One of Washington’s largest immigrant support organizations is in crisis, with mass layoffs last month amid a unionization effort from staff and what leadership says is a budget crisis.
The Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network has laid off 18 workers since early September, the organization said, leaving only 14 staffers at the nonprofit, which operates a hotline — offering assistance and resources to those facing deportation — and organizes rapid response teams to witness and document immigration enforcement action around the state.
The layoffs will mean reduced hours, services and a much more sparsely staffed hotline, at a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Washington is at its most intense level in years, with more than six times as many monthly arrests compared with the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term.
WAISN’s deportation defense hotline helps families connect to organizations offering food, housing, healthcare and legal aid. It received more than 5,000 calls in 2024, according to the organization’s most recent annual report. Previously, it was staffed 12 hours a day, Monday through Friday. Now it will be staffed seven hours each weekday, from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., the organization said.
WAISN’s bond fund is funded separately and will continue to pay bonds to get immigrants out of detention, the group said. The fund paid out about $133,000 in 2024, releasing 17 people from detention.
The organization blamed depleted funding for the layoffs, writing in a prepared statement from a strategic communications firm: “Intimidation and threats from the current administration have led funders who once saw themselves as allies to our movement to reassess political risk and pull back funding.”
The layoffs also come in the midst of an organizing effort by the group’s workers. The nascent group, the WAISN Workers Collective, wrote on social media that it requested voluntary union recognition on Sept. 8, just before the layoffs began, but never heard back. It wrote that all 14 of the most recent layoffs were people who supported the unionization effort.
“Brenda Rodriguez Lopez, Catalina Velasquez,” the Workers Collective wrote, referring to WAISN’s two executive directors, “and the WAISN Board chose to lay workers off instead of recognizing the union.”
WAISN, in response, wrote that it “respects and supports our employees’ right to decide for themselves whether they wish to be represented by a union. We are committed to ensuring that employees can make that decision freely.”
Israel Gonzalez, a former rapid response organizer who was laid off last week, said they were told the layoffs were for financial reasons.
“Yet it is important to share that most of us who were laid off were part of the group that is speaking up, raising concerns about leadership,” Gonzalez said in a video posted by the Worker Collective.
WAISN said that it began 2026 with a $2.6 million budget deficit. Its most recent publicly available tax return, from 2024, shows revenue of $3 million, expenses of $3.2 million and assets of $7 million.
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