Vanessa Reyes’s life has been shaped by migration. Vanessa uses they/them and she/her pronouns. Vanessa’s family is from El Estado de Mexico, Mexico. Vanessa’s parents migrated to Southern California, where Vanessa was born. When she was a couple of years old, Vanessa and her family moved to Illinois, living first in a Chicago suburb and later to a small rural town in Central Illinois. Vanessa moved to the Illinois-Iowa border to study political science, gender studies, and ethics at Augustana College before moving to Seattle, Washington in mid-2015.  

From 2015 until 2020, Vanessa worked at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project as a Legal Advocate and Accredited Representative, supporting immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other crimes in applying for immigration relief. At NWIRP, Vanessa learned a lot about the complexities of the immigration legal system and how the laws and policies of this system were created and continue to enact division and keep certain people from accessing rights, benefits, and basic security. 

Outside of her day job, Vanessa has participated in community organizing and mutual aid work, which has included being a founding member of Fuerza Colectiva, a Seattle-area organizing collective of Latinx-identifying young people who, among other projects, helped raise funds to support immigration application fees and efforts to shut down the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. 

Vanessa’s personal, educational, and professional experiences have fostered their values as a prison and border abolitionist.    

In August of 2020, Vanessa started working at WAISN as the first Fair Fight Bond Fund Coordinator. She is excited to have the opportunity to blend her skills and values at WAISN to work towards freeing people from detention while working towards dismantling the systems that oppress our people and building up thriving and welcoming communities instead.