Judge Jimmie V. Reyna: ‘Don’t let anyone take your dreams from you’

I see Circuit Judge Jimmie V. Reyna, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District, walking intently like a man on a mission across Times Square. Then I see him running in the opposite direction down a New Orleans street. These are images in my head. Judge Reyna put them there. He wants me to remember them because they mean something. They are to remind me to “know where (I’m) going” and to “run when something doesn’t feel right.”

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As he does every year during the Hispanic National Bar Association’s Legislative Days, Judge Reyna recently hosted a group of middle-school girls along with members of the HNBA’s Latina Commission at the Federal Circuit Court.

The courthouse sits on the east side of Lafayette Square, which is bordered on the south by the White House.

Judge Reyna explained to the girls that as the son of immigrants who picked onions in the fields alongside his parents, all the odds in the world were against him becoming a federal appellate Judge. Yet he “wanted to make it in life,” and as a practicing attorney in Washington D.C. he often sat by himself on a Lafayette Park bench, eating his lunch, and thinking about how he would do just that.

“The first thing you have to do is decide: ‘I’m gonna make it,’” Judge Reyna shared with the girls. He had heard that the world stood aside for the men and women who know where they’re going, and one day he decided to test that theory. He was in New York, a city where everyone is going somewhere – or so it seems. “I am going to walk from one end of this street to the other, as if I know where I’m going,” Judge Reyna plotted. “And I am going to project that.” Judge Reyna suddenly looked fierce and powerful as he re-enacted the scene. “Do you know what happened?” he again faced the girls, relaxed and dropped his tone by a few decibels. “Everyone got out of my way.”

This doesn’t mean that hard work is unnecessary. On the contrary. “Some people decide not to work,” Judge Reyna said somewhat sadly. “I think it’s because they don’t want to make it.” The problems and issues that arise as people work through everyday life, become non-issues for people that know where they’re going.

But in order to make it, you also have to know from whom, what and where to steer clear. Judge Reyna warned the girls that things like abusive relationships and drugs would “rob (them) of making it,” and therefore they had to bypass such things or leave them behind.

“Don’t let anyone take your dreams from you,” he said. “Be the most beautiful thing in the world: a strong, independent woman.” This takes courage to decide that you are going to make it, courage to work hard, and courage to honor your inner voice.

And so Judge Reyna revealed how long ago, while on a business trip before he was a judge, he was invited to a private home in New Orleans to play pool.

Amidst a game of billards, and for no apparent reason whatsoever, his inner voice told him: “Salte de aqui. Get out of here.” Judge Reyna excused himself to go to the bathroom, but he instead reached the front door and ran without ever looking back. “I was a grown man, in a suit, and I ran,” he confessed to the girls. “You do so too. And you make it.”

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