Anticipating the possibility of a hostile legal and political environment after the November elections, the Four Freedoms Fund is trying to raise $5 million to help immigrants who came to the United States as children remain in the country.
The Four Freedoms Fund, which is part of a donor collaborative and consulting nonprofit called NEO Philanthropy, will initially support some of its 135 grantees who employ about 1,000 people with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, status. Under DACA, people who are undocumented and came to the country as youngsters can delay deportation indefinitely — often for decades — so long as they successfully renew their status every two years.
The effort, called the Movement Resilience Fund, has received $500,000 so far, says Rini Chakraborty, vice president of the Four Freedoms Fund. Chakraborty said some of the early funding came from the Heising-Simons Foundation but did not specify how much or which of the Four Freedom Fund’s other donors — which include the Gates, JPB, and Kresge foundations — had participated.
Initially grants will be made to assist nonprofits with DACA staff to assess whether those staffers can apply to stay in the United States under a range of other immigration policies or work permits, plan “advanced parole trips” to other countries that may be necessary for undocumented people to complete an immigration process, and to provide ongoing legal and mental health counseling.
The money will support advocacy groups, including the Justice Action Center, the UndocuBlack Network of currently and formerly undocumented Black activists, and Voces Unidas, a Colorado community organizing and advocacy nonprofit, which will each provide services for a broader slate of immigration nonprofits. Social justice and immigration rights organizations, Chakraborty said, are likely to be the first to be targeted if Donald Trump wins the presidency and carries through with plans for mass deportations.
“We have to do something or the consequences will be devastating, not just for immigrant leaders and their families but also the movement organizations that have really come to depend on them,” she said.
Efforts to terminate the DACA program are the subject of a lawsuit being heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. If the appellate court finds the policy illegal, the case is likely to be bounced up to the U.S. Supreme Court as early as next year. A decision in that case would affect the legal status of more than 500,000 DACA recipients.
Chakraborty would like to get the program running as soon as possible because she fears a Trump administration could terminate the program before the Supreme Court considers a case.
“The threat of mass deportations is real,” she said.
Counseling Dreamers
Under President Biden, as illegal border crossings increased, deportations also surged even as the administration paved the way for more legal immigration through a series of executive actions. In June, for instance, the Biden administration adopted a “parole in place” policy that allows some noncitizens who are married to citizens to remain in the country while applying to adjust their immigration status.
In a June statement made before she became the apparent Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris touted her record of support for “Dreamers,” as California attorney general and pledged to support those DACA recipients who she said “power our communities, economy, and country.”
As nonprofit leaders ponder the choices facing their staff members without immigration papers or work permits, nonprofit leaders are also paying attention to a proposed Department of Homeland Security rule that would streamline processes for people applying for H-1B visas, which allow employers to temporarily hire noncitizens. The proposal also would broaden the range of nonprofit organizations exempted from the H-1B lottery process. That might allow more DACA recipients to stay in the United States with a green card rather than a change in their immigration status.
But, says Patrice Lawrence, executive director of UndocuBlack, if an administration favoring stringent immigration policy comes into office, the pending rule is " dead in the water on day one.”
The possibility of ramped-up deportations in a new administration has nonprofit leaders like Lawrence sprinting to counsel as many DACA recipients as soon as they can.
With money from the Movement Resilience Fund, UndocuBlack plans to offer screenings for nonprofits that identify DACA recipients and other immigrants whose status may place them in jeopardy, webinars covering immigration law, and individual assessments, with UndocuBlack staff or outside lawyers.
Immigration law is byzantine, and filing claims can be a lengthy process. Many people and organizations need help identifying whether a person qualifies for a wide variety of ways to stay in the country, including through marriage, being the victim of a crime, or having a highly specialized job role.
In addition to legal consultations, UndocuBlack will offer biweekly mental health check-ins with participating staff members to talk with others going through similar experiences and to unload any frustrations or fears they may have in dealing with the uncertainty of their time in the United States.
“Going through this process is really hard,” Lawrence said. “It can mess with your mind.”
‘A Drop in the Bucket’
The Movement Resilience Fund is part of a larger philanthropy-supported effort to secure legal counsel for immigrants, whether they are firmly established in their communities or face imminent deportation.
The Path2Papers, a nonprofit project at Cornell University Law School, in April received $1.5 million from the Crankstart Foundation to offer free consultations to DACA recipients in the San Francisco area who want to see if they have work visa options.
The nonprofit has done more than 400 consultations, finding that more than half of DACA recipients it worked with may be eligible for a work visa.
“While that is a great start, it is a drop in the bucket compared to the over 500,000 DACA holders in the U.S.,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, Path2Papers’ co-founder and an immigration law professor at Cornell, wrote in an email.
According to Yale-Loehr, courts consider immigration cases some of the most complex to adjudicate. The American Immigration Lawyers Association has about 16,000 members, a small slice of the 1.3 million lawyers practicing in all fields nationally, according to the American Bar Association.
No matter who wins the presidential election, nonprofits with DACA recipients on staff will benefit from the fund, said Cesar Bautista-Sanchez, campaign manager of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.
Bautista-Sanchez came to the United States with his parents from Mexico when he was seven years old. Now 35, he still does not have citizenship and must reapply for DACA status every two years. He has an elementary school-age daughter, and he bought a house several years ago. He’s one of four staff members at the coalition who are DACA recipients.
If the policy is rescinded, all of that — the stability of a job, a house, and a school for his daughter — would evaporate, he said.
Probing for alternatives to DACA would allow him and many of the immigrants the coalition serves to plan beyond the two-year window allowed by their status as Dreamers.
“They only view their future for every two years until they have to renew again,” he said. “They don’t see a future without the status.”
Alex Sánchez, founder of Voces Unidas, another Four Freedom Fund grantee, is leading several efforts to obtain lasting legal status for the state’s undocumented people, especially those in the central mountain region who work at luxury ski resorts. The group, which has an associated political action committee and a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that can get involved more directly in politics than a charity can, has several employees and board members who are DACA recipients.
Sánchez would like to help 1,000 of the state’s 12,000 DACA recipients obtain permanent legal status. To do so, Voces of Colorado is surveying the state’s legal community to learn how many lawyers have the combined expertise in immigration and employment law that would help and is working to identify which industries would be the ideal sectors to start working with.
The group also organizes parole trips to Mexico City that allow Dreamers to leave the United States and re-enter legally.
Sanchez said he is expediting those trips with a goal of getting 10 DACA holders to travel this month. If he waits too long, he said, a “hostile government” may deny them re-entry.
Said Sanchez: “The election will be a factor in this.”
