Angela Colmenero

On May 11, 2026, President Trump nominated Angela Colmenero to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

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Biography

Colmenero received her undergraduate degree in government from the University of Texas at Austin (2001) and her law degree from the University of Notre Dame School of Law (2004).

Legal Experience

Upon law school graduation, Colmenero clerked for then-Chief Judge A. Joe Fish of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. She also practiced law with Jones Day and Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox in Dallas. Following these roles, she joined the Texas Office of the Attorney General, where she served as an assistant attorney general in the General Litigation Division, and was promoted to deputy chief of the Special Litigation Division before being appointed by Attorney General Ken Paxton to serve as chief of the General Litigation Division.

Colmenero joined Governor Greg Abbott’s office in 2018, where she currently serves as the deputy chief of staff. Previously, she served as Abbott’s deputy general counsel from 2021to 2023. She also served as the Interim Texas Attorney General during Ken Paxton’s impeachment proceedings in July 2023.

Key Facts and Context 

• Served as lead counsel in Veasey v. Abbott, where she defended a Texas photo-ID law that disproportionally burdened voters of color, in violation of the Voting Rights Act. When the court ruled that the law had discriminatory intent, Colmenero helped the Texas legislature find a workaround to “cure” the law’s discriminatory effects.

• Served as trial counsel representing Texas in multiple cases defending congressional and legislative redistricting maps against Voting Rights Act challenges

• Served as trial counsel in Texas’s failed attempts to obtain Voting Rights Act preclearance for its redistricting plans, which the court concluded were specifically drawn to disadvantage minority voters

• Served as trial counsel in Texas v. United States, where she challenged the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program and the expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program

• Colmenero has regularly made efforts to defend Texas’s abortion ban, including defending the state’s position in a landmark challenge to Texas’s near total abortion ban and its medical exception provisions

• Under Colmenero’s leadership as an interim Texas attorney general, she filed an appeal to undo a district court judge’s ruling that stopped Texas from enforcing SB 14, a state law that prohibited necessary and lifesaving gender-affirming care for young people

• Colmenero reviewed and approved a Texas State Preservation Board’s controversial restroom policy, which prohibited transgender individuals from using restrooms that align with who they are, a policy that extended to the Texas State Capitol