Stacy Villalobos
Director, Racial Economic Justice Program
Stacy Villalobos (she/her/ella) is the Director of the Racial Economic Justice Program at Legal Aid at Work. Stacy has been advocating for workers’ rights for over two decades, beginning during her undergraduate years as an organizer with the university’s immigrant workers. Her practice currently focuses on fighting race discrimination in the workplace, including representing job seekers with arrest and conviction records.
Most recently, Stacy was involved in arguing and briefing, as amici curiae, an important victory before the California Supreme Court in Bailey v. San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. There, the Court held that a single use of a racial epithet, even when uttered by a coworker, can be severe enough to be actionable harassment under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA). Stacy and her colleagues also won two important victories in the Ninth Circuit. In Arias v. Raimondo, co-counseled with California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA), the court created national precedent when it found an employer’s attorney could be held personally liable for unlawful retaliation when he contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to have an undocumented immigrant worker deported after he had sued the employer to recover his unpaid wages. And in Guerrero v. California Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), the Ninth Circuit upheld a groundbreaking U.S. District Court judgment that CDCR violated a job applicant’s federal civil rights by rejecting him solely because he had used an invalid Social Security number to obtain work while he had been undocumented.
Stacy also advocates for systems and policy change to challenge structural racism and advance the rights of marginalized workers. As part of this work, Stacy was selected to be a 2021 Dr. Beatriz María Solís Policy Institute Fellow by the Women’s Foundation California.
Stacy began her legal career as a Skadden Fellow at Legal Aid at Work, representing immigrant women workers in the Central Valley and beyond. Stacy is a former law clerk to the Honorable Fernando M. Olguin of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School. Stacy also serves on her local Library Board of Trustees in Southern California.
She previously served as an Abogada Consultura for the Consulado General de Mexico de San Francisco and on the Mexican American Bar Association’s Judicial Externship Committee. In 2025, she was the recipient of the Stanford Law School Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award. Stacy is the first in her family to obtain a high school diploma and a native Spanish speaker.