“Carol Robles was a dynamo her entire life,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a statement. “She devoted herself to public service and made a noteworthy difference both in the lives of Latinos and all New Yorkers. Her passing is a tragedy for her family and all of us.”

A 1983 graduate of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, Robles-Román served as deputy mayor for legal affairs during Michael R. Bloomberg’s three-term tenure as mayor, from 2002 through 2013. She was the highest-ranking Latina in city government at that time and the first woman ever to serve as counsel to a New York City mayor.

From City Hall, she oversaw more than a dozen agencies. Her accomplishments include launching the city’s Family Justice Centers to provide free, confidential, and comprehensive assistance to survivors of domestic violence. She also expanded the city’s language-translation services to better meet the needs of non-native English speakers. And she was instrumental in creating the Latin Media and Entertainment Commission to help “bring the best in Latin media and entertainment productions, businesses, and jobs” to the city.

After serving in the Bloomberg administration, she led two national civil rights organizations: Legal Momentum—the Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Equal Rights Amendment Coalition/Fund for Women’s Equality. In recent years, she had been general counsel and dean of faculty at Hunter College. She also was a longtime member of the City University of New York Board of Trustees.

“Carol Robles-Román dedicated her life to public service and to making our city and country more equal and just,” Bloomberg wrote in a statement, citing her “groundbreaking work to make the city more accessible to our … immigrant and disabled communities, and to stop domestic violence and human trafficking.”

In a 2015 profile in Fordham Magazine, Robles-Román described her approach to identifying societal problems and mobilizing both the political will and the means to fix them.

“Part of my ethos is being a disruptor—in a nice, good way,” she said. “It’s about creating strategic partnerships to make change happen.”

‘Women Can Have a Powerful Voice’

Robles-Román was born in East New York, Brooklyn, on August 27, 1962. Her parents, Emilio and Inéz Robles, owned an insurance brokerage and travel agency, and they were engaged with multiple local civic groups focused on voter registration, housing, and health care, among other issues. They had migrated to New York City from their native Puerto Rico in the mid-1950s, and in the early 1970s, they moved the family to Howard Beach, Queens.

“My mother raised six children—five girls—so it was particularly important to her to teach us, as women of color, that women can have a voice and can have a powerful voice,” Robles-Román once said. “Many women never learn that. That’s the gift she gave me.”

A Puerto Rican Power Couple

After graduating from Stella Maris High School in 1979, Robles-Román enrolled at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where she majored in political science and media studies.

“I felt very, very comfortable speaking in my own voice and being assertive, and in pursuing my joint passions: civics issues and writing,” she told Fordham Magazine in 2002.

In an international law class, she introduced herself to Nelson Román, FCRH ’84, a fellow student of Puerto Rican descent who would become her husband in 1991. Román, who is now a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, worked as a police officer in the Bronx while he was enrolled at Fordham. He told her what he witnessed while responding to domestic violence calls, and the stories he shared left her bothered but determined to help. She researched best practices for handling such incidents and published her work in a Fordham pre-law journal.

“Ever since then, domestic violence and the treatment of women has been an issue that she’s held very close to her soul,” Román told Fordham Magazine in 2015.

A Champion of Sonia Sotomayor

After graduating from Fordham, Robles-Román worked as a paralegal and eventually earned a J.D. from New York University. In the mid-1990s, she met Sonia Sotomayor, then a federal district court judge, through the Puerto Rican Bar Association. Like many young lawyers in the bar association at the time, she came to regard Sotomayor as a mentor.

“She’s a very warm woman, she’s a very nurturing woman, and she also shared her substantive legal intellect with us very early on,” Robles-Román told CNN in 2013.

In the late 1990s, when Nelson Román was president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association, he and Robles-Román helped lead a grassroots campaign to get a Latino justice on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor was on their short list.

A decade later, in May 2009, when President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to serve on the nation’s highest court, Robles-Román helped prepare Bloomberg to speak at a congressional hearing in support of her nomination. Three months later, she became the first Latina Supreme Court justice in U.S. history.

“I felt like this is the message Judge Román and I had been sending our whole lives,” Robles-Román said in 2010. “We have excellent Hispanic judges and attorneys, and it feels like it’s been our job to shine a light on that.”

Prior to joining the Bloomberg administration, Robles-Román served as a senior attorney to a family court judge and as special counsel and eventually director of public affairs for the New York State Unified Court System, where she focused on bias matters, among other issues. She also served as a New York state assistant attorney general in the state’s civil rights bureau.

A Mentor to Young People

During her tenure as deputy mayor of New York City, Robles-Román created what she called her Girl Power School talk, which she presented primarily to middle and high schoolers. She encouraged them to focus on the steps—like writing a resume, finding mentors, and developing a network—that will lead them from the classroom to careers of influence.

“Many young women think that people walk around with tags on them that say, ‘I’ll be your mentor.’ I help them empower themselves to say, ‘Hey, I like that teacher. … I’m going to make an appointment and ask that teacher to mentor me … and to give me advice and to help me as my career proceeds,” she told CNN.

In the 2015 Fordham Magazine interview, she added another piece of advice she often shared with young people: “Don’t be shy,” she said. “Do. Not. Be. Shy.”

Robles-Román is survived by her husband, Nelson; their two children, Ariana and Andrés; four sisters; and four nieces and nephews.

In 2006, after seven years at some of the world’s largest law firms, Yiota Souras, LAW ’99, joined the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where she serves as general counsel. She spoke with FORDHAM magazine about making the transition to advocacy law. And she shared details of her recent appearance in I Am Jane Doe, a new documentary film in which she discusses the center’s efforts to prevent online sex trafficking via the website Backpage.com.

What drew you into a career in law?
Among other things, the ability to advocate analytically and creatively for a solution to compelling issues—and the opportunity to channel conflicting opinions and facts into a singular story. Like just about everyone else who goes to law school, the thought that I might have the opportunity to facilitate access to justice for those in need was a tremendous draw.

What made you decide to work for an advocacy organization?
My seven years working as a law firm associate were invaluable. I learned the basics of litigation, white-collar investigations, corporate governance, and intellectual property issues; how to structure and build a case and legal defenses; and productive ways to apply a team approach to large-scale issues and project manage solutions in a legal context.

In my sixth year as an associate at Orrick Herrington, I became very involved in the legal defense of Guantanamo Bay detainees. I was fortunate to be at a firm that allowed me to devote significant resources to this pro bono project. The experience was a revelation to me. It exposed me to lawyers who were applying their legal skills to socially meaningful issues while wielding their skills to create and develop new law and policies. This was eye-opening, and I knew from then on that this was the direction I needed to go within my legal career.

What are your focus areas at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children? How do you spend your time as general counsel?
Seventy percent of the time, I could be GC of any 350-person company dealing with typical contract, employee, trademark, and compliance issues. But the other 30 percent of my time I get to tackle issues very unique to the center’s mission to help find missing children, reduce child sexual exploitation, and prevent child victimization. This work may involve federal legislative efforts, coordinating with corporate and technology partners, or working internally to anticipate and prevent new threats to child safety, especially online. Last year, the center received over 8 million reports of child sexual exploitation (pornography, enticement, sextortion, sex trafficking, etc.), so the challenges are enormous.

You graduated from St. Catherine’s, an all-girls high school in Richmond, Virginia. And your work largely defends girls. Do you see a link between your background and work?
Most victims of child sex trafficking are girls, but boys and transgender children are definitely victimized as well. I think when you go to an all-girls school for 13 years, you’re naturally conditioned to empathize strongly with girls who are horribly victimized and have been denied the sort of childhood that we were able to enjoy. That being said, the deepest influence my experience at St. Catherine’s had on my current work was the emphasis on finding a role in society where your work benefits others. This influence was echoed years later at Fordham Law School, which makes service to others a core part of the education experience.

How has your work against Backpage.com influenced your view of the pros and cons of “communications freedom” enabled by the consumer internet?
It’s essential to understand that the civil and criminal legal challenges against Backpage have absolutely nothing to do with internet freedoms or freedom of speech. The invocations of these freedoms are simply red herrings designed to distract from the starker factual landscape of these cases—namely, that the trafficking and sexual abuse of children is always illegal. There are no freedoms that can immunize someone who aids and abets or otherwise participates in a venture that traffics children for sex.

Many lawyers in I Am Jane Doe say parents of trafficked girls are what got the legal momentum rolling against Backpage.com. Do you agree?
I think this is definitely true. The mothers in this film are indicative of so many parents NCMEC works with who never stop looking for and supporting their children when they go missing or are exploited. I think this is reflective of NCMEC’s origin. We were founded by John and Revé Walsh in 1984, after the abduction and murder of their 6-year-old son Adam fueled their wish to ensure that no one other parent searching for their child would do so without the support and help of a nonprofit dedicated to these efforts. Social movements like these efforts around child protection are often most powerfully inspired by human ties, including the love parents have for their children.

What is your hoped-for outcome with the release of I Am Jane Doe?
I think we’re already seeing what I had hoped would be the impact of this amazing film: heightened public awareness and dialogue; increased attention from Congress on the problems and potential solutions highlighted by the film; and new dialogue around how as a society we can provide additional, focused support services to survivors of child sex trafficking and their families.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Jane Hodges.