“We Care About Them”

By Leslie Linthicum

They all have one thing in common: A date in the courtroom with Jaymie Roybal.

Roybal, 33, who assumed the title of president of the UNM Alumni Association last year, has been a federal prosecutor since 2019 and carries a caseload that is about half violent crime and half child sexual exploitation cases. She takes on bad actors and she wins, too.

So it’s a little surprising when Roybal (’12 BS/BA, ’16 JD) tells the story of bursting into tears in her first-year criminal law class at UNM during a discussion of a case against a father who had kicked his 4-year-old son to death.

She’s nursing a chai tea and remembering some of the twists and turns that took her from an idyllic childhood in Española to representing the Justice Department in federal courtrooms. Roybal makes clear she is talking to Mirage as a proud Lobo, and not in her official capacity as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of New Mexico.

Alumni Association President Jaymie Roybal outside the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals courthouse in Denver.
(Photo: Courtesy Jaymie Roybal)

“He was really sweet, and he told me, ‘You need to be able to read the material for the reason I’m trying to teach it — for the law.’ And I just couldn’t. I couldn’t get to the teaching part because it was really sad to me that this kid had died. That’s all I took away.”

Roybal got a C in that class. “Well deserved,” she says. And she decided that she still wanted to be a lawyer, but she could never do criminal law.

“I always tell that story, because you just never know where the universe is going to end up taking you,” Roybal says. “So now this is what I do full time. And I love it. And if there was a job that was, like, designed for me, it would be this.”

Roybal’s heart hasn’t hardened to the dark corners of humanity that she encounters in her cases.

“I still cry. I just do it in my office now, not in the courtroom,” Roybal says. “But I think you can’t lose that human element, right? Because it’s easy to be jaded. It’s easy to just kind of move the case from point A to point B. But working with victims is just the best. Because you can’t ever undo something bad that’s happened to someone, but you can help them close this bad chapter and go forward.”

Roybal grew up in Española with family at the center of everything. Her dad taught accounting at Northern New Mexico College and her mother worked in the Santa Fe office of Richard Rosenstock, a civil rights lawyer. Life revolved around church, volleyball, grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, and work at the family farm in Chamita.

“It was really a picturesque childhood and I’m so grateful that I grew up there,” Roybal says. She attended Pojoaque High School, where she played volleyball, served as class president, worked on the yearbook and was in the National Honor Society.

Roybal came to UNM because it was a family tradition and found herself as a 17-year-old freshman sitting in a psychology class in Woodward Hall with 800 other students — about six times the number of people in her senior class in high school.

Like other freshmen from smaller towns, Roybal managed to find her way at UNM and surprisingly discovered a supportive community in the Signed Language Interpreting major in the Department of Linguistics.

Although one of Roybal’s grandmothers had lost her hearing and the grandkids communicated with her by passing notes, Roybal had no particular passion for signing. She was just having trouble fulfilling her foreign language requirement and someone told her the ASL classes were easy.

“So I took it and it was not easy!” Roybal says. “It was so hard. But I loved it. And the program at UNM is such a gem.”

When she graduated in 2012 it was with a Bachelor of Science in Sign Language Interpretation and Translation and a bachelor of arts in Political Science.

Jaymie Roybal (Photo: Raymond Armijo)

“I took ‘you argue a lot’ as a compliment,” Roybal says, laughing.

When she got out of law school in 2016 fate found Roybal a clerkship with U.S. Magistrate Greg Fouratt, a former U.S. attorney, who encouraged her to consider criminal law and made observing prosecutors in the courtroom part of her job. One in particular, a young Hispanic woman named Marisa Ong, showed Roybal what might be possible.

“By the end of that clerkship,” she says, “I was hooked. I wanted to be in the U.S. Attorney’s office.”

Roybal was living in Washington, D.C., working on the policy staff of U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich and loving it when a job opened at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Albuquerque. She’s been there since 2019. In addition to carrying a general caseload in the criminal division, Roybal runs the department’s Project Safe Childhood initiative, which prosecutes the sexual exploitation of children.

It’s a demanding job, with high stakes and lots of hours. Roybal finds balance in learning to play tennis and golf and in her work with the Alumni Association board of directors, which she joined in 2017.

When she was asked to join, Roybal was already familiar with the association from her term as president of the Associated Students of the University of New Mexico in 2011-2012. And she remembered Office of Alumni Relations Director Karen Abraham’s advice that, wherever you are in your life or career, you can always find something to give back to UNM.

“Karen took me under her wing and she used to really emphasize to me that your service to the University goes beyond your 15 minutes of fame, so to speak. That you always have more to give to this place.”

• • While she is no longer certified, Roybal can still communicate in American Sign Language.
• • When she ran for president of the Associated Students at the University of New Mexico in 2011, her “Now” slate swept the ASUNM election, taking the president and vice president positions and all 10 Senate seats.
• • With her current job as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Roybal has now worked in all three branches of the federal government.
• • She was named New Mexico Prosecutor of the Year by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“It’s a great board. It’s people that just love the University and love the campus, and they all love it for different reasons,” she says. “Everyone’s story is completely different. But this one place gave all of us an opportunity and a path that we walk on now.”

One of Roybal’s goals for her term as president is to connect with students, so they’re familiar with the Alumni Association before they graduate and become alumni.

“I will always believe that first and foremost, the University is to educate students. And the student base is our future alumni base,” she says. “So I want students to know that we see them, and that we care about them, and that we want them to graduate. And that we want them to become part of our alumni community.”

Expect to see Roybal’s “Lobo For Life” rollout on campus sometime this spring as Alumni Association board members fan out on campus handing out Lobo for Life swag and making connections that hopefully will pay off for students and board members down the line.

“I think that so much of what the Alumni Association does is foster that intangible kind of love for place. We’re about maintaining that connection, which then I think pays off in really tangible ways,” Roybal says. “I think one of the most important things that it does is help people find other people who can help you along the way.”