FROM ANNE IM, SENIOR DIRECTOR, COMMUNITY IMPACT AND POLICY, SILICON VALLEY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION, AND REBECA RANGEL, SENIOR DIRECTOR, ASSET FUNDERS NETWORK
JUNE 2026

This is the third post in an ongoing Bay Area AFN Short Take series on immigration and economic security in Silicon Valley. Read part one, Philanthropy’s Critical Role at the Intersection of Housing and Immigrant Rights in Silicon Valley, and part two, Children at the Intersection: How Immigration Policy and Enforcement Shape Economic Security in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley’s strength has always rested on immigrant families: its workers, neighbors, and small-business owners. This June marked a year since the federal government put that truth under assault, deploying National Guard troops and Marines to the streets of Los Angeles and casting immigrant communities as a threat to justify a widening crackdown. A year of terror has caused real harm, here and across the country. This post recaps a February briefing for funders on that harm, and on how philanthropy can respond. The United Coalition for Immigrant Services—a coalition of 16 nonprofit legal-service providers across San Mateo and Santa Clara counties—convened the briefing.

The harm has been felt in Silicon Valley. Across San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Francisco counties, ICE has assaulted and abducted hundreds of our neighbors over the past year at courthouses, at required immigration check-ins and interviews, and on public streets. Often, the only thing standing between an immigrant and captivity or removal is a lawyer.

In my remarks opening this briefing, I shared what we have been hearing from nonprofit partners at Silicon Valley Community Foundation. One told us that a client’s child had told her, “Mommy, I know where to hide you if they come.” Another reported that small businesses in their city are seeing a 30% drop in customers because people are afraid to leave home. A year in, fear itself is taking an economic toll in one of the wealthiest—and most inequitable—regions in the world.

Recognizing our Interdependence

For asset-building funders, immigration may feel like someone else’s issue. The briefing made the opposite case. As Alison Kamhi, Legal Program Director at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC), and program lead for United Coalition for Immigrant Services, put it, in a region like the Bay Area almost any social outcome is an immigration issue—housing, income, health, education. The reverse holds just as powerfully: Stripping people of lawful status widens income disparity, deepens housing insecurity, and reduces access to education and health care.

The scale is hard to overstate. California is home to 10.4 million immigrant people—about 23% of the national total—and 27% of California residents are foreign-born, more than double the national average of 12%. Across the state, seven counties are more than 30% foreign-born. Santa Clara ranks first in the state at 41% and San Mateo second at 36%. Silicon Valley alone counts more than a million immigrant people, nearly 200,000 of them undocumented Californians. Against that backdrop, Kamhi reported, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Francisco counties recorded 266 ICE arrests and abductions in 2025, most at courthouses and immigration check-ins.

Immigrants are among our families, friends, and neighbors; they have rights, and their flourishing is foundational to all of ours. That calls for authentic solidarity—recognizing our interdependence across race, gender, and class, and acting on the understanding that an attack on immigrant communities is an attack on all of us.

A Year of Escalating Harm

The local picture reflects a year of rapid federal change. Elizabeth Taufa, Senior Policy Attorney and Strategist at ILRC, joining from Washington, D.C., traced the escalation: roughly $240 billion in new federal funding for agencies including ICE and Customs and Border Protection, a wave of new detention facilities aiming to hold 100,000 people at a time—a build-out that profits private prison firms. In addition, a surge in agreements that deputize local police–now roughly 1,400, about 1,000 of whom were added in the past year–to augment ICE and/or CBP ranks.

Legal immigration is being squeezed in parallel: Taufa described the effective “de-documentation” of people who have followed the rules, including those with Temporary Protected Status, deferred action, or parole. This is creating a new class of undocumented residents, even as paused applications and steep new fees grind the system toward a halt. The economic logic is direct. When work authorization disappears, household income can vanish overnight.

Cruelty and Fear with Real Consequences

Fred Buzo, then Director of Advocacy and Community Engagement at Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, described how the crackdown is cutting families off from the services and economic life that sustain them. Fear, he said, is driving economic withdrawal: local restaurants have often sat empty during what should have been their busiest hours, even on Super Bowl Sunday. Enrollment in benefits and safety-net programs is falling as families grow afraid to seek public support, and fraud is rising, with scammers posing as immigration attorneys to prey on people in crisis.

Children are absorbing much of the strain. Buzo described students’ classmates vanishing from one day to the next and the questions of those left behind: “What happened to my friend?” “Can I go visit my friend who just had to leave for Guatemala?” This is occurring alongside rising absenteeism and interrupted learning that carry long-term costs for health, education, and economic mobility. As one community member told him, “Every time I go outside, I don’t know what is going to happen to me or to my family.”

A Persuasion Window: The Case for an Affirmative Narrative

The briefing’s most forward-looking argument came from messaging strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio, who urged funders to seize the present “persuasion window”—a moment when public opinion is unusually open and formerly set views are up for grabs. It is not enough, she argued, to say that cruelty is wrong; advocates need a full-throated, affirmative case that immigrants are good, not merely tolerable. The other side does not rely on poll-tested talking points. It performs its narrative, sending agents into communities to generate footage that reinforces a story of criminality. Advocates have to do the reverse: Make the heroes visible and begin with shared experience.

She pointed to the “fascism-fighting frogs” of Portland and, closer to home, to people dancing salsa on the University Avenue overpass in Palo Alto—exactly the kind of joyful, visible “show, don’t tell” that shifts a story. She was equally pointed about language, warning that echoing terms like “Alligator Alcatraz” only erases the humanity of the people detained. The “Brave of Us” campaign answers what her team’s research found to be the biggest barrier to action—not apathy, but fear—by calling people into courage. It is brave, after all, to move heaven and earth for your family, and bravery is not the absence of fear, but acting in spite of it.

What’s Working: Models for Funders to Support

For all the grim data, the speakers were specific about what works. The throughline is coordination. United Coalition’s own model shows what that achieves: warm referrals across member organizations regardless of a family’s relief category, so a single investment reaches families across many crisis types at once. Kamhi urged funders to back umbrella legal services, know-your-rights education, habeas petitions, and impact litigation, alongside advocacy for protections at the state, county, municipal, and institutional levels.

Even funders whose portfolios don’t center immigration have grantees who are directly affected. Nithin Iyengar of the Give Forward Foundation, a K–12 education funder who closed the briefing, urged peers to start simply: “Ask your grantees how they’re responding to this moment and what they’re seeing.”

Funding Recommendations for Asset-Building Funders

For funders ready to move, AFN and Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees lay out a concrete menu in An Asset Funders Guide to Supporting Immigrants and Refugees in an Era of Harm. The guide is grounded in the premise that asset-building is immigrant justice, and as enforcement tactics increasingly weaponize the financial system, this field is part of the solution.

The Stakes for Asset-Building Philanthropy

Speakers at the briefing said there were early signs the ground is shifting. Taufa pointed to a more defensive tone in federal messaging and some resistance in Congress on agency funding, while cautioning that institutions are not coming to the rescue and that, for now, it is communities protecting one another. Shenker-Osorio’s “persuasion window” points to the same thought: The moment is unusually open. Both reach the same conclusion—this is a time to act, not wait.

“This is a moment to go full throttle across all domains.

Anat Shenker-Osorio

For asset-building funders, the takeaway is plain: the economic security of immigrant families and the prosperity of the region are bound together. Meeting this moment will take flexible, multi-year support, a willingness to fund beyond the usual program boundaries, and the resolve to match the urgency that frontline organizations are already showing. The infrastructure and the messengers are here; what they need now is for philanthropy to keep pace.

This blog is a recap of a February 19, 2026, briefing convened by the United Coalition for Immigrant Services and co-sponsored by Asset Funders Network–Bay Area, the City of San José, the Give Forward Foundation, Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants & Refugees, the Grove Foundation, Northern California Grantmakers, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and Sobrato Philanthropies.