Tanisa Jeffers Wins Big in JP5 Contest

Tanisa Jeffers (center) with campaign manager Sarah Swallow (left) on election night (courtesy of Sarah Swallow)

It was after 10:30pm when the Chronicle finally caught up with Tanisa Jeffers. She had awoken an hour earlier, learned she had won the contest for Justice of the Peace Precinct 5, and headed down to the post-election party at Hotel Vegas.

“I apologize, I’m still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes,” Jeffers said. “I work at night. I’m a night court judge, and I sleep during the daytime. I’ve got to be at work in 20 minutes, but I’m here.”

At that point it had been three hours since early voting results showed Jeffers with a wide lead over her opponents, Rick Olivo, the current judge of JP5, and Travis County prosecutor Ornela DeSeta. Jeffers wound up taking 61% of the vote to Olivo’s 20% and DeSeta’s 19%. The margin of victory surprised some people, and Jeffers was one of them. “We were preparing for the run-off,” she said. “We were trying to be judicious with our resources, because we knew that was a big, big possibility.”

JP5 is one of Travis County’s busiest courts – Olivo has called it “the people’s court.” It handles misdemeanors, including bond and eviction cases. Olivo has led the court since September of 2023, when the Travis County Commissioners Court chose him over Jeffers to succeed Nick Chu, who had stepped down after six years of progressive leadership on the bench. Olivo had the most judicial experience of the candidates the commissioners had to choose from.

The race for JP5 was Jeffers’ third in the last four years, after she lost to Dimple Malhotra for County Court at Law No. 4 in 2020 and Mary Ann Espiritu for CC5 in 2022. She’s been an attorney in Austin for two decades and already served as a magistrate judge for the county’s JP courts. As a Black woman, she told us she believes it’s important for Travis County to have Black judges on the bench, especially in JP5, where a disproportionate number of people facing eviction are people of color. She is excited that she’ll now be able to explore more options for helping tenants facing eviction, including the use of an Eviction Diversion Court.

Jeffers also said she hopes limiting evictions can help with Austin’s housing affordability problem. “There’s a housing crisis in Austin,” she said. “I mean, I cannot afford to live here anymore and I’m a judge, right? We need to go forward and push this envelope. And it’s going to start with our local JP to properly handle all the evictions that we’ve had as a result of coming out of the pandemic.”