FROM LÉA TIENOU-GUSTAFSON, HEAD OF PHILANTHROPY AND COMMUNITY, WORLD EDUCATION SERVICES
JULY 2026

AFN Short Take is a blog series highlighting insights and perspectives from recent AFN programming events.

Immigrants play vital roles in our communities, our economies, and in our history. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary this month, charged rhetoric about who deserves to be an American and hostile policies that other and exclude immigrants are obscuring a fundamental truth: we are better when everyone in the country is able to live, work, and thrive, no matter where we come from. Asset funders spend careers helping families build savings, businesses, and stability – all of which can be erased in a moment when immigration enforcement separates families and deports workers.

On May 19, 2026, the Asset Funders Network and Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR) convened funders from across the country for Inclusive Prosperity for All—a national webinar accompanying the newly released Asset Funder’s Guide to Supporting Immigrants and Refugees in an Era of Harm.

At the WES Mariam Assefa Fund, we support organizations and leaders that drive inclusion, opportunity, and community integration for immigrants and refugees in the U.S. and Canada. We know that less than 2 percent of all philanthropic funding goes to immigrants and refugees, so this conversation and this guide are both timely and essential. Putting the dignity and agency of immigrants and refugees at the center of our work as funders is deeply necessary.

A Case for Funding this Work

WES was founded to ensure that educational credentials earned abroad are recognized in the U.S. Since 1974, WES has helped millions of individuals achieve their academic and career goals. But despite this progress, systemic barriers to immigrant economic inclusion remain. I particularly appreciated Rebeca Rangel’s reminder that we as funders need to make the case for an economy that sees immigrant people as rights holders whose human flourishing is necessary for our shared prosperity.

That places the path forward squarely in the asset funder’s wheelhouse, and it makes solidarity essential: an attack on immigrant communities is an attack on the shared foundation everyone’s stability rests on.

Reflections from GCIR: Enforcement Is Being Routed Through the Financial System

Kevin Douglas, Senior Director of National Programs at GCIR, reflected on how the policy changes in the last year have reshaped the landscape and fundamentally disrupted household economic stability.

Weaponizing the financial system, he said, not only betrays immigrants who are filing their taxes and doing the right thing but also undercuts the long-held promise that those who pay into benefits will be able to access them when they need. Furthermore, the stripping of work authorization from nearly a million people is not going to help U.S.-born workers or spur wage growth; rather, it forces people into undocumented status. Asset funders include banks, CDFIs, credit unions, and community foundations—so this type of harm is not a peripheral issue. Rather, as Kevin said, it is central both to where harm is inflicted and where repair will be built.

Appleseed’s Approach to Funding Preparedness and Asset Preservation

What happens to assets when immigrants are deported? That was the question at the heart of Sarah Pacilio’s part of the presentation as Director of Network Collaboration at the Appleseed Network. When an immigrant worker is detained, or deportation occurs, the financial damage is immediate: abandoned accounts, lost income, interrupted businesses, and separated families. She pointed out that the newly revised Deportation Preparation Manual can help those dealing with the unclaimed assets immigrant families were leaving behind. The manual is a planning tool with information spanning powers of attorney, bank accounts, property, small businesses, child custody and guardianship, wage theft, public benefits, and remittances.

The 2025 update reflects the breadth of its uses: it is available in nine languages, contains eleven state-specific child-safety guides, and features an interactive “Build Your Guide” tool that generates a customized, downloadable plan. These resources only matter when they reach families through trusted messengers—the credit unions, schools, and providers they already rely on. Sarah also noted that Appleseed Mexico’s Guide to Rights and Services for Returned Mexicans helps deported individuals reopen bank accounts, recover documents, and reintegrate.

Annie E. Casey Believes Every Funder Has an Entry Point

The strongest case that this work crosses every portfolio came from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, whose focus is on children and families. Laura Speer, Director of Strategy, was candid that the foundation is not, by its own definition, an immigrant justice funder, yet it invests here because one in four children in the United States—roughly 18 million children—lives in an immigrant family, and 80 to 90 percent of those children are U.S. citizens themselves. Detention, deportation, and enforcement activity are traumatic for children and deeply disruptive to family economic security.

What drew Casey in was its asset-development lens. Immigrant families are overwhelmingly working households, and many run small businesses, so the question of what happens to those assets when a parent is detained became a core economic-security concern for the foundation. That reasoning led Casey to support the Appleseed toolkit, and it continues to invest in this work because it gives families agency at a time when they feel they have very little. The entry point to funding immigrant-serving organizations can often be slotted into any portfolio that supports children and families.

From Conviction to Action

The guide offers nine concrete grantmaking strategies, organized along a continuum, with each highlighting national resources and strategies with local application:

Immediate Protection: Helping families protect their finances and assets, funding economic stability and rapid response, and resourcing legal defense and impact litigation.

Building Economic Power: Documenting economic harm, funding economic mobility (including work authorization and employee ownership), and investing in mental health and community wellness.

Long-term Transformation: Power building and narrative change.

The discussion also pressed funders to examine how they fund, not only what. Immigrant-serving organizations are stretched thin after years on the front line; the call was to lighten due-diligence burdens, move money quickly, and compensate organizations for their time. This is something that particularly resonates with our experience as a trust-based grantmaker. We have also deployed rapid response funding and other unrestricted support, including last year when our grantee partners and the communities they served were under significant strain due to a rapidly shifting immigration landscape. Community groups can only reach families in crisis if funders resource those trusted relationships, through flexible, multi-year support, well before crisis hits.

Finally, the panel looked beyond the impact of grantmaking to consider how mission aligned investing can ensure our endowments grow in ways that support our missions. WES for one is committed to a 100 percent mission-aligned investment portfolio, and we leverage our full asset base to ensure achievement of impact goals. This strategy keeps the larger share of capital from undercutting the mission the grants advance.

Whether your portfolio is workforce development, career pathways and readiness, health care, or education, your work already intersects with immigrant and refugee communities. We believe that incorporating immigrant-inclusive strategies into grantmaking can benefit everyone and advance broader institutional missions, regardless of specific funding priorities and strategies. The flourishing of immigrant communities is foundational to our collective prosperity.

Read An Asset Funder’s Guide to Supporting Immigrants and Refugees in an Era of Harm and access the webinar recording and slides.