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With abortion on the ballot, can a Californian help swing this state to Harris?

Maggy Krell, a deputy attorney general, has decided to take her Democratic campaign for California State Assembly on the road to Nevada.

The 130-mile road trip will also bring Krell full circle — she prosecuted sexual violence under Harris, defended Planned Parenthood from Trump and is now stumping for the former and against the latter. Like Harris, Krell says she is shaped by her work as a prosecutor. ‘When I think of these abortion bans and who is just most devastated by them, I think of the victims in the types of cases I prosecuted.’

Sacramento Assembly candidate Maggy Krell talks about working with Kamala Harris at the CADOJ

Vice President Kamala Harris has inspired several women in California who are either already in elected office or hoping to win one in November.

One of those women is Democrat Maggy Krell, who is running to represent Sacramento in the State Assembly. Krell will face Republican candidate Nikki Ellis in the race to replace Kevin McCarty, who is running to be Sacramento’s next mayor.

Dear Neighbors in Nevada by Maggy Krell

This is post-Dobbs America, where the Supreme Court held that there is no constitutional right to abortion and opened the floodgates for states to revive arcane laws from the 1800s (before women could vote!) or pass newly concocted bans that have had a chilling effect on health care providers everywhere, and a life-threatening impact on women seeking care.

Dobbs made every American less free.

Nevada is not only a pivotal swing state in the November election, it is one of a handful of states whose voters will consider enshrining the right to abortion into the state constitution. State constitutional amendments will be a key legal tool in the next battleground of reproductive rights litigation.

For this lawyer and Assembly candidate, ‘save the children’ isn’t a hashtag

Alessandro, left, has dinner with Maggy Krell and her family. Alessandro was separated from his mother when they arrived at the U.S. border and Krell, a Sacramento lawyer and California Assembly candidate, helped reunite them. (Max Whittaker/For The Times)

Maggy Krell is a California assistant attorney general who headed up the state’s special crimes unit (think “Special Victims” if this were a television show) and is now running for the state Assembly to represent a district in Sacramento…

The first time I wrote about a case that involved Krell, she didn’t want me to use her name. Unlike Ballard, Krell doesn’t seek out publicity.

This was during the era of President Trump, when children were being separated from their parents at the border — kidnapped, really, with no accountability. Krell was chief counsel for Planned Parenthood at the time, but she couldn’t stomach what the government was doing. So she volunteered to help. She wound up at the Port Isabel Detention Center near Brownsville, Texas, where she was assigned to help a migrant I’ll call Patricia. Patricia had been separated from her 6-year-old son Alessandro and had no idea where he was or if she would ever see him again. Krell discovered the government had listed Alessandro as an unaccompanied minor after he arrived at the border, with no connection to Patricia. The only way Krell could locate the child was by searching through all the identification numbers issued to people who were picked up by the Border Patrol on the day the mother and son arrived, and track down the ones handed out just before and after Patricia got hers. Krell got lucky with that bit of detective work and found Patricia’s son. Then she fought to get them both asylum, then picked Patricia up and drove her to retrieve her child. I met Alessandro shortly afterward at the Fourth of July parade in my Sacramento neighborhood, where he was riding a bike that Krell got for him. Today, Patricia is legally employed, and Alessandro is thriving.