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. She represents workers fighting race discrimination before federal and state courts as well as administrative agencies. Stacy has experience litigating a wide range of employment issues, including discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wage theft. Stacy also spearheads Legal Aid at Work’s Ban the Box and Fair Chance work representing job seekers with criminal records.
Most recently, Stacy was involved in briefing two important victories in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In the first case, Arias v. Raimondo, which we co-counseled with California Rural Legal Assistance, the court broke new legal ground when it held that an employer’s attorney violated the law when he contacted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) in an attempt to have his client’s former employee deported after he sued for his unpaid wages. In the other case, Guerrero v. California Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the Ninth Circuit affirmed a precedent-setting 2015 U.S. District Court trial judgment that an employer violated federal civil rights law when it disqualified a job applicant solely because he had used an invalid Social Security number to obtain work while he was undocumented. Stacy has also played an active role in programmatic strategic planning, secured almost $300,000 in grants to support the work of the program, and supervises the Fair Chance Community Organizer at Legal Aid at Work. Stacy also serves as an Abogada Consultora for the Consulado General de Mexico de San Francisco. Stacy first worked at Legal Aid at Work as a Skadden Fellow, representing immigrant women workers in the Central Valley and beyond. After law school, Stacy completed a federal district court clerkship with the Honorable Fernando M. Olguin, U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School. At Stanford Law, she was a Senior Editor of the Stanford Law Review and a Co-Chair of the Stanford Latino Law Students Association. As part of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, Stacy also represented clients before San Francisco’s Immigration Court, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the Ninth Circuit. During law school, Stacy worked at the National Immigration Law Center, ACLU of Southern California, and Traber & Voorhees, a plaintiff-side civil rights law firm. She is the first in her family to obtain a high school diploma and a native Spanish speaker. Stacy has been advocating for workers’ rights for over a decade, beginning during her undergraduate years as an organizer with low-wage immigrant workers on campus.