Lakendra Barajas

Lakendra Barajas is a senior attorney with Earthjustice’s Toxic Exposure & Health Program, where she advocates for all people to have access to safe, non-toxic workplaces, neighborhoods, and everyday products. Lakendra primarily litigates in federal courts, with a focus on ensuring agencies implement health-protective regulations of toxic chemicals like lead, PFAS, and phthalates. She also engages in considerable administrative advocacy in front of multiple agencies tasked with regulating toxic chemicals, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. Her current work focuses in large part on the regulation of toxic chemicals used in consumer products, including personal care products, cosmetics, and food packaging.

Lakendra works closely with community groups, environmental and health organizations, and labor partners to ensure that communities already overburdened with toxic chemicals do not continue to bare an outsized burden of toxic exposures. She also lobbies for health-protective legislation in Albany, New York, where she worked in coalition with New York community groups to fight for the passage of a ban on the use of toxic chemicals in menstrual products, which successfully passed both houses of the legislature in April 2025.

Prior to joining Earthjustice in 2019, Lakendra was an associate at the private law firms Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz and Willkie Farr & Gallagher, where she litigated intellectual property cases. Lakendra received her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and History from Vanderbilt University.