What Biden Means for Nonprofits Focused on Immigration

The first priority for immigrants-rights groups when President-elect Joe Biden assumes office is simply getting the immigration system back to where it was before President Trump took office.

The Trump administration slashed refugee admissions, ended many asylum protections, and sought to end protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants living in the United States illegally after entering as children.

“The Biden win represents an opportunity to roll back a number of harms to the health, safety, and well-being of immigrant and refugee communities,” says Kevin Douglas, director of national programs at Grantmakers Concerned With Immigrants and Refugees. “There’s so much damage that has been wrought. That’s job No. 1 before anything else.”

Biden has pledged to reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers to legally work in this country. Organizations in the immigrant-rights movement hope to push for permanent legal status for Dreamers, a position supported by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives.

“There’s broad public consensus, and also within Congress, around DACA and wanting to find a solution,” Douglas says.

Ted Wang, director of the U.S. program at Unbound Philanthropy, a grant maker that supports immigrant- and refugee-rights groups, says he hopes Biden will push Congress to make coronavirus-relief benefits available to all taxpayers regardless of their immigration status — or at the very least provide benefits to immigrants who are providing essential services. To date, Congress has failed to provide benefits even to some U.S. citizens who are in mixed-status families. Under the Cares Act, families in which one spouse lacks a Social Security number are ineligible for stimulus checks, even if the other spouse is a U.S. citizen. The effort to reverse the exclusion has some bipartisan support in Congress.

Many immigrants have been providing essential services during the pandemic, including serving as frontline medical workers, harvesting and delivering food, and cleaning public spaces, which is why Wang believes all essential workers deserve benefits.

“With the virus continuing to have a devastating impact, especially on communities of color, we need to think about what we can be doing for essential workers in particular so that they can continue to contribute,” Wang says.

The current administration’s harsh treatment of immigrants led to a “Trump bump” in fundraising for many immigrant-rights groups. For example, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, in Texas, raised $30 million in 2018, primarily through a Facebook fundraising event in response to Trump policies of separating children from their families at the border.

“That’s not necessarily going to continue,” says Geri Mannion, a program director at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who has long focused on immigration. “People are preparing for what happens when it’s no longer a scenario of them versus us.”

Donors need to stay the course, she says, to help reverse Trump administration policies and to aid charities that experience cuts in government spending.

Some state governments, as in California, provide the bulk of the funding for legal services that aid undocumented immigrants. If that support falters due to the pandemic’s effect on the economy, foundations will need to step in or immigrant families will suffer, Mannion says.

“If you don’t have a lawyer,” she says, “you’ll more than likely be deported.”