Brenda Rodríguez López has spent her life organizing, strategizing, and amplifying the stories and expertise of immigrant communities. A queer and undocumented organizer with national recognition, she is the executive director of the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network (WAISN), a statewide, diverse, and powerful ecosystem of 400 organizations working to advance and protect the rights of immigrants and refugees. She grew up in Basin City in rural Washington and worked in the fields every summer alongside her family.
Through her organizing with Crimson Group at Washington State University, Brenda was able to secure funding streams that would create employment and scholarship opportunities for undocumented students and worked to remove barriers and increase retention of undocumented students. She also organized alongside college groups in Washington state and United We Dream to lobby for the Dream Act and to protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program during the Trump administration.
She joined WAISN in 2018 as the first East and Central Washington coordinator to build coalitions that have successfully become their own organizations in Wenatchee, Yakima, Spokane, Quincy, Ephrata, and the Tri-Cities.