Nayda Benitez
Nayda (she/ella) grew up in El Paso County, a notoriously anti-immigrant county in Colorado, as an undocumented immigrant. She immigrated to Colorado from South Central Mexico in 2002. Today, she leads CIRC’s organizing team and strategy as the Director of Organizing. She was pulled into the immigrant rights movement in 2016 as a student who organized against the onslaught of attacks on DACA recipients and the criminalization of the immigrant community during the Trump years. She has worked on campaigns to disentangle ICE from local law enforcement, on passing a statewide Immigrant Legal Defense Fund, on expanding healthcare access to undocumented people in CO, and has worked extensively with migrants in the rural, Southern part of her state. She credits a lot of her organizing skills to working class, undocumented, women & queer people of color who are at the heart of the immigrant justice movement in Colorado.