Robert Andres Bonta was born on September 22, 1972 in Quezon City, Philippines. The next day, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcosdeclared martial law. Bonta immigrated with his family to California at just two months old. Through his father, Bonta was a U.S. citizen at birth. The Bonta family initially lived in a trailer at La Paz, the United Farm Workers headquarters near Keene, California, before moving north to Fair Oaks, a suburb of Sacramento. At Bella Vista High School in Fair Oaks, Bonta was a soccer player and graduated as class valedictorian. Bonta then attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he graduated cum laude with a B.A. in history in 1993 and played on the Yale Bulldogs men's soccer team. After completing his undergraduate studies, Bonta attended University of Oxford for one year studying politics, philosophy, and economics. After his year at Oxford, Bonta returned to New Haven to work as site coordinator at nonprofit organization Leadership, Education, and Athletics in Partnership, where he supervised 30 staff members and 100 children for an organization serving the Church Street South neighborhood. In 1995, Bonta enrolled at Yale Law School and graduated in 1998 with a J.D. Bonta was admitted to the California State Barin 1999.
Legal career
From 1998 to 1999, Bonta clerked for Judge Alvin W. Thompson of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut. Bonta then returned to California to be a litigation associate with San Francisco law firm Keker & Van Nest. Working at Keker & Van Nest from 1999 to 2003, Bonta practiced in a variety of areas including civil rights, crime, insurance, patent infringement, legal malpractice, contract, and fraud. From 2003 to 2012, Bonta was Deputy City Attorney of San Francisco under Dennis Herrera. In representing San Francisco in a lawsuit filed by Kelly Medora, a preschool teacher who accused San Francisco police officer Christopher Damonte of excessive force during a jaywalking arrest, Bonta argued that Medora and her friends put themselves and others in danger by walking on the street and were warned to leave by Damonte and another officer. The city eventually settled the lawsuit for $235,000 in May 2008. In 2009, Bonta testified in defense of San Francisco's strip search policy in jails by arguing that concerns about smuggling of drugs and weapons at a main city jail presented reasonable basis for strip searches. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled 6–5 in favor of the strip search policy in February 2010.
Bonta was elected to Alameda City Council in November 2010. Within a year, he declared his intent to run for state assembly. In 2012, some Alameda residents started a recall campaign against him. The recall campaign ended when Bonta resigned his city council seat to serve in the assembly.
In 2013, Bonta introduced legislation that would require California public schools to teach students the contributions of Filipino Americans in the farm labor movement; it was signed into law in October of that same year by Jerry Brown. Bonta's mother, Cynthia Bonta, helped organize Filipino and Mexican Americanfarmworkers for the United Farm Workers. In 2017, Bonta introduced legislation that would protect government employees in California from being fired for being members of the Communist Party. The proposal, AB22, would repeal an almost 70-year ban on Communist Party members holding government jobs in California. Bonta's fellow assemblyman Travis Allen blasted the proposal, calling it "blatantly offensive to all Californians." The bill was withdrawn after protests by veterans and by the Vietnamese community. In 2018, Bonta and State Senator Robert Hertzberg co-authored to Senate Bill 10 that made California the first state in the nation to eliminate money bail for suspects awaiting trial and replace it with a risk-assessment system. On August 28, 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed the sweeping reform bill into law.
