This webinar made the case that asset funders have both the permission and the responsibility to act at the intersection of economic justice and immigrant justice — and offered concrete strategies, partners, and entry points for doing so.

Our speakers brought four complementary perspectives:

Rebeca Rangel of the Asset Funders Network opened a framing advanced by Dr. Darrick Hamilton and Dr. Manuel Pastor at AFN’s November 2025 Economic and Immigrant Rights Summit in the Bay Area: that economic precarity creates the conditions for authoritarianism, and that the scapegoating of immigrant communities is rooted in the failures of our economic system that does not center and resource people for them to thrive. The good news is that the path forward is in our wheelhouse as asset funders — guaranteeing the housing, healthcare, family care, dignified work, and more. The case for inclusive prosperity must rest on human dignity and on transforming our economy toward one that sees immigrant people as rights-holders, not solely as laborers and consumers.

Kevin Douglas of Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees offered field context organized around four themes from the past year: the militarization of the U.S. interior; heightened enforcement, detention, and deportation; the dismantling of lawful immigration pathways; and the broader move toward authoritarian governance. He then traced the household-level economic impact: worker exploitation across agriculture, meatpacking, domestic, and construction work; the chilling effect of public charge on benefits families are entitled to; IRS–DHS data sharing pushing ITIN filers out of the tax system; and the loss of work authorization for close to a million people whose lawful status has been or may be stripped.

Sarah Pacilio of the Appleseed Network walked us through Appleseed’s Deportation Preparation Manual, first published in 2009 in response to a coalition of banks and credit unions concerned about the unclaimed assets immigrant families were leaving behind, and most recently updated in 2025. The manual is a planning tool with information on protecting both financial assets and family stability, covering topics like powers of attorney, bank accounts, property, small businesses, child custody and guardianship, wage theft, public benefits, remittances, and more. She emphasized the need to further create pathways for local implementation of planning and preparedness resources prior to crises. Sarah closed with the reminder that preparation cannot stop at the border, lifting up Appleseed Mexico’s Guide to Rights and Services for Returned Mexicans as a resource for reintegration after deportation.

Laura Speer of The Annie E. Casey Foundation shared the institutional funder case from a foundation that is not, by its own definition, an immigrant justice funder. One in four children in the United States — roughly 18 million children — lives in an immigrant family. Eighty to ninety percent of those children are U.S. citizens themselves, and four to five million have at least one undocumented parent. Detention, deportation, and enforcement activity are traumatic for children and deeply disruptive to family economic security. AECF supported the development of the Appleseed toolkit in 2009 and continues to invest in this work because it gives families agency at a time when they feel they have very little.

Key Takeaways for Funders

Enforcement is increasingly being routed through the financial system — and asset funders are squarely in this fight. So-called immigration enforcement tactics have shifted toward weaponizing the financial system itself: IRS–DHS data sharing has betrayed the promise the Treasury made to ITIN filers — that filing their taxes and doing the right thing would not be used against them; public charge is chilling families from accessing benefits they are entitled to and have funded; the stripping of work authorization from close to a million people is, by design, forcing people into undocumented status; and we anticipate further escalation, including pressure on banks and credit unions around customer data. This is not a peripheral issue for asset funders. Our field is central both to where this harm is being inflicted and to where the repair will be built.

This work belongs to every asset funder. Whether your portfolio is health, housing, financial health, workforce, or education, the intersection with immigrant and refugee communities is already in your work. The guide provides the language, framing, and concrete national-with-local-application strategies to walk through doors that are already open.

Funding preparedness and asset-preservation is critical. Philanthropy has a role in helping impacted families protect their assets through crisis. Funding the development and the distribution of preparedness tools and the local capacity to use them before crisis hits — and to support reintegration on the other side are some examples.

How we fund matters. Organizations in the immigration space and their leaders are in crisis and have been for at least a decade. They don’t have the capacity to develop relationships over multiple meetings. Sometimes it’s better to be transactional when relationship-building is not feasible, move resources quickly, and compensate organizations for their time when taking meetings, completing letters of inquiry, and submitting grant applications.

Look beyond the 5%. The lion’s share of resources and power in most grantmaking institutions sits in the endowment, not the grants budget. Funders are encouraged to examine how the 95% is invested and to divest from firms profiting from mass incarceration and encampments.

Additional Resources