Matthew Soerens hopes 2025 isn’t a repeat of 2017, which World Relief, the refugee assistance nonprofit he works for, called a “year of unprecedented pain.”
That year marked the start of Donald Trump’s first term in office and a huge shift in immigration policy, starting with the Muslim ban and including a host of executive orders that guided the family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border and led to the termination of Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
Now, with Trump set to return to the White House riding a wave of campaign promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and make it harder for people to enter the country legally, Soerens fears that World Relief may face tougher times than during Trump’s first term, when it laid off a third of its staff and shuttered five of its locations.
Like many nonprofit leaders who focus on assisting immigrants, Soerens, World Relief’s vice president of advocacy and policy, fears that a battle-tested Trump administration will be more effective in restricting immigration and forcing some of the millions of deportations.
Eight years ago, philanthropy responded to more stringent immigration policies with a raft of more than $1 billion in emergency grant making. Now, however, the trend is murkier. Pro-immigration nonprofit leaders say a coordinated, well-funded response is only beginning to materialize, while other, conservative foundations continue to support efforts to restrict immigration.
As they prepare to neutralize the expected policy actions, progressive foundations face decisions about whether to provide rapid support for immediate needs, like legal advice for those facing deportation and security for targeted nonprofits, or to devote money to longer-term movement building.
With four years of executive experience from the first Trump administration, immigration policy leaders including Stephen Miller, who is set to be the White House deputy chief of policy, and Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar pick, are poised to return to power with a more finely tuned and coordinated set of ideas about how to restrict the flow of people over the border and how to marshal local law enforcement to assist in deportations, said Doris Meissner, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
To counter those expected moves, philanthropy should support more on-the-ground assistance to people in need of legal representation, says Meissner, who served as the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Clinton.
While local and state officials might provide assistance in areas that have been more welcoming of immigrants, like Los Angeles or Chicago, Meissner says funders should be ready to support the needs of immigrants in places where local leaders might work in sync with federal officials to carry out deportations, including in Texas, which she called “ground-zero” for the coming immigration battles.
“This is very much a red-state, blue-state phenomenon,” Meissner says.
For World Relief, tending to immediate needs is paramount. Additional support from foundations and congregations will be necessary for it to fulfill its mission. World Relief is one of nearly a dozen organizations under contract with the U.S. State Department to assist refugees with the paperwork needed to enter the country and to provide help with housing, education, and language classes for the first 90 days upon arrival.
Under President Biden, the number of refugees was capped at 125,000 annually. Trump, who lowered the cap during his first administration, has promised to halt refugee resettlement upon his return to office.
That will not only mean no new refugees coming into the country, Soerens says, it will also mean that World Relief will have limited funds to support refugees already here.
“We just don’t have the resources to help everyone who is looking for help right now,” he says.
From 2016 to 2020, philanthropies plowed $1.4 billion into efforts intended to benefit immigrants and refugees, according to an analysis of Candid giving data conducted by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. That was more than double the amount during the five previous years. It came from 3,000 foundations, many of which were new to the field.
The huge turnaround in policy and the chaotic rollout of orders, including the Muslim ban, created an “agitating energy” that prompted more foundation activity from progressives, says Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream, a national immigrant advocacy nonprofit based in Dallas that has received support from the Ford, Freedom Together, and MacArthur foundations and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund.
This time, she says “philanthropy is going to take a bit longer.”
Martinez Rosas is putting together a $20 million response fund. The fund’s first foundation grant is still in the works, she says, adding that philanthropy seems to be in the “middle stages” of coming up with a response.
United We Dream is looking to support an “all-out community response” in which school systems, employers, medical facilities, elected officials, and neighbors are informed of undocumented immigrants’ rights and are prepared for the possibility of workplace and home raids and to work with teachers and principals whose students and family members face deportation.
Many of the coming fights, Martinez Rosas and other immigrant advocates believe, will occur at the local level, where city leaders may be at odds with federal or state policies. For example, under anexecutive order signed in August by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas will ask patients about their immigration status at Texas public hospitals. Martinez Rosas believes the order is unpopular at the local level and is educating city leaders on the issue.
Much of United We Dream’s efforts will be focused on its “Know Your Power” campaign, which counsels immigrants to, among other things, refuse to answer questions about their status.
But, Martinez Rosas says, immigration rights leaders need to focus beyond rapid response efforts. The Trump victory was a sobering event for advocates who thought a pro-immigrant stance was a winner nationally, she says. But Trump won support by casting immigrants as criminals or even, as was the case of his attacks on Springfield, Ohio, residents, as pet eaters.
“As we’re responding to everyday attacks, it’s incumbent on leaders like myself to have a long-term plan for how we get out of that narrative,” she says. “Our challenge is to bring more people that have not joined us yet into our fold.”
As pro-immigration foundations scramble to respond to the incoming administration, foundations that support a more restrictive approach to immigration have also been active.
For instance, the Colcom Foundation gave $2.1 million to the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit that advocates for low immigration levels, in 2022, the most recent data available. The foundation also gave $2.3 million to the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a group set up to “educate the American people about the threat of unchecked mass migration.”
Colcom and the Immigration Reform Legal Institute declined to comment; the Center for Immigration Studies did not respond to inquiries.
Meanwhile, progressive philanthropies have started to shift gears, getting into crisis-response mode.
NEO Philanthropy, a donor intermediary, manages the Four Freedoms Fund, which is funded by a group of 19 funders, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, as well as the Heising–Simons and Open Society foundations. The fund has put a previously announced fund to support immigrant nonprofit leaders largely on hold so it can respond to the expected flood of workplace raids and deportations. It had expected to raise $5 million for its Movement Resilience Fund, to help “Dreamers” —- people with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status who came to the United States when they were young — get legal status as permanent residents.
Rini Chakraborty, vice president of the Four Freedoms Fund, which concentrates on immigration issues, said the group is still actively raising money for the resilience fund, but as new threats emerge, “we’ll have to see” whether it can hit its $5 million goal. The $500,000 it has raised will be used to process applications already filed.
The more pressing matter, she said, is to respond to the Trump victory and the expected clampdown on immigration. To that end, the fund sent about $850,000 to grantees, including the National Immigration Project, to create regional rapid response hubs, and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, to organize migrant defense committees among workers.
The Four Freedoms Fund has plans to raise $10 million by April to broaden its response effort, to be called the Immigration Frontlines Fund. While the fund has supported rapid response efforts in the past, it has largely devoted its $20 million in annual grant making to power-building efforts at the state level.
“Now we are prioritizing, first and foremost, creating a circle of protection against raids and roundups,” Chakraborty says.
Grantmakers Concerned With Immigrants and Refugees, a group that rallies foundations and individuals to give to the cause, has also launched a new fund, called the California Immigrant Justice Infrastructure Fund. The fund has raised about $3 million and sent about $1.3 million to grantees.
Marissa Tirona, the group’s president, says it is critical that philanthropy respond to needs as they arise. But she hopes they “stay in the game” and continue to support immigrant groups over the long haul.
“We’re really trying to keep funders focused on making long-term investments and not just treat this as a near-term crisis,” she says.
