Rob Fuentes is running for Fresno City Council District 1 in the November 2026 election against Naindeep Singh, for the seat being vacated by termed-out Councilmember Annalisa Perea. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford, a master’s in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a law degree from Yale. A civil rights attorney who has represented workers in wage-and-hour, discrimination, and wrongful-termination cases, he also teaches at San Joaquin College of Law and serves as president of the State Center Community College District Board of Trustees. In 2023, he was hired as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California, working primarily on civil rights and white-collar fraud cases.
Fuentes’s campaign was disrupted in mid-2026 by a Fresnoland investigation revealing that while publicly campaigning to “abolish” a federal immigration enforcement agency he called “unhinged” and “unlawful,” he had been assigned by the U.S. Attorney’s Office to represent that same agency in more than 120 immigration cases during the Trump administration. He said he continued to support California’s sanctuary-state protections throughout. The day after his public criticism became widely known, he was placed on administrative leave; he resigned shortly after, saying, “I was pushed out by the Trump administration for criticizing ICE publicly… I saved them the trouble and resigned.” Coverage described the episode as a self-inflicted setback for his campaign. He led the June 2026 primary and advanced to the November runoff, campaigning on lowering the cost of living and building safer neighborhoods in District 1.
