A staff of 18, a budget of $4.2 million, and a hard rule that no eviction goes uncontested in the six Bay Area counties Tenants United covers. In two years the practice has stopped 3,200 evictions, returned $1.9 million in illegally withheld security deposits, and trained 240 volunteer attorneys.
A civil-rights litigator,
a tenant-defense director,
a candidate for the Senate.
Janelle Brooks has spent fourteen years arguing federal civil-rights cases and two years running an eviction-defense nonprofit that handles three thousand cases a year. She is forty-four. She is running because the instruments of federal power are poorly used and she would like to use them well.
Janelle Brooks grew up at the corner of Pacific and Seventh in Long Beach. Her mother, Diane Brooks Park, taught third grade at Edison Elementary for thirty-one years. Her father, Yong-Su Park, drove a city bus for the Long Beach Transit Authority and read four newspapers cover to cover before dinner.
The household was loud and serious. Her grandmother on her mother's side had organized for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the 1950s and would remind anyone within earshot, at any holiday, that there is a difference between feeling sorry for working people and standing next to them. Janelle remembers being eleven, holding a stack of leaflets for a school board recall, and being corrected on the difference.
She read law in college because it seemed the most direct route from a well-argued case to a changed outcome. She read it again at Yale because she suspected she was wrong and wanted to know why. She was not wrong. She was incomplete. The cases changed outcomes. The cases by themselves did not change the law that produced the outcomes. That was the gap she spent the next eighteen years trying to close, first by litigating and eventually by deciding to legislate.
Twenty years of cases, briefs, and people kept in their homes.
Civil-rights litigation, with an emphasis on voting rights, employment discrimination, and police misconduct. Lead or co-counsel on fourteen federal cases, four of which reached the Supreme Court on certiorari. Author of eleven Supreme Court briefs of record.
Voting-rights litigation. Lead counsel in the redistricting cases brought against the City of Compton in 2013 and the County of Riverside in 2015. Designed the litigation strategy that produced the consent decree governing CHP traffic-stop data collection.
Drafted bench memoranda and opinions in cases involving immigration, employment discrimination, and the First Amendment.
Why I am running
I have spent fourteen years arguing federal civil-rights cases. I have won some and lost more, and in every case, win or lose, I have watched the same pattern. The statute is on the books. The courts will interpret it one way or another. The Senate, the body that wrote the statute and that could rewrite it tomorrow, sits on its hands.
For two years I have run a nonprofit that stops people from being thrown out of their homes. The cases are easy and the cases are unending. They are unending because federal housing policy has been frozen for a decade while rent has not.
I am running because the instrument exists, and the instrument is poorly used, and I would like to use it well.
Janelle, on the day she filed. March 2, 2026.
The short version.
- 1981Born in Long Beach, California.
- 2003B.A. American Studies, Yale University.
- 2007J.D., Yale Law School. Comments editor, Yale Law Journal.
- 2008Clerks for Judge Marsha S. Berzon, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
- 2010Joins the ACLU of Southern California as a staff attorney.
- 2016Made partner at Goldstein, Borgen, Dardarian & Ho, the civil-rights litigation firm in Oakland.
- 2020Argues, on the winning side, in Bostock v. Clayton County companion-brief amicus.
- 2023Founds Tenants United Bay Area, a nonprofit eviction-defense practice.
- 2025Tenants United halts its three-thousandth eviction.
- 2026Files for U.S. Senate, March 2.
Janelle lives in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland with her wife Priya Krishnan, a pediatrician at UCSF Benioff, and their nine-year-old daughter Mira. She runs the loop around Lake Merritt three mornings a week. She is a member of Allen Temple Baptist Church in East Oakland.
On Sundays she cooks. The kitchen is small and the recipes are old. The point, she says, is the sitting down afterward.