Capital Research Center

Why Maryland?

CASA de Maryland has enormous influence in state politics. But it also has disproportionate influence at the White House through its two former CASA board members, the current Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Thomas Perez, and Cecilia Muñoz, director of the President’s Domestic Policy Council. Maryland is a secure base of operations for field-testing a new kind of community organization. In discussing his New Americans Initiative,18 which aims to persuade hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants in the D.C. area to naturalize and so become eligible to vote, CASA director Gustavo Torres recently declared, “My goal is to build 200,000 members in the next five years,” and someday “build a powerful … movement of immigrants and other minorities including the African American community to fight for justice—and they decide what justice means” (emphasis added).19

In other words, CASA wants to become the illegal immigrants’ ACORN—an all-purpose agitation machine that helps clients to skirt the laws that govern things like voter registration and welfare benefits. And in fact, as we’ll see, Torres has ties to ACORN founder Wade Rathke.