Linda Chavez, a head of the US Commission on Civil Rights during the Reagan administration, was President-elect George W. Bush’s first choice as secretary of Labor. She was eventually pressured to withdraw her nomination in January 2001, following revelations that during the early 1990s she had harbored in her home an illegal immigrant from Guatemala.
Ms. Chavez admitted that she had given the woman money from time to time, and the woman said that she had occasionally done household chores. But Chavez said she had housed the woman as a charity case, not an employee, and that the case was not comparable to that of others in her situation (see No. 1). “Search and destroy politics” made her nomination untenable, said the ex-Labor nominee upon her withdrawal.
