Nonprofit leaders say the Trump administration’s plan to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to three Central American countries could deepen poverty in at-risk regions and create new challenges for organizations that depend on foreign assistance to serve communities.
The president’s plan to limit support to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras followed his statements saying that those countries’ governments are not doing enough to reduce the flow of migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“No more money is going there anymore,” Trump told reporters ahead of a formal announcement by the State Department. “We were giving them $500 million. We were paying them tremendous amounts of money, and we’re not paying them anymore because they haven’t done a thing for us.”
More than 50 organizations, including the American Jewish World Service, HIAS, Lutheran World Relief, Oxfam America, and Save the Children, said in a joint statement that Trump is undermining his own policy goals and is incorrectly viewing foreign aid “only in transactional terms and not as part of a long-term strategy.”
David Ray, vice president for policy and advocacy at CARE, a humanitarian agency that has programs in all three countries, said the cuts are both “inhumane and self-defeating.” He added that cutting aid this way won’t stop migration.
“If you want to stop people from fleeing a bad situation, the last thing you should do is make that situation worse,” he said.
Rachael Leman, associate vice president for U.S. advocacy at CARE, said the organization works on a variety of efforts related to gender-based violence, teenage pregnancy, child marriage, and education. People who hold views on foreign aid similar to the administration’s may miss the progress that has been made, she said.
“I don’t think humanitarian work is necessarily really well understood by the average person,” she explained, “but the evolution of these programs over the last 10 to 15 years has been incredible. The U.S. has been engaging in this kind of critical work for 75 years. It’s unfortunate that that’s not better understood, but there is data to back that up.”
Leman said the diversity of organizations speaking out against the proposal is a sign of the philanthropic community’s power to spark a potential change of course.
‘Illogical and Abrupt’
Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the Latin American Working Group, called Trump’s move “illogical and abrupt.”
“Once again the president is making decisions based on nothing more than xenophobia and his obsession with a border wall,” added Daniella Burgi-Palomino, a senior associate at the group.
Glasswing International, another humanitarian group, said about 35 percent of its funding for programs and projects comes from the U.S. government. Ken Baker, the CEO, told the Chronicle that the group’s goal is to achieve long-term stability for its programs and help communities improve their own situations.
“Ironically, Glasswing’s goal is very similar to the current administration’s goals, which is we want to keep people thriving and safe,” he said. “What is often lost in the discussion is that emigration is not in the interest of these countries. It can have devastating effects, namely in breaking up families and communities, along with a brain drain.”
Sarah Hall Aguila, director of operations for the Central American Resource Center, said the recent history of migration from Central America is linked to events in the United States a few decades ago.
“People fleeing gang-related violence and extortion are unfortunately dealing with a phenomenon that began in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and spread to Central America because of deportations after the region’s armed conflicts ended in the 1990s,” she said, citing news reports and other documents that say the United States has trained police in El Salvador to combat violence and migration but may be creating other issues.
Fundraising Challenges
The plight of Central American refugees was a hot topic at this week’s annual conference of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
Sylvia Acosta, CEO of YWCA El Paso Del Norte, said her organization was not planning to get involved in efforts to serve migrants detained in El Paso until the Trump administration enacted its policy, since rescinded, of separating children from their families. “That’s when we realized we could not just kind of stand idly by and watch this happen,” she said.
So the organization started using its national connections to raise awareness and funding for Annunciation House, the El Paso nonprofit that is handling most of the work with refugees crossing the border at El Paso, Acosta said. In addition, the YWCA is mobilizing volunteers, including its own board members, to provide support to migrants in the process of being released from detention.
The past several months have been exhausting for nonprofits in the area, Acosta said, because the crisis — and the need for funding — keeps accelerating. When the YWCA first dipped its toes into this work, she noted, around 50 to 100 migrants were entering El Paso each day. “Then it became about 1,000 a week and kept growing and growing,” she said. The city predicts the flow of migrants into the city will reach around 3,000 per week by June, she added.
A key challenge the YWCA faces in drumming up support for this issue, Acosta said, is battling the misperception that those seeking asylum along the border are in the United States illegally. “Many of these individuals will not get asylum and will be deported,” she said, “But while they’re in our country, they have every right to be here. That gets lost.”
Showing the Needs
In the wake of the family separation crisis, Nancy Santiago Negron, vice president for strategic partnerships and communications at Hispanics in Philanthropy, learned that simply sharing numbers or stories wasn’t the best way to get through to donors — it was to let them experience the situation firsthand, she said.
The grant makers’ association has since led a few delegations of foundation leaders on visits to relevant sites at the border, including a shelter in Tijuana and immigration courts in San Diego. The goal is to give the donors more context so that they can make better giving decisions.
“You really aren’t going to be effective until you understand what’s going on,” she said.
