centro del Pueblo building, has grown in recent years and its revenue is nearly double what it was in 2019.
La Raza Centro Legal was founded in 1973 by Chicano law students who sought to provide legal services in Spanish to Latinos in San Francisco. Its attorneys practiced immigration law from the beginning and that is still its focus, but the nonprofit has added a worker rights unit and a senior law unit since.
Ronen went to work for the group’s worker-rights unit after law school and stayed there from 2003 to 2010, before joining Supervisor David Campos’ staff and then serving two terms as District 9 supervisor. She was replaced by Jackie Fielder, whom she endorsed, in 2024.
Ronen’s two terms spanned the heated anti-gentrification battles of the mid-2010s, when Mission activists fought wholesale against new market-rate housing, and the pandemic, when neighborhood street conditions deteriorated precipitously.
Ronen, for her part, said those periods defined her tenure: She was able to focus on policymaking and legislation during her first term, she told Mission Local in an exit interview, before her office was fully engulfed by the illegal fencing, drug use and crime at both neighborhood BART plazas.
As to La Raza, Ronen said the group is “as strong as can be” and that she would take the helm not to “fix what’s not broken,” but instead to help marry the organization’s legal-defense work with its advocacy work to try and change “bigger systems that are producing the harm in the first place.”
“La Raza is exceptional at the individual cases. That work is sacred, and not going anywhere at all,” she said. “But I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible when you take all of that knowledge, those cases, those patterns, and you use that knowledge to go after the system.”
Ronen pointed to the group’s success with habeas petitions and said its attorneys “basically beat the Trump administration and effectively stopped the courthouse arrests through creative legal work.” Courthouse arrests ground to a halt last fall, and attorneys said the successful petitions and subsequent lawsuits played a key role.
Other opportunities Ronen sees: The group’s work with seniors could be used to craft policy as the city braces for the “Silver Tsunami” of Baby Boomers retiring, for example, or its wage-theft cases with low-paid immigrant workers could help “design what the new economy looks like” in a post-AI world.
“Legal services without advocacy is triage, and advocacy without legal services is too abstract,” Ronen said. “When you put them together, you can change the conditions people are living in.”
La Raza is largely dependent on fundraising and government grants; in 2024, the last year for which data is available, 72 percent of its revenue came from such grants, about half which came from San Francisco city funding. The city has tightened its belt as it faces down a bigger than $600 million budget deficit, and funding for all kinds of nonprofits may be on the cutting block.
Lisa Jimenez, La Raza’s board president, said that “every organization currently in the city” worries about a loss of city funding, but that La Raza “is in a good place.” Donors have flocked in the Trump era, she said, to fund work “supporting the communities that need the most support right now.”
“All we can do is move forward and do the work, and show the proof — that this is the work that we have done and this is why it’s so important,” Jimenez said. The board, she added, is “very excited” about Ronen’s leadership.
“She has the overwhelming support of our staff,” added Jordan Weiner, the head of La Raza’s deportation work, who has been serving as interim director since the fall. “Everyone is on board and excited.”
Ronen is, too. She said she is “raring to go” after making the rounds and talking to staff members 1-1 in the past few weeks.
“I am so excited about this, it feels not like a pivot but like a homecoming.” As to her daughter Maelle: “She is beyond excited to come home — the kid is a die-hard San Francisco lover, I don’t know if she’ll ever leave San Francisco again.”
The 13-year-old appreciated the island vistas in Las Palmas, Ronen said, but would turn to her parents and say: “There are way better views in San Francisco.”
The revolving door between the city employees giving our money to nonprofits and the employees of those same nonprofits taking our money just goes round and around
So she is being rehired by the organization that she gave money to as supervisor? Assuming she is being paid less than $300k, that’s a good return for La Raza.
The revolving door between the nonprofit sector and legislative assistants and elected officials where members of the political class always find landing spots, failing upwards, funded with public dollars warrants investigation because it remains so well lubricated.
Is there a gender neutral term for “Made Man?”
Wow! Ronen was an absolute disaster. Spent her second term telling everyone how much she hated the job and wanted out. Literally walked around City Hall with a countdown clock. D9 suffered horribly.
Ronen’s legacy will be empowering a criminally-insane nonprofit cartel that got rich off the public and encouraged the neighborhood to become a drug market containment zone so they could profit off human misery. And Jackie is keeping that legacy going strong.
Government (taxpayer) money (grants) to fight the government. “Immigrants” as used by this august journal meaning both legal and not-legal. Documented and undocumented. Of course, those two groups are in entirely different circumstances. But SF and CA are above certain laws. Imagine if every state and city felt the same way. What a country.
Cheers to Ronen for giving back to the community instead of cashing out with a cushy private sector lobbying job. La Raza Centro Legal does essential work protecting our immigrant neighbors.
Quite a contrast with the “moderate” candidate to succeed her, who, after he lost, immediately took a job lobbying for Flock – with whom many cities are ending their contracts because Flock cameras facilitate sharing with ICE.
The ‘moderate’ techies want to silence you for telling the truth.