Tax-exempt organizations have spent more than $100 million since President Joe Biden took office in 2021 working to prevent the federal government from deporting illegal immigrants, according to a Washington Examiner review of tax filings.
The organizations, which include donor-advised funds shifting around millions of dollars in untraceable funds, Soros-backed philanthropies, and large legal groups, collectively spent at least $101.9 million on programs intended to aid illegal immigrants in avoiding deportation. While some of the programs paid for by these nonprofit organizations involved advocacy efforts, the vast majority were oriented toward providing immigrants with legal resources to thwart deportation.
“They realize if they paralyze the legal system, they win,” Federation for American Immigration Reform Media Director Ira Mehlman told the Washington Examiner. “The longer you are delayed, the longer you stay here before you see your day in court, the less likely it is that you can be removed.”
“Clearly, tying up the courts is a tactic in winning this ideological battle,” he continued.
While these charities shoveled tens of millions of dollars into the legal system on behalf of immigrants facing deportation, the number of new migrants illegally entering the country spiked. Border Patrol had over 5 million encounters with individuals attempting to enter the country between fiscal 2021 and 2023, according to government statistics. As the number of people in the country illegally increases rapidly, immigration authorities have had difficulty processing them, particularly those arriving and claiming asylum, in part due to the massive strain placed on the legal system.
The backlog of cases in U.S. immigration courts reached a record 3 million in November 2023, working out to an average of 4,500 pending cases per judge.
While some migrants do have a legitimate claim to asylum, “if you throw lawyers and money at every single economically-motivated illegal immigrant, then the system basically just grinds to a halt,” Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow in Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told the Washington Examiner.
La Raza Community Resource Center, an immigration nonprofit organization based out of San Francisco, was one of the biggest spenders among the groups resisting deportation efforts, disbursing $14.1 million between 2021 and 2023 for a program providing legal services to asylum-seekers and migrants facing deportation. Immigrant Justice Corps, meanwhile, is a New York-based charity that spent $20.2 million over the same period on a fellowship program placing recent college graduates at nonprofit organizations across the country to provide illegal migrants with legal services.
Research suggests that the efforts of nonprofit organizations to provide illegal immigrants with legal services may be effective in preventing deportation. A 2014 study conducted by Stanford Law School found that migrants with lawyers were three times more likely to win their deportation cases than those without legal representation, for example. Only 30% of individuals in immigration courts are represented by attorneys, according to a Syracuse University report.
Legal Services Of New Jersey, a nonprofit organization that provides free legal representation in civil rights litigation to low-income residents of the state, was also a major force in antideportation efforts between 2021 and 2022. The organization distributed $12.5 million worth of grants over that period to help other organizations provide “legal assistance for individuals facing detention or deportation.”
Pangea Legal Services, located in San Francisco, spent over $5 million on providing representation to asylum-seekers and people who entered the country illegally between 2021 and 2023. In those years, the nonprofit organization served nearly 1,500 clients through its program, according to its tax forms.
Hankinson told the Washington Examiner that the Biden administration wants to keep illegal immigrants in the country “for three reasons: globalist ideology, political leverage to force another amnesty, and hopes that if they become citizens, they will all vote Democrat — hopes which seem less credible after November 5.”
“NGOs are motivated by ideology and, increasingly, by the massive income they now get from government-funded illegal immigration,” he continued.
Meanwhile, Mehlman said the reasons nonprofit organizations fight to keep illegal immigrants in the United States range from ideological to economic, as many NGOs receive funding from business interests that see them as a source of “cheap labor.”
The Soros family’s Foundation To Promote Open Society donated $500,000 to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in 2021 to support its “New Way Forward” campaign. The campaign pushed changes to the legal system that would end the automatic deportation of some criminal aliens, end the mandatory detention of illegal aliens, and decriminalize entering the U.S. without proper documentation. The Soros family’s foundation also gave the Transgender Law Center $250,000 in 2021 to “support Black LGBTQIA+ migrants through organizing and base-building, deportation defense and strategic communications.”
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Meanwhile, former Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz’s family foundation pumped $3 million into the Immigrant Legal Resource Center to support its “deportation defense” operations between 2021 and 2022. Moritz has also donated millions of dollars to organizations opposing Republicans.
The uptick in illegal border crossings under the Biden administration has placed immense financial strain on major cities such as New York and Chicago. Some of the migrants who entered under Biden, meanwhile, have committed high-profile violent crimes. For instance, Jose Ibarra, who was recently convicted for the murder of Laken Riley, was detained at the border after he illegally crossed but he was ultimately released into the country.