Immigration Groups Need Money. Dem Donors Are Too Scared to Write Checks.

Leading advocates and fundraisers say their money is urgently needed as Trump presses for millions to be deported.

(Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

IN THE WAKE OF THE BRUISING 2024 ELECTIONS, one of the preeminent networks of liberal donors met for a multi-day conference last November to pick up the pieces and begin to chart a way forward.

But despite Donald Trump having run a campaign promising mass deportations and crackdowns on migration, there was little talk at the Democracy Alliance gathering about the urgency of funding immigration-focused work. When immigration did come up, it was treated as a topic that the party needed to tiptoe around rather than engage on proactively. Sources familiar with the conversations said immigration was viewed in the room as an “albatross.”

Months later, the fear is that perceptions among donors haven’t changed. Though Trump has undertaken a campaign of fear, unlawful directives, the ending of legal protections for refugees and protected groups, detentions in Guantánamo Bay, and mass-deportation efforts that have caught even U.S. citizens in his dragnet, Democrats and advocates say that the Democratic donor class remains reluctant to fund groups trying to push back.

Broadly—and shockingly, to leaders who court donors and those who head immigration groups, several of whom spoke to The Bulwark—the Democratic party’s wealthiest supporters remain convinced that the issue doomed the party, and that it is better to pick battles on more opportune turf.

This posture has rankled some. Less than two weeks ago, a former Democracy Alliance president took to Facebook to share his frustration with liberal donors after the New York Times reported that many donors were pulling back their giving. Calling the piece “infuriating,” Gara LaMarche said, “if you’re so demoralized or afraid of Trump that you’re sitting on your growing millions or billions while frontline groups fighting for fast-eroding rights and for the most marginalized are starving and reeling from cutbacks, get effing over it.”

“If you think you’re scared, try being an immigrant restaurant worker fearing deportation, a trans kid, a Medicaid recipient or one of the countless others across the country and the world facing the unrelenting cruelty and callousness of Trump 2.0,” he wrote.

While LaMarche was not talking about immigration funding in isolation, many of the people who commented on his February 16 post were progressive leaders who work to raise money for immigration-advocacy initiatives, and they expressed similar sentiments. Kica Matos, the president of the National Immigration Law Center, was one of them.

“Last week I met with one of our biggest donors, who notified me that they would no longer be funding litigation efforts, including in the area of immigration,” she wrote. “It is not a secret that litigation is one of the few tools we have right now to protect immigrants from the vicious attacks that are coming with alarming speed.”

Asked about the post, Matos told The Bulwark that while some donors have stepped up their giving, it has not been enough.

“We need every funder to recognize the urgency of the moment we’re in and step up with the resources required to meet it,” she said. “This is particularly important because we know that Trump’s attacks on immigrants represent the first wave of his broader assault on our democracy.”

Mayra Peters-Quintero—the executive director of the Abundant Futures Fund, an immigration-focused philanthropy group that launched in 2022 with a plan to raise $100 million and has since raised $65 million toward that goal—similarly urged donors to get off the sidelines.

“This is a moment of real authoritarianism,” she said. “It’s a dark moment in history, and we’re going to be asked, ‘What did you do?’”

No Funders Saying ‘This is a Desperate Moment and I Want to Stand Up For Immigrants’

TO HELP ME BETTER UNDERSTAND THE STATE OF immigration advocacy funding, leader after leader pointed to a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) report that shows immigration has only ever been a drop in the bucket of overall philanthropic giving. According to that report, “between 2011 and 2015, barely 1% of all money granted by the 1,000 largest U.S. foundations was intended to benefit immigrants and refugees.” A follow-up report found that the “pro-immigrant, pro-refugee movement’s share of all foundation grants” had “shrunk 11% since DACA was first introduced” in 2012—but in the same time period, the foundations themselves became wealthier.

Trump’s first term gave rise to a short-lived bump in immigration-focused giving as foundations responded to his numerous attacks on immigrants, from an ill-conceived Muslim ban to the forced separation of families at the southern border. Average yearly funding for the movement “more than doubled from $130 million during 2011-2015 to $280 million during 2016-2020,” the NCRP’s latter report stated.

But now the immigration donor landscape is a mess, leaders say. After an election where immigration was central to Trump’s win, Democrats remain in retreat on the issue even as the federal government has turned its resources towards terrorizing immigrants. The concern among advocates is that the funders themselves have been cowed by a retribution-focused administration.

“The funder community is still quite shocked, and so what we’ve been hearing from most of them is that they’re trying to take a beat this year,” Jennie Murray, the president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, told The Bulwark. The general feeling, she added, was: “we’re just going to fast-track your renewal for one year until we figure out what end is up.”

Decisions like this are devastating, immigrant-rights leaders said, particularly when groups are often 99-percent foundation dependent.

“There’s not really anyone stepping up to say, ‘This is a desperate moment and I want to stand up for immigrants,’” one national leader said.

Immigration leaders acknowledge that funders’ attention is being pulled in many directions: They are dealing with an onslaught of crises the Trump administration is causing for all kinds of groups they care about and normally fight for. But these leaders also stressed that, absent pushback, the Trump administration will grow even more aggressive in how far it will assail immigrants.

“There’s no question: In a number of sectors, there’s a lot of anxiety about Trump’s anti-immigration and anti-DEI crackdown,” Julián Castro, the former presidential candidate and CEO of the Latino Community Foundation, one of the largest Hispanic-serving foundations, told The Bulwark. “But my hope is that donors will recognize the need to support organizations doing great work that is absolutely legal, necessary, and impactful at this moment.”

While there are still funding efforts underway in 2025, Democrats’ and liberals’ work in this area is more inconsistent and doesn’t hold a candle to what the right has been able to do on immigration. Where progressives historically give more money to create immigration campaigns when legislation is on the table, as they did during the years where comprehensive immigration reform was winding its way through Congress, the right has spent millions in recent years to define what it means to be an American in a way that excludes migrants.

By last September, for example, Republicans spent $117 million on anti-immigration ads while Democrats had spent $15 million, according to ad-tracking from AdImpact. Republicans outspent Democrats 5-to-1 in key swing states on the issue.

Republicans are so eager to spend on the topic that they will spend large amounts of money just to congratulate themselves for taking action on it. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently announced a $200 million ad campaign warning immigrants not to come and praising Trump for his work. She did so, reportedly, at his request.

“We are in danger of really missing the moment,” one immigration leader told The Bulwark.

“They already have the winning hand: The administration is setting the tone early, they’re pouring $200 million into immigration ads, they have the resources, they control the government, and they’re coordinated in amplifying their message.

“Meanwhile, here we are.”

Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, told The Bulwark that the administration’s work is about more than immigrants.

“This is not just an attack on immigrants, this is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on American families that might have an immigrant among them,” she said. “What we all need to realize is that while the excuse is ‘criminal immigrants,’ the reality is these attacks are fundamentally about our values, about who gets to be called American. Who decides?”

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THERE ARE A FEW BRIGHT SPOTS for immigration advocates. The donor collaborative Four Freedoms Fund, from NEO Philanthropy, which has raised and deployed $300 million over the last two decades, said it provided grants for more than $20 million last year, and it shared its plans for 2025.

“We recognize immigrant rights groups are on the frontlines and need more resources to protect people, which is why we created the Immigration Frontlines Fund, a large-scale rapid response fund,” Rini Chakraborty, the vice president of the Four Freedoms Fund, told The Bulwark. “We’re looking to raise $10 million to get it out to local community groups.”

The Freedom Together Foundation, led by former immigration advocate Deepak Bhargava, is also moving an extra $20 million towards its immigration portfolio, a source with knowledge of the plans said. While the foundation said it could not confirm the exact dollar amount, it said it is increasing its grantmaking for immigration advocacy in 2025 and pointed to a letter posted Tuesday from the foundation president, who wrote, “this crisis demands an extraordinary response from philanthropy.”

A third effort, coming from a top legal and immigration group, will be announced in the coming weeks, The Bulwark learned.

“At some point the government will overstep so far, the public will come to life and will want to do something, so we want to be there to move money to the field,” a source with knowledge of the effort said.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) is a beneficiary of the Four Freedoms Fund grants. Angélica Salas, the group’s leader, said it recently had to take over a Department of Labor hotline it had maintained in partnership with the government after funding was pulled. That hotline allows undocumented and Latino immigrant workers to report abuse.

The group said states can also offer spigots of much-needed immigration funding. It pointed to a $20 million grant it received from California for the first of its kind immigrant welcome and empowerment center, which will be an 83,000 square feet center in downtown Los Angeles.

“We also deserve beautiful things,” Salas said. “We don’t just deserve detention centers—we need beautiful places for our people, too.”

One Last Thing

I’m just going to leave this one here: Infamous military contractor Erik Prince and his friends submitted an “unsolicited” proposal to the Trump administration to deport 12 million undocumented immigrants, Politico reports, and it reads like fan fiction by a member of the jackboot enthusiast set.

The $25 billion plan would be for military contractors to carry out mass deportations through a network of “processing camps” on military bases, an ad-hoc air force of 100 planes, and a “small army” of bounty hunters who would use public records to find people to deport. The proposal also calls for the funding of “a cash reward for each illegal alien held by a state or local law enforcement officer.” They really can’t get enough of this bounty hunter idea, can they?

Mercifully, there has reportedly been “zero show of interest or engagement” in the fantasy proposal.