Lourdes Martinez Diaz Barriga

Lourdes Martinez brings twenty years of experience in the immigrants’ rights field with her to Centro Legal. After graduating from George Washington University Law School, Lourdes worked at the Tahirih Justice Center in Falls Church, Virginia, representing immigrant women and girls fleeing gender-based violence in a variety of cases, ranging from affirmative asylum to removal defense in immigration court. Lourdes later moved to California and became a legal educator at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco, where she provided technical assistance and training to attorneys, acting as community liaison with the government, and working with immigrant organizers in the Central Valley of California. Lourdes’s areas of legal expertise include family-based immigration and asylum law, with a focus on protections for women and sexual minorities.

Most recently, Lourdes spent six years as the Political Director at Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) in the Bay Area, working alongside immigrant leaders and organizers on campaigns for Domestic Worker and Immigrant Rights, as well as promoting the civic engagement of the Latinx community. During that time, Lourdes oversaw MUA’s base-building and political campaign work, also forming part of the organization’s leadership. Lourdes and her team worked successfully with immigration advocates to ensure that immigrant women’s voices were heard by the Biden Administration, and that asylum protections for survivors of domestic violence were restored. She also led MUA’s efforts to form the Alameda County Immigrant Legal and Education Network in collaboration with Centro Legal, in response to the threats launched by the Trump Administration against the immigrant communities of the Bay Area. Lourdes identifies as a Mexican woman of mixed heritage whose family history compels her to work to create a world where migration is not needed to flee displacement or persecution, but where it is nevertheless possible and celebrated.

Lourdes is an immigrant originally from Mexico City, a home that she left at the age of 13 to move to Texas with her family. Today, she is the Political Director of Mujeres Unidas y Activas, or MUA, a grassroots organization of Latina immigrant women in the San Francisco Bay Area with a double mission of promoting personal transformation and building community power for social and economic justice. MUA’s focus issue areas are Immigrant Rights; Domestic Worker Rights; and Violence Against Women. Before joining MUA, Lourdes was an immigration attorney, working as an immigration legal educator with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) in San Francisco; and, prior to that, representing immigrant women fleeing gender-based violence at the Tahirih Justice Center in the Washington D.C. area. Lourdes has worked as a contributor with Univision, Telemundo, NBC Bay Area, KQED News and local radio stations in the Bay Area of California.