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PETER SAKAI: Still the Family Judge
Still the Family Judge
By Steve A. Peirce
Photos by Mewborne Photography
Meetings of the Bexar County Commissioners’ Court are held at the Double-Height Courtroom at the Bexar County Courthouse, aptly named because its ceiling is two floors high. Running the meeting is Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, and sitting on both sides of him are four County Commissioners. Judge Sakai functions as the Chief Executive of the County, but he is only one of five votes on the Commissioners’ Court. On my visit, in the middle of Fiesta, the meeting starts with an invocation; a passionate plea from Pastor Shetigho Nakpodia of Redeemer’s Praise Church, for a higher being to bestow blessings on all present and those not present as well. The Pledge of Allegiance follows.
The meeting starts with the fun stuff: proclamations, awards, recognition of service, photos, and many incantations of “Viva Fiesta.” Then the meeting turns to business, with an agenda that runs seventeen pages of singlespaced items. The process is formal and informal at the same time, and Judge Sakai smiles as he seamlessly runs through the agenda while giving each commissioner and the agenda presenters the floor to speak. The mood is relaxed and civil. No one is talking over anyone else or losing their cool. The professional staff sometimes chimes in with information or advice. Some on the Court enjoy snacks during the process. The County has a $3 billion budget and about 5,000 employees, and most of the decisions are about how to apply funds for various initiatives. Among other things, the Court considers funding capital improvements to the infrastructure of La Villita, support for a UTSA sports facility, and how to deal with a recent unfunded mandate from the Texas Attorney General for statistical information and digitalization of court records at an estimated cost of about $1 million.
The McAllen Farm Boy
Judge Sakai’s office on the tenth floor of the Paul Elizondo Tower has a magnificent view southward. Over 230 miles in that direction lies the city of McAllen, Texas, where Sakai was born and raised, the eldest child of Yukata “Pete” Sakai and Rose Marie Kawahata Sakai, second generation “nisei” Japanese Americans. Both sides of Peter Sakai’s family were farmers. His grandparents were Japanese immigrants, known as “issei;” the paternal side farming the California Imperial Valley, and the maternal side farming the Texas Rio Grande Valley. Judge Sakai’s father Pete Sakai, became a farmer in McAllen, and his children, including Peter, worked on the farm picking onions, lettuce, and cabbage alongside Mexican farmhands. “My grandparents spoke Japanese first, then Spanish, then a little English,” says Sakai. “I speak English first, then ‘poquito’ Tex-Mex Spanish, and I know some Japanese words.”
Sakai picked up his Spanish (first, the cuss words), something of a necessity in the majority Mexican American part of the state, from his classmates and the farm workers. At school, those cuss words were often directed at him for being Japanese, but he fought back (sometimes inappropriately) and gained respect. He spoke Spanish with the farm workers, “doing backbreaking work, from sun-up to sun-down,” he says. “After years of working on the farm, as a high schooler, I asked my dad if I could be paid. His response was, ‘You get free room and board, and if you want to get paid, get a job somewhere.’ So, I went to work in a shoe store. Farm work is the Lord’s work, but I would never go back to it.”
Judge Sakai recounts his high school days. “In the early 1970s, I was an unfocused student in high school with above-average grades, and a 155-pound center and linebacker on the football team. I was also a student council class officer, but people who knew me in high school would be surprised about where I ended up.” This brings to mind the Kurt Vonnegut quote that “true terror is to wake up one morning and realize that your high school class is running the country.” Since January of 2023, Peter Sakai has served as Bexar County Judge, doing his part to help run the country, after a long and storied career as a lawyer and trial judge. As evidenced herein, his classmates most assuredly should feel more pride than terror.
In everyone’s life there are turning points – life-changing events, experiences, and decisions that make us wonder what our lives would have been like without them. With Peter Sakai, it was the experience of his father, with whom he often struggled, the help of his friends, and his decision to stay in San Antonio.
A Stopover in Poston; The Internment Camp Lesson
In the Summer of 1971, seventeen-year-old Peter was a longhaired opposer of the Vietnam War, and would have been grooving to the tunes on AM radio on a family road trip to California. Peter’s dad, a no-nonsense crew-cut conservative World War II veteran with little patience for the hippie culture, pulled the station wagon into an old Indian Reservation in Poston, Arizona. Viewing some slabs in the triple-digit heat of the barren Arizona desert, he informed Peter, “This is where I grew up.
In the weeks following the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, mass hysteria ensued, taking the form of an irrational fear of all Japanese citizens. Faced with intense political and military pressure, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, permitting the Secretary of War to send Japanese Americans to internment camps. Officially, the order authorized the Secretary to exclude all persons from designated military areas and to place such persons in other accommodations. It was mostly used on Japanese Americans and along the Pacific Coast, which was designated a military area, where many Japanese Americans lived, and where sabotage was feared along the coastal shipping areas. Japanese American families were given as little as forty-eight hours’ notice to dispose of their property and report to a train to take them to “assembly centers,” such as racetracks or fairgrounds, with ultimate disposition at one of several “relocation centers,” which came to be known as internment camps (some were taken directly to internment camps).
Most internment camps were in desolate, remote areas, and the housing was typically army-style barracks with shared facilities, little privacy, and little protection from the elements. Poston, Arizona, contained three internment camps, holding over 17,000 Japanese American internees. All told, almost 120,000 Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps, about 70,000 of whom were American-born, and about 17,000 of whom were children under ten. It is estimated that about $400 million in property was lost by the interned families. They were given no hearing, no due process, and no appeal prior to their loss of property and liberty. Their only “offense” was that they happened to be at least 1/16th Japanese, and that they lived in a designated area. On the legal side, the Supreme Court upheld Executive Order 9066 in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).
Closer to home, the Japanese Tea Garden—an old stone quarry in San Antonio, which was maintained as a beautiful garden and home by the family of Japanese artist Kimi Eiso Jingu—was renamed the Chinese Tea Garden. The Jingu family was evicted, and a Chinese family was installed in their place. And Texas itself had its own internment camp in Crystal City, which was unique in that it held Japanese, German, and Italian Americans together. This camp was later the subject of the bestselling book The Train to Crystal City.
“When my dad was in high school, [he] and his family were taken to the Poston internment camp because they were Japanese in the Imperial Valley,” says Judge Sakai. “Because my dad’s family were poor tenant farmers, their living conditions at the camp were almost a step up, according to my dad.” As part of the internment process, the government issued a questionnaire to all interned men over the age of seventeen. Two of those questions were whether you were willing to serve in the U.S. armed forces, and whether you swore unqualified allegiance to the United States. “My paternal grandfather was known as one of the ‘no-no boys,’ because he answered ‘no’ to both those questions,” says Judge Sakai. “As a result, he was shipped off to a secured segregation center in New Mexico. They later let him return to Poston,” Sakai adds. “As soon as he was old enough, my dad joined the Army to get out of the camp. He became a translator as part of the U.S. occupation force in Japan after Japan’s surrender in 1945. My mother’s family, who lived in the Rio Grande Valley, were not interned.”
Judge Sakai recalls, “The stopover at Poston and my dad’s stories of the internment made a lifelong impression on me. As I went through life and began to study law, it made me think about due process, our Constitutional rights, the rule of law, and how to defend it.” By the end of 1945, the internment camps were closed, with Poston being closed in 1946. It took a good while for further corrective action to be taken. In 1971, when the Sakai family stopped off at Poston, Executive Order 9066 was still in place; it was not repealed until 1976. A 1982 Presidential Commission Report found that racial prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership were the underlying causes of the internment program. Locally, the Chinese Tea Garden was finally renamed the Japanese Tea Garden in 1984. The federal government gave Japanese survivors of the internment an apology and some small reparations in 1988. And in 2018 the Supreme Court finally abrogated its Korematsu opinion in Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. 667 (2018), while upholding a travel ban from certain Muslim majority countries.
The Road to Law School
When Peter graduated high school in 1972, like many kids of non-college educated parents of that time and place, he had no mentors and got little guidance on what to do with his life. He only knew he wanted to go to college. So he enrolled at UT-Pan American in Edinburg (now UT Rio Grande Valley) with no idea where he was headed. Sometimes, a young person just needs a little confidence. A friend told him that he was “too smart” and that he should go to the University of Texas in Austin. Taking that advice to heart, he transferred to UT Austin, and ultimately got a B.A. in Government in 1976. Still uncertain about what to do, he met another friend who lived in his apartment complex. He recounts that: “She was from an affluent Dallas Highland Park family, and she asked me what I was going to do and told me that she was going to take the Law School Admissions Test,” says Judge Sakai. “I didn’t even know what that was, but she gave me the LSAT workbook and tutored me for the test. I took the test and was accepted into UT Law School, the only Asian American in the law school at the time.”
“At UT Law School, we formed an intramural softball team called the Chicano Bears, consisting of me, one Anglo, and the rest Hispanics,” says Sakai. “Lawyers Fidel Rodriguez and Oscar Villareal were also on that team. We had several players who had played college sports, and we were one of the top teams on campus.” Sakai jokingly takes partial credit for starting the fajita craze in the late-1970s. “I was the only Asian in the Chicano Law Student Association. Being from McAllen, I knew how to cook fajitas, and I was
the chief fajita cook for our fundraisers. At the time, fajitas were considered a lower-class meat, but they sure became popular.” But he wasn’t as successful with his grades as he was on the softball diamond and with the grill. “In my first year, I never studied so hard to do so poorly, and considered dropping out,” he says. “But I became friends with (future federal judge) Orlando Garcia, who was a year ahead of me at UT Law, who told me that I belonged and to hang in there. He became my mentor, and my grades went up.”
A New Beginning in San Antonio
After graduating from law school in 1979, Peter Sakai deferred his job search in order to study for the bar exam. He passed the bar exam but had some difficulty finding employment. “By the Spring of 1980, I was a licensed attorney living with my brother in Austin and working at the mall,” he said. “I submitted resumes everywhere. No one would take my calls, and there were no job offers.”
Then he got a call from a law school friend, Ron Mendoza, who was a mid-level prosecutor in the Bexar County District Attorney’s office, about an opening there for an entry level position. At about the same time, another law school friend, Wayne Olson, called him about a position with the City Attorney’s Office in Fort Worth. “The D.A. job paid $13,200, but the Fort Worth job paid $17,500,” says Sakai. “I almost blew it at the D.A. job interview. They offered me the job, and I asked if I could have some time to think about it. I really wanted to be a trial lawyer, and though the Fort Worth job paid more, the best I could hope for was misdemeanor municipal court work. So, I took the position with the D.A.’s office in the hopes of advancing to a first-chair felony prosecutor,” says Sakai. “I never regretted that decision. Never make your decisions based on money alone. Choose your passion,” he adds.
The decision worked out, and Peter Sakai was on his way. Within two years, he married Raquel “Rachel” Dias-Sakai, and they had their first child. They would end up having the common interest of working with children and families. Rachel was the daughter of a Laredo juvenile officer who often brought delinquent minors home so they would not have to share a jail cell with an adult. Decades later, Rachel has retired after having been an educator, counselor, and administrator at Harlandale ISD for thirtytwo years, Director of the Gateway to College at Palo Alto College, and working as a teacher/ sponsor at Providence Catholic School. She was inducted into the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame and was also named as a 2022 recipient of their Volunteerism award. She remains a volunteer in “Youth Do Vote,” an organization that helps demystify voting and elections for young people through voter registration, voting education, and recruitment of student election clerks. Together, Peter and Rachel have two kids, George and Elizabeth. They are also blessed to have three wonderful grandchildren, Grayson Sakai, Jackson Sakai and Grayson McNeil.
At the D.A.’s office, Sakai became an appellate attorney, and was later promoted to Chief of the Juvenile Section, beginning his decades-long career as a specialist in family and children’s issues. By 1983, Sakai had opened a solo practice, where he handled court-appointed child abuse and neglect cases. In 1989, he was named the Juvenile Master in the 289th District Court. In 1995, he was unanimously appointed by the civil court judges as the Associate Judge in the Bexar County Children’s Court. The retirement of his judicial mentor, Judge John J. Specia, left an opening for the 225th District Court, and Sakai was elected to that bench in 2006. Sakai was reelected as Judge of the 225th until the end of 2022, when he briefly retired before deciding to run for his current position as County Judge.
The Children’s Court Judge
Prior to being elected County Judge, Peter Sakai was best-known as the Bexar County Children’s Court Judge, a national model for handling child abuse and neglect cases, and foster placement and adoptions of children. It is a challenging and emotionally taxing job to try to fix broken families and place these traumatized children in a better situation; incredibly rewarding when it works and devastating when it does not. “The typical case is one or both parents are alcohol or drug abusers, and there may be physical or sexual abuse of a child,” says Judge Sakai.
One such case that nearly ended Judge Sakai’s career in the mid-2000s was that of fourteen-month-old baby girl who had been removed from her home after her mother tested positive for drug use. Judge Sakai signed off on an agreed order that allowed the girl to go home. The child died after being beaten by her mother, and the mother was later given a life sentence. The case left Judge Sakai so distraught that he seriously thought he would leave the judiciary. “I had to take a sabbatical to deal with the pain of that case,” Sakai admits. “I am person of faith. I work hard, and at the end of the day, I try to leave it behind and recharge my batteries,” says Sakai.
But it is the success stories, as Judge Sakai puts it “to help the least of us” that make his twentysix years as a District Court Judge like none other. He ran the Family Drug Court, which is a program to rehabilitate parents with substance abuse issues, that among other things included a contract with the parents, frequent drug testing, and a weekly “truth telling” session with Judge Sakai. He also ran the Early Childhood Court, whose mission it is to establish a comprehensive, integrated, and coordinated systems approach to helping families within the community. This approach includes developing, supporting, and facilitating services and tailoring those services to the needs of the child(ren) and family. He ran the College Bound Docket, which provides barrier-free access to education and housing for foster children, and was instrumental in the Thru Project, which helps foster kids go to college when they age out of the foster care system. From 1995–2005, adoptions of Bexar County foster children increased by 1000 percent under Judge Sakai’s leadership.
To Sakai, few things are as satisfying as seeing a child who had been in his court reach a level of success and give back to the community. “A Bexar County Deputy approached me and said, ‘I was a foster kid in your court,’” says Sakai. “She said, ‘My parents abandoned me. I talked you out of keeping me in the foster system. You made a deal with me to finish school and come back with a plan on who would be responsible for me. I was emancipated and lived with my sibling and got a job,’” Sakai explains. “Another case was a 15-year-old boy who was the parental figure in his house because his mother was mentally ill. He ran with the gangs and wouldn’t follow the rules. He was a gifted athlete, but he had an attitude,” Sakai recalls. “I had him come in and see me every four months. I told him that he was a leader, in his family and as an athlete. Years later, I saw him at an event where he was a volunteer at CASA (Child Advocates San Antonio).” Judge Sakai says that “after twenty-six years working with foster kids, you have to be able to listen to them and understand that most of them are in circumstances beyond their control. I have tried to impress upon the children the values that my parents taught me: Work hard and follow your dreams; be honest; do things with a sense of integrity; be humble; don’t discriminate; don’t disrespect; and remember where you came from.”
The Bexar County Judge
Sakai won election as Bexar County Judge in November of 2022, and was sworn in on January 1, 2023—appropriately, by his old law school mentor, Judge Orlando Garcia. His immediate goals are lofty: create a public Internet Utility to expand high-speed internet accessibility to all Bexar County residents; create a Public Health Division for emergency readiness for public health crises like pandemics, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks; provide more beds for those with mental illness; support mental health resources in the schools; bring a robust jury system back on line and move cases along; and, certainly not least, facilitate voter registration and easy access to the polls.
During Judge Sakai’s first eighteen months on the job, the County has already accomplished a lot: JCB, the world’s largest privately owned manufacturer of construction and agricultural equipment, is building a new factory on the South Side, adding an estimated 1,500 jobs. Industrial Commercial Properties will take over the old Rackspace headquarters on Walzem Road, for mixed use, retail, and light industrial use. There are fifty new Bexar County deputy positions with a substantial pay hike for Sheriff’s officers, and a joint project with the City of San Antonio’s law enforcement officers to come up with more than thirty actions to address violent crime. The County has contributed more than $30 million to the Spurs, UTSA, and Texas A&M San Antonio. More funding is being secured for beds to house the mentally ill, rather than placing them in jail. Another $20 million has been provided to area school districts to address mental health concerns stemming from the pandemic’s aftermath.
Though his softball playing days are behind him, he still listens to the AM radio hits of the Sixties and Seventies. He also relaxes by reading his favorite biographies and watching sports. He’s been to several quinceaneras and every Fiesta event he could get to, and he can trade notes with you on the best Mexican food places on the South Side of San Antonio. He’s doing the same job he’s done his whole career: trying to do what’s best for families. There’s a lot more families now, and he’s up for the task.
