Under former President Joe Biden’s administration, illegal aliens didn’t just cross the border. A system of immigration nonprofits, many of them heavily subsidized by taxpayers, provided housing and transportation, settling these aliens across the country.
As I wrote in The Woketopus, organizations such as Catholic Charities USA, Church World Service, Global Refuge, and HIAS received millions—in some cases more than 50% of their revenues—from the federal government.
As a reminder, at least 9 million illegal aliens entered the United States under President Joe Biden. Only 11 U.S. states have populations greater than 9 million, and even left-leaning “sanctuary city” mayors lamented their inability to deal with the influx of illegal aliens.
While I believe in helping the less fortunate, these groups handled immigration on an industrial scale, and many of them advocated against immigration restrictions during the crisis of the Biden years.
President Donald Trump’s administration has wisely reconsidered these relationships, but some corners of the Left are fighting to protect them.
The ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act’
California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill that will shield “immigration support services” providers from scrutiny.
AB 2624 extends a privacy program to immigrant-serving nonprofits, their staff, and volunteers, allowing them to acquire substitute addresses in public records rather than their home and business addresses. The law also bans anyone from posting information on the internet with the intent of enabling another person to threaten violence against an immigration support services provider.
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights—which received more than two-thirds of its revenue from government grants between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2025—co-sponsored, testified in support of, and lobbied for the bill. CHIRLA operates an “immigrant political power project,” and its website mentions offices in Mexico that help immigrants come to the U.S. (CHIRLA claims these Mexico offices are separate entities.)
Jenny Rae Le Roux, director of California DOGE, told the Daily Signal that the bill creates “a protected class of people,” protected from other Americans “using our First Amendment rights.”
Eric Soskin, the team leader for Florida’s DOGE initiative, echoed Le Roux.
“If money is going to flow to non-governmental entities, then transparency requirements should go with that, and if you’re going to take taxpayer money, purportedly for a public purpose, all the accountability that goes with the government spending such money on behalf of taxpayers should extend to you, as well,” he said.
Investigative journalist Nick Shirley, represented by America First Legal, has already challenged the law in court, arguing that it restricts the publication of lawfully obtained information on matters of public concern.
CHIRLA spokesman Jorge-Mario Cabrera argued that rising harassment and doxxing concerns justified the legislation.
Le Roux challenged this claim, however. She insisted that threats of violence and intimidation were already illegal under California law.
“We actually already had statutes on the books in California that would have protected them from everything that they said that this law protects them from,” she said. “The new law aims to obfuscate or hide what these organizations are doing from the public.”
Lora Ries, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, noted that many immigration groups have attempted to reveal the identities of immigration enforcement officials.
“When many of these groups threaten and dox [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents and others on the Right, their complaints of receiving threats themselves fail the laugh test,” Ries argued.
A Worrisome Trend
The federal government has long directed taxpayer funds to entities most Americans would not support. When President Trump entered office last year, the DOGE effort highlighted how Americans’ tax dollars propped up “diversity, equity, and inclusion” grants in other countries, along with transgender activism overseas.
At the same time, the administration has started investigating fraud across the country. The Justice Department has successfully prosecuted massive fraud schemes in Minnesota. The department has also brought charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center for allegedly funding the very hate it claims to combat.
FROM MY DESK
📚Reading: “Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity” by Nabeel Qureshi
Like Mark Christian, Nabeel Qureshi rejected Islam for Christianity, but Qureshi’s story is interesting in part because he came from a more moderate/Western form of Islam. I already knew there were some differences between the God who revealed Himself through Moses and Jesus and the Allah of Mohammed, but this book helped me articulate exactly why Muslims and Christians do not worship the same God.
📰Worth your time: FBI Tracked Susie Wiles Phone, Email Communications With Journalists, Lawyers, Political Advisors, New Documents Show by Fred Lucas
🧼Washing: I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Dr. Squatch’s Mango Tango soap—the spicy-and-sweet scent is invigorating, and the soap cleans and lathers well.
The Trump administration is also working hard to deport some of the millions of illegal aliens who entered the country under the previous administration.
Rather than reckon with the failures of the Biden-era immigration system and the taxpayer-funded organizations that helped sustain it, many on the Left have treated virtually every effort at scrutiny, auditing, investigation, or enforcement as an attack on civil society itself.
AB 2624 represents a similar overreaction. While some immigrant-serving organizations may have faced some harassment, that does not justify creating a new bureaucratic system to hide an entire nonprofit ecosystem from public scrutiny—especially amid serious concerns about fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds.
Law enforcement should investigate and prosecute violent threats that meet the definition of crimes, whether they victimize immigrant-serving nonprofits or any other person. Neither California nor any other state should respond to the much-deserved scrutiny these groups are finally receiving with laws creating new protections just for them.
It is perverse for the law to shield a taxpayer-funded organization from scrutiny just because some people object to how that organization spends taxpayer funds.
California is not simply protecting charities that feed the hungry. It is extending special protections to politically active organizations that receive enormous sums of taxpayer money while lobbying to shape public policy. This is exactly the sort of corruption the Trump administration rightly aims to combat.
This article is a commentary on news initially published on The Daily Signal.
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