Arguably the main achievement of the Biden era, if unintended, was putting the dangers of mass immigration, especially the illegal kind, on full display. There were 10.8 million border encounters during those four years, about 2 million of which resulted in migrants (“gotaways”) disappearing into the nation’s interior. Sovereignty, rule of law, public safety and fiscal solvency were badly compromised. The Biden administration radicals did more than let this happen. They made it happen, going so far as to fly in hundreds of thousands of migrants under cover of the “parole” program.
Complicit were multitudes of world-saving nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), most significantly, those funded by the Soros family’s Open Society Foundations (OSF). Opening the border to unlimited immigration, and without required vetting, long has been central to the Soros mission. It’s not as if the family doesn’t give generously to a wide range of causes. In 2021 alone, the Open Society Policy Center, part of the Open Society Foundations network, donated at least $140 million to politically-oriented nonprofit groups. This figure was on top of the $170 million that patriarch George Soros personally contributed during the 2021-22 midterm election cycle to Democratic Party campaigns and political action committees (PACs) and the $60 million that the OSF network gave to IRS 501(c)(3) charities.
But promotion of mass immigration ranks high on the Soros priority list. Today’s support could have been predicted. Over 15 years ago, George Soros termed national sovereignty “an anachronistic concept.” The man backs up words with money. His grateful recipients, as one shall see, believe as he does.
Plenty of swing voters were ticked off over the consequences of this misguided philanthropy, enough of them at any rate to put Donald Trump back in the White House last year. Throughout the campaign, Trump emphasized the necessity of reversing the migration invasion. Once in office, led by border czar Tom Homan, his administration has dramatically stepped up border security and removals of unauthorized persons. This no-nonsense approach has produced the added benefit of discouraging new entries. According to the Department of Homeland Security, border encounters are down more than 90 percent from last year.
Open borders organizations on the Left, their fantasy of transforming America into a global rainbow welfare sanctuary now in peril, have been busy these past several months mounting resistance in the streets, the press, Congress and the courts. Flush with foundation money, they are determined more than ever to shape the Democratic Party platform. But they’re getting unexpected blowback from within the party.
An article this April in the reliably liberal New York magazine (“The New Soros”) explains this intraparty chasm:
This past November, a post-election consensus began to congeal everywhere from the liberal New York Times to the progressive Nation to the Substacks of the “popularists” center: Blame the Groups. The argument: Nonprofit advocacy organizations had pressured the Democratic Establishment into unpopular left-wing positions on issues such as policing, gender, and immigration by claiming to speak for the party’s multiracial working class when in reality Trump’s victory turbocharged the Groups critique, but it had been brewing for years. In 2003, Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol published her book Diminished Democracy, which argued that cross-class membership organizations like unions, churches, and social clubs were steadily being replaced by top-down NGOs, which claimed mass engagement but were really just clearinghouses for petitions and donations. Two decades later, nonprofits have gained only more political sway.
Specifically, these organizations, many of them Soros-funded, had pressured Democrats to support open borders more than a year before the November 2020 elections. They got what they wanted, notes the New York article:
In the summer of 2019, eight progressive NGOs teamed up on a campaign to pressure the Democratic presidential field into pledging to decriminalize border crossings. They were United We Dream Action, Working Families, MoveOn, Indivisible, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, Women’s March, Sunrise, and Bend the Arc: Jewish Action. Though the policy polled poorly, eight of ten presidential candidates at a debate that June pledged their support for it. (Joe Biden and Michael Bennet did not.) OSF has funded seven of the eight groups. Later, a ninth group, Latino Victory Project, vowed to apply pressure on Biden. It also receives OSF funding.
Joe Biden got the message by the time he became president, thanks to pressure from these organizations and from Vice President (and “border czar”) Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The result was immigration out of control. Harris, to one’s relief, is not our president. On the downside, radical nonprofits and PACs are doubling down on thwarting the second Trump administration’s immigration initiatives and enforcement. Here’s a close look at those nine groups.
United We Dream Action. United We Dream Action, a political action committee, is a companion organization to the much larger nonprofit United We Dream, the latter claiming one million members and four million-plus social media, email and text messaging users. Each is dedicated to the principle that any migrant who arrives in the U.S., legally or not, has the right to stay. For them, the word “deportation” should be banished from our vocabulary. In sentimental, AI chatbot-style language, United We Dream declares, “We believe that maintaining safe spaces are key to preserving the magic that has helped thousands to find their voice, learn new skills and mobilize to change their world.” This outfit is so radical that it spells “women” as “womxn.” Writing sample: “We may be farthest from the conventional levers of power, but we are closest to the problems, and we are most able to create truly transformative solutions based in an intersectional analysis and the beauty and power of our whole selves. Youth, womxn, and LGBTQ people from different ethnicities are at the core of our work.” This “work” includes blocking migrant deportations, winning amnesty for illegals protected under Deferred Arrivals for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and insisting upon a “pathway” to citizenship for all migrants.
Working Families. An amalgam of three separate organizations – Working Families Power, the Working Families Party and Working Families National PAC – this Brooklyn, N.Y.-based operation focuses mostly on labor issues, but views immigrants as a crucial element in a pro-union voting coalition. “Immigrant communities,” its website reads, “are critical to our multiracial working class base and are often subjected to the worst law enforcement and employer abuses while enjoying the fewest rights and protections. While nationally we have joined calls for an inclusive pathway to citizenship, halting deportations, abolishing ICE, and more, we also seek state and local reforms where possible.” As for the Soros factor, George Soros’ Democracy PAC, along with Mark Zuckerberg’s Accountable Justice Action Fund, have been heavy donors to the Working Families National PAC.
MoveOn. Formed in 1998 to oppose President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, MoveOn consists of two separate entities, MoveOn Civic Action and MoveOn Political Action. Each engages in organizing, training, petitioning and fundraising on a wide range of radical causes. When not pressuring corporations into pulling their advertising from the Fox News Channel or pressuring Congress into impeaching Justice Clarence Thomas, MoveOn is doing everything possible to block President Trump’s immigration enforcement. The messages in member signup click boxes for its Protect Immigrant Communities project speak for themselves: “Congress: Stop Trump’s Attack on Birthright Citizenship!” “Democratic Governors: Prevent Mass Deportation Now!” and “Congress: Don’t Fund Trump’s Guantanamo Bay Immigrant Prison!” The group proclaims: “We envision a world marked by equality, sustainability, justice and love.” Truth to tell, there is nothing to love about this bunch.
Indivisible. National Legal and Policy Center published a lengthy analysis on Indivisible on March 31, set in the context of arson attacks on Tesla automobiles and outdoor protests at Tesla dealerships. As the article noted, the group during 2017-23 received more than $7.6 million from the Open Society Foundations. It is worth adding here that Indivisible, formed in the aftermath of the 2016 elections, vigorously opposes enforcement of immigration law. This January, for instance, the group denounced the Senate for approving the Laken Riley Act, which President Trump quickly signed. The legislation authorizes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to detain illegal immigrants for crimes such as burglary, theft, larceny and shoplifting. It also authorizes state attorneys general to sue the federal government for nonenforcement of immigration laws. In shrill language, Sarah Dohl, chief campaigns officer for Indivisible, commented: “Spineless. That’s the only word for the Senate Democrats who handed MAGA Republicans a gift they didn’t deserve.” She added, “The Laken Riley Act is a racist, xenophobic attack on immigrants that shreds constitutional rights and hands power to extremists like [Texas attorney general] Ken Paxton to hijack federal immigration policy.” For those who may have forgotten, Laken Riley was the University of Georgia nursing student who during a morning campus jog in February 2024 was murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. Sarah Dohl no doubt would have us forget.
Center for Popular Democracy Action. This group is the PAC compliment to the New York City-based Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), formed in 2012 from several chapters of the defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The CPD’s mission is to “unapologetically demand transformational change for Black, brown and low-income communities.” CPD Action likewise “works to create equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with high-impact base-building organizations, organizing alliances, and progressive unions.” The groups have a strange definition of democracy. In an overheated tone, the Center for Popular Democracy condemned the ICE detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian graduate of Columbia University, as “a dangerous precedent that threatens the First Amendment freedoms of all individuals in the United States” and “an attack on free speech and the right to dissent.” Mr. Khalil was the spokesman for demonstrators who built and occupied an outdoor encampment at Columbia last spring in support of the terrorist group Hamas. Though a legal resident of the U.S., he faced deportation due to the security threat posed by his behavior.
Women’s March. Women’s March, which burst onto the scene with multi-city rallies on January 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s first inauguration, appeals to a perpetually angry feminist sensibility. By then, it had accumulated the funds to pull off the event. Without necessarily making direct donations, the Open Society Foundations had provided a combined $246 million during 2010-14 to organizations listed as Women’s March partners. Feminism, anti-whiteness and socialism are of a piece with this group, especially if men pay. “We’re taking on the Billionaire Boys Club, and fighting for a wealth tax to begin reversing the grotesque hoarding of wealth that should be used to fund solutions,” reads a Women’s March website declaration under the heading “Building Feminist Economies.” Could things get more stupid than this? Well, yes. Under the heading “Ending White Supremacy,” the group announces: “To build a multi-racial feminist future rooted in values of justice, we must reduce the death grip that white supremacy has on hundreds of millions of people, including many white women. We also know that white supremacist ideology is fueled by patriarchy and misogyny, whether its agendas of (sic) reproductive control or open celebrations of extreme violence against women.” As for immigration, Women’s March views reform as abolishing borders all but in name. In 2018 this group coined the slogan, “Build bridges, not walls,” to protest Trump’s southern border wall proposal. It also demanded an end to family separations at the border, oblivious to the fact that it was migrant mothers who risked the safety of their children by bringing them here.
Sunrise Movement. “We are the climate revolution,” Sunrise Movement, a youth-led, 501(c)(4) tax-exempt nonprofit, declares. “Together, we will force the government to end the era of fossil fuel elites, invest in Black, brown and working class communities, and create millions of good union jobs. We’re on a mission to put everyday people back in charge and build a world that works for all of us, now and for generations to come.” Politicians on the Left haven’t needed much convincing. The group won support from 23 of the 25 Democratic Party presidential candidates in 2020 for a presumably environmentally-friendly Green New Deal proposal covering every aspect of the economy. Sunrise Movement thinks big. In 2021, it demanded at least $10 trillion in new government spending over the next 10 years for this purpose. Even Congress said “no deal” to that. The group already had amassed plenty of funds to play hardball, including a combined $750,000 in 2020 from George Soros’ Democracy PAC and a Soros-supported dark money operation, the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Democracy PAC chipped in $250,000 of that.
Bend the Arc: Jewish Action. There isn’t much Jewish about Bend the Arc: Jewish Action. In fact, there isn’t much American about it either. Its website states, “Bend the Arc is building a multiracial, multiethnic intergenerational movement of Jews and allies all across the country who are rising up to build an American future free from white supremacy, antisemitism and racism.” Consider also this gem: “We’re building the multiracial democracy that’s been promised in America but never achieved. We’re investing in systems that keep our communities safe and divesting from systems that uphold white supremacy.” The group, railing against “Trump’s cruelty” on immigration and budgetary priorities, recently denounced a looming Republican-supported budget reconciliation plan that create “mass detention and deportation.” Alex Soros, George Soros’ favored son who in 2023 took over as chairman of the Open Society Foundations, eight years earlier launched a political action committee, Bend the Arc PAC. This entity could develop a high profile during congressional budget debates.
Latino Victory Project. Three organizations bear the moniker Latino Victory: the Latino Victory Project, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit; the Latino Victory Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit; and the Latino Victory Fund, a political action committee. In each case, the goal is getting out the Hispanic vote. The Latino Victory Project, which received a $1 million grant in 2022 from OSF’s Open Society Policy Center, was launched in 2014 after raising funds from a ready-made network of Obama campaign donors. Its present and former top officials are politically well-connected. Project co-founder Henry R. Munoz III served for several years as finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The Latino Victory Project’s founding president and recently-appointed board chairman, Cristobal Alex, played key roles in the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020; before that, he held jobs at the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation. No matter who’s in charge, the motive is maximizing the Hispanic vote in size, eligibility and enthusiasm. Immigration advocacy fits right in here. Latino Victory organizations embrace Hispanic mass immigration and have no use for people who want to curb it. In May 2024, the Latino Victory Project declared Donald Trump “public enemy number one for the Latino community.” That October, it teamed up with several other organizations to reject Donald Trump’s campaign vow to speed up deportations of illegal residents. Such actions would “erode the fundamental rights and protections of immigrants, legal residents, and even naturalized citizens.”
Let us summarize. The above organizations and their allies – the Center for Community Change is particularly egregious – haven’t just opposed longstanding immigration laws; they’ve helped lay the foundation for their erasure. The Open Society Foundations is the maypole of this network. While certain recipients, such as Working Families, deal with immigration as a side issue, all share an ecumenical Leftist vision of an American future in which immigration is unlimited, equality takes precedence over liberty, sovereignty is subordinated to NGOs who fight “climate change,” and wealth is redistributed on an enormous scale to ostensibly marginalized persons and communities. For them, Third World-izing America is the essence of democracy and compassion. If these groups seem interchangeable, it’s because they are interchangeable – in goals, strategies and rhetoric.
These organizations are a threat to American interests and identity. As regards immigration, they are breaking the law. Title 8, Section 1324 of the U.S. Code clearly states that aiding and abetting illegal immigration, whether by bringing in migrants or harboring them, can result in a fine or imprisonment. Federal agencies need to investigate potential violations of this statute.
Beyond criminal justice, it is crucial to understand the character of these radical nonprofits and political action committees. Their sense of justice is, to borrow their language, transformative. Mere reforms will not do for them as long as the people in charge of our institutions remain in power. What these organizations want to do, and with a religious-like fervor, is transform America, to recreate it as an egalitarian paradise. All that is needed for this to happen is for the right people to rule. These activists realize that they don’t have the votes for that. But through unlimited immigration, with all immigrants properly tutored and naturalized, they eventually could. It’s the job of patriotic citizens to stop them.
Carl F. Horowitz is an NLPC senior fellow.
