After union effort, WA immigration nonprofit lays off deportation hotline and rapid response staff

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For three weeks, employees at the largest immigrant-led nonprofit in the state waited for leadership to respond to their union demand, which had already gained support from the majority of the organization’s workforce and was only growing. 

Workers asked the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, also known as WAISN, to voluntarily recognize their union on September 8, according to Marsha Enriquez, the former Finance and Operations Coordinator for the nonprofit.

Employees formed the WAISN Workers Collective in early September, prompted in part by what it described as WAISN’s financial crisis, an earlier round of layoffs, reduced hours and a perceived lack of transparency. 

On September 22, WAISN sent an email telling the Collective's leadership that they could expect a response the following week.

“So in good faith, we waited,” Enriquez said. 

WAISN leadership did not voluntarily recognize the union. On September 30, they laid off about half of its remaining staff, she said. 

“We understand this was their response,” Enriquez said. “To lay off 14 people.”

WAISN denies the layoffs were retaliatory. But Enriquez, who was the Collective’s co-chair, told RANGE that all of the people laid off were either part of the union effort, including her, or were supervisors who had expressed support for the workers. Currently, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is looking at seven separate Unfair Labor Practice Charges filed against WAISN. 

Allegations include refusal to recognize the union, coercive actions and retaliation against workers who supported the union, according to the National Labor Relations Board case docket.

“How can an organization champion for unionizing … but then turn around and lay off (most employees) that (were) in support of it?” Enriquez asked. “It just doesn't make sense.” 

In the aftermath of the layoffs, WAISN leadership sent the Collective an email indicating they would voluntarily recognize the union and move forward with the process to confirm that the union still had the support needed for recognition. The Collective declined, noting that the majority of the union had been laid off and affirming their intent to continue with the NLRB charge process.

WAISN, based in Seattle, was established in 2016 as a rapid-response network to support immigrants and refugees facing deportation, including providing bond funds, educating communities about their rights and accompanying people to legal appointments.

What was once a staff of over 30 has since been reduced to 14 people, Enriquez said. The recent layoffs included all three members of WAISN’s Deportation Defense Hotline and the two organizers leading the rapid response teams across the state, she added.

Like it has on two other occasions, WAISN declined a request for an interview. Instead, a spokesperson emailed a general media statement, saying that “WAISN respects and supports” the employees’ right to support a union and declined to comment further on the ongoing effort. WAISN later commented on some of the allegations in an email. 

Former staff continue to wait for the outcomes of the charges – a process that can take months if not longer. If the board finds that the layoffs were unlawful, those employees could be reinstated.

The union push

As Trump’s increasingly violent immigration crackdown spread across the US in the last two years, immigrant organizations across the state quickly mobilized to support impacted communities, including WAISN.

During that time, staff members felt subjected to working conditions that were increasingly difficult to navigate, including unaddressed concerns over workloads and burnout, Enriquez said. Others also voiced concerns over WAISN’s fundraising strategy and its priorities. 

WAISN didn’t directly address these concerns in an email to RANGE. It however emphasized that staff has been a part of the budget process, and touted the organization’s starting salary of $70,000 and its benefits, including 46 days off in addition to other time off.

Enriquez said the inability of WAISN’s leadership to be transparent with workers who saw three colleagues suddenly laid off in late August, another layoff in mid-September and some of whom had their work hours reduced further compounded the problems. 

“It felt like staff were being asked to absorb all of the consequences that come with the financial crisis when those in power and those who make the decisions about how we spend money … were not being affected in any way,” Enriquez said.

The hope was that the union would give workers “a seat at the table” and empower them to be part of the decision-making — including how WAISN spends its money and where they fundraise, she said.

For its part, WAISN said that its $2.4 million budget deficit was announced to all employees at the beginning of the year. They also said the majority of staff working reduced hours participated in the state’s SharedWork program, allowing them to receive 75% of their pay at the reduced hours.

When the Collective responded to WAISN’s post-layoff email saying it would recognize the union, it criticized the actions the organization’s leadership took as they tried to form the union.

“By choosing to dismantle the very workforce that built this effort, leadership fundamentally destroyed the bargaining unit and made it impossible for us to unionize as intended,” the collective wrote.

The email rejected the prospect that both parties could move past leadership’s “forced removal of most of our union and the deliberate destruction of our bargaining unit” and just go through the union recognition process. The collective said that leadership was well aware of who organized the union efforts. 

The Collective’s email also affirmed workers’ belief that WAISN has employed a “bad faith approach” to the ongoing crisis in between its “prolonged financial mismanagement” of assets, decision to retain executive salaries and executive associates whilst firing many employees, and decision to continue using expensive consultants and attorneys.

“When the organization is going through a financial crisis and you are citing that we are just not meeting fundraising goals, you don't lay off your director of finance and your director of development,” Enriquez said. 

In a statement to RANGE, WAISN said both executive directors took a 25% pay cut on September 11 while two staffers in the Executive Department began working part time. 

According to WAISN’s latest available tax filings from 2024, the three full-time directors all made more than $100,000 annually, with the two executive directors, Brenda Rodriguez Lopez and Catalina Velasquez, making $160,000 each in base compensation. The tax filings also list a contract grant writer making $136,750 that year. The organization reported $3 million in revenue and $3.2 million in expenses, with a net income deficit of $220,000.

In total, compensation for “officers, directors, trustees, and key employees” summed to more than $443,000 in total expenses, while other salaries and wages for its 27 employees came to more than $1.2 million. In that fiscal year, the organization spent more than $28,000 on travel expenses and more than $155,000 on conference expenses. 

In filings from 2023, Lopez and Velazquez made $170,000 and $165,000 in base compensation, respectively. That year, the organization spent $1.5 million on other salaries and wages for its  reported 39 employees and spent more than $66,000 on travel and conferences expenses each. WAISN reported more than $9.3 million in revenue, expenses of $3.1 million and a net income of $6.2 million.

On the night of September 30, RANGE attended a Zoom meeting of more than 100 rapid response volunteers where an attendee asked a WAISN manager facilitating the meeting about the organization’s 2024 tax filing. In response, the manager said, “All I can say to that is: 2024 is not 2026, and I am not a finance person, nor can I give that level of detail about financing. But we are in a desperate financial situation.”

Responding to a loss in capacity

In an email to RANGE on September 30, WAISN said it has dealt with a “disheartening loss” in funding from donors and the state government, which has resulted in the nonprofit needing to make difficult decisions and cuts to weather the losses. The organization shared publicly that many foundations once supportive of the work they do have “pulled back” and that the state support they once received also “shrunk under immense pressure from the federal government.”

WAISN told RANGE that in addition to starting 2026 in a deficit, it had not received support to the scale it needs. For the first time, WAISN requested $5 million from the state legislature for the Deportation Defense Hotline. But the effort was unsuccessful. The nonprofit had also sought to make itself more eligible for funding by broadening the language of the WA Migrant and Asylum Seeker Support program (MASS), according to the statement. But as of October 7, the state had not yet opened up the process for organizations to request funding. 

“Not one organization or group is meeting the growing need during this mass detention and deportation agenda,” the statement read. “While we have had to make incredibly painful decisions and cuts, we will not allow this setback to deter us from our mission and our commitment to our communities.” 

WAISN’s Deportation Defense Hotline will now run under reduced hours from 7 am to 2 pm, Monday to Friday. Before, the hotline was staffed from 6 am to 6 pm those same days. Other support services will also continue under WAISN’s reduced capacity, like helping immigrants pay for detention bonds, accompaniment to legal or administrative appointments and the resource finder, according to the organization.

Still, concerns abound about how well positioned the nonprofit organization is to continue supporting immigrant communities affected by the growing presence of ICE operations across communities like Yakima, Seattle and Spokane.

During the September 30 Zoom meeting, the WAISN manager told the volunteers that layoffs had affected all departments and that she, another WAISN employee and a contractor would staff the hotline in the meantime.

One by one, participants in the meeting asked questions about the organization’s layoffs, finances and operations, while also voicing concerns about increased immigration enforcement statewide. In the chat, volunteers across the state urged each other to connect with local teams and discussed wanting to set up their own hotlines. 

David Morales, a volunteer with the Yakima Immigrant Response Network, told RANGE that Yakima is currently experiencing its “biggest surge ever of ICE activity.”

“They might be taking upwards of 10 people per day in the county, depending on the town,” he said. “We’ve started to see raids on agricultural farms, so there’s a lot of need.”

He said the main goal of his network's rapid response team is to take videos of ICE encounters with civilians to make sure their legal rights are being protected. There is also a humanitarian team to support detainees and accompaniment services for community members who need to attend an ICE check-in, he added.

All of these programs are based on WAISN’s programs, according to Morales.

The Yakima Immigrant Response Network uploads reports at the end of the day to the WAISN system, Morales said. He said WAISN has the technology and infrastructure to maintain a database that includes videos and arrests that is “plain unreplicable.”

“Most of the people who work on the response line have been laid off,” Morales said. “So we’re going to have to have discussions about what we’re going to do.”

Local organizing

Although 14 people recently lost their jobs, Enriquez noted that the community is poised to lose too. 

“WAISN has not been present,” she said. “WAISN has not been supporting in its capacity because it's been essentially working against its workers internally.”

Enriquez said WAISN does not have the staff necessary to handle the growing need while ICE arrests continue to surge across Washington immigrant communities. She emphasized that she didn’t want to turn people away from WAISN, but urged them to connect with their local on-the-ground teams. 

Locally, WAISN has been a key resource for the Spokane Immigrant Rights Coalition (SIRC), which is made up of local non-profits and churches to provide financial assistance for families facing deportations, among other aid. 

SIRC had reached out to WAISN about a year and a half ago to “build capacity within Spokane,” according to coalition co-chair Margot Mejia. With WAISN’s educational materials, the coalition held trainings in Spokane as it developed a local rapid response team and encouraged the use of the WAISN hotline. 

The statewide hotline number was a vital resource for the coalition, Mejia said, since it helped them investigate abductions, mitigate community panic and get an accurate count of people being taken.

But community members started to feel that WAISN wasn’t catching all the alerts — though they didn’t know if calls were simply not being reported or if the community wasn’t aware of the hotline, Mejia said.

“Sometimes the numbers would be as low as three abductions in the community when we were clearly seeing a lot more,” Mejia said.

This summer, the Spokane coalition ended up setting up its own local hotline as a supplemental number for hours when WAISN’s hotline was unavailable.

With WAISN in such a precarious position, the coalition will have to focus its efforts locally rather than looking toward the statewide organization, Mejia said.

According to Mejia, WAISN shared in their last meeting that they had two directors because each was responsible for a side of the state. However, Rodriguez Lopez, who was responsible for the east side, had never reached out to the Spokane team, she said.

“It takes time to build community trust,” Mejia said. “Many folks are losing that trust in a system that doesn’t appear to be transparent in the decision makings, and also doesn’t seem to take accountability for its actions.”

Local resources

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