By Greisa Martinez-Rosas
The horrors we’ve seen unfold in Minneapolis are a predictable escalation of an administration that has encouraged reckless, militarized immigration enforcement with little accountability or regard for due process.
As enforcement becomes more extreme, access to legal help is disappearing. In immigration court, there is no guaranteed right to a lawyer. Parents facing deportation, and permanent separation from their children, are expected to represent themselves against trained government attorneys. Even children can be forced to appear in court alone.
That is why United We Dream, the ACLU, and the Abundant Futures Fund launched the Defending Our Neighbors Fund — and why support for it is urgently needed right now.
I know these stakes personally. When I was a child, my father was detained at a traffic stop. My family could not afford a lawyer, and my dad was deported. That brutal experience shaped my life and informs the work I do every day.
The outcomes are not a mystery. People with lawyers are far more likely to stay with their families, while people without them are far more likely to be deported. Yet nearly 60 percent of people facing deportation nationwide have no legal representation. Earlier this year, the federal government made this crisis worse by cutting funding for lawyers for unaccompanied immigrant children, forcing trusted legal organizations to scale back services just as enforcement escalates.
The Defending Our Neighbors Fund responds by rapidly directing resources to community-based legal service providers nationwide. The Fund does not provide legal services directly. It ensures that experienced, trusted organizations have the resources to show up for families facing detention and deportation right now. When possible, the fund also supports nonprofit bond funds, like Midwest Immigration Bond Fund and Prairielands Freedom Fund, that help our immigrant neighbors eligible for release to be reunited with their families and communities.
Thousands of people like you have already stepped up, many with donations as small as $10. Together, those gifts have raised more than $13 million since the Fund launched, resources that have been quickly deployed to legal service providers nationwide, helping ensure countless families still have access to representation.
The Fund will not fix a cruel and broken immigration system on its own. But it does something essential: it gives families a fighting chance, and tells them they are not alone.
Created in partnership with United We Dream Network (UWD) and the ACLU, The Defending Our Neighbors Fund is hosted at Abundant Futures Fund, a fiscally sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The Fund is focused on fundraising, identifying grantees, and rapidly distributing resources to organizations working on the frontlines to support immigrant communities through legal representation and, when possible, bond assistance.
