DALLAS – When Bill Brewer struts through his 48th floor downtown office, he looks like just another high-powered Dallas attorney in an impeccable pinstriped suit and brightly colored tie.

He just might be working for free, however.

When he’s not handling disputes for multi-million dollar companies at the firm he co-founded more than two decades ago, he and other attorneys at Bickel & Brewer take on civil rights and commercial cases for clients who might not be able to pay at all.

Since opening the Bickel & Brewer Storefront, the law firm’s pro-bono satellite office in predominantly black south Dallas, he has guided lawsuits that, among others, won wheelchair athletes the right to compete in the New York City Marathon and helped a small Hispanic evangelical church nearly swindled out of its building.

The Long Island native also represents Farmers Branch landlords and residents fighting the Dallas suburb’s efforts to prevent illegal immigrants from renting apartments and houses. Brewer has filed numerous state and federal lawsuits contending that the city’s all-white leadership is trying to drive out the city’s growing Latino population.

“Generating an antagonism between Anglos and Hispanics is not the way to go,” said Brewer, 57. “This is a state, if it’s not already, will soon be, a state where the majority of the people in our community ... are of Hispanic origin.”

Calls and e-mails from The Associated Press to Farmers Branch officials for comment were not returned. Mayor Tim O’Hare has previously said illegal immigrants are a drain on the city’s schools and neighborhoods.

Brewer’s friend, longtime Dallas activist Adelfa Callejo, asked him to get involved after the city council unanimously passed a November 2006 ordinance requiring landlords to check the immigration status of renters. The rule was revised later to include some exemptions.

“What they’re doing in Farmers Branch is highly illegal, inappropriate and unconstitutional,” said Brewer, then a board member of New York-based PRLDEF, which fought a similar ordinance in Hazleton, Penn.

Brewer decided to open a division to represent low-income clients while sitting in a Dallas courtroom with partner John Bickel around 1987, some three years after establishing their firm.

“We were watching a case be disposed of in front of us and it was clear if you really listened that the black plaintiff had a legitimate complaint ... but he was represented by a lawyer from the community that was clearly outgunned from an advocacy, from a resource, from every other perspective.”

The Storefront opened in 1995 and handles everything from eviction and foreclosure to employment disputes, said Brewer, who earned degrees from St. John’s University, the Albany Law School of Union University and New York University School of Law.

“The goal here was to do something a little different and it was – and is – to bring the resources that are available to our corporate clients to community impact cases,” Brewer said. “There’s no budget here on any case, period. The only imperative ... in the Storefront or in the firm is to win the case.”

In the Farmers Branch case, Bickel & Brewer launched a campaign to get the rental rule on the ballot, hoping voters would strike it down. Brewer’s six children – ranging from a 1-year-old to a 19-year-old college sophomore – accompanied him door-to-door. But Farmers Branch residents endorsed the law 2-to-1 in May 2007 during the nation’s first public vote on a local government measure targeting illegal immigration.

Still, Brewer’s clients prevailed in court. A federal judge blocked Farmers Branch from enforcing the ordinance after finding city officials didn’t defer to the federal government on immigration matters and tried to create their own classifications to determine who could live there.

The judge also will rule on how much money Farmers Branch will pay for the opposing attorney fees, including $480,000 the Storefront seeks. The money will go to the firm’s Future Leaders Program, bringing students from Dallas’ economically depressed areas to elite private schools for classes and mentoring, said Brewer.

In the meantime, Brewer’s clients are challenging a new ordinance in which Farmers Branch would ask the federal government for a potential renter’s immigration status before approving a rental license.

Brewer said he knows cities across the nation continue watching the two-year legal battle unfold, especially those considering similar rules.

“The most important time in the history of Texas is right now in how we handle this shifting demographic,” Brewer said, jabbing an index finger at a conference room table for emphasis. “And it is an opportunity, it’s not bad, it’s all good.”