The Hon. Araceli Martínez-Olguín is a judge on the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. She was nominated to the bench by President Joe Biden on January 3, 2023, and confirmed by the United States Senate on February 28, 2023.
Prior to her appointment, Martínez-Olguín was a supervising attorney for the National Immigration Law Center, a position to which she was named in 2018. Before that, she spent time as a managing attorney at Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto (2017 to 2018) and a civil rights attorney for the United States Department of Education (2016 to 2017).
Martínez-Olguín earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1999. She spent the next few years teaching bilingual kindergarten through Teach for America in Oakland before completing a J.D. at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, in 2004. As a law student, she interned with the Hon. Thelton E. Henderson of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California as well as the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.
After graduating from law school, Martínez-Olguín began her legal career as a judicial law clerk to the Hon. David Briones of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas. She served in that capacity until 2006, at which time she became a staff attorney with the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City. Then, in 2010, she was hired as a staff attorney for Legal Aid at Work in San Francisco.
Martínez-Olguín returned to the American Civil Liberties Union, this time as a senior staff attorney with the Immigrants Rights Project in San Francisco. She remained with the project for two years, eventually leaving to become a contract attorney for the University of California, Irvine School of Law (2015) and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (2015).
Her memberships have included the American Law Institute. She has also been involved with the boards of the American Constitution Society, the East Bay La Raza Lawyers Bar Association, the El Paso Mexican American Bar Association, and the San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Bar Association.
She is a recipient of the Hon. Thelton E. Henderson Social Justice Prize from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (2010) and the Unity Award from the Minority Bar Coalition (2017).
Martínez-Olguín was born in Mexico City, Mexico. She immigrated to the United States as a small child with her mother and brother.