Sotomayor’s relatives hope to attend hearings

MAYAGUEZ, Puerto Rico — Puerto Rican relatives of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor — the New York-born federal appeals judge who is vying to be the first Hispanic justice on the high court — hope to attend her confirmation hearings in Washington.

“If they invite us, we will travel,” said Jose Garcia Baez, a lawyer who is one of a number of Sotomayor’s Puerto Rican cousins living on the west coast of the U.S. island, where her nomination by President Barack Obama has been a point of pride. The confirmation hearings start July 13.

The top Republican senator on the Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said Monday he wants to find out whether Sotomayor would let racial bias affect her decisions as a justice.

Sotomayor was on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1980 until 1992, while the organization represented Puerto Ricans and other minorities in employment, education and housing discrimination cases, among others.

She held leadership roles on the board, including on its litigation committee, in charge of setting broad goals and strategy for the group’s legal activities, according to fund officials and documents the organization sent the Senate.

The judge’s parents left Puerto Rico decades ago. Her father, who died when she was 9, was from the Santurce area of the capital, San Juan. Her mother, a nurse, was from the neighborhood of Santa Rosa in Lajas, a still mostly rural area on Puerto Rico’s southwest coast.

Garcia is confident that Sotomayor, who maintains close ties to Puerto Rico, will be confirmed.

She “has incredible merits, is one of these people who are born to serve,” the Puerto Rican lawyer said.