The Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) believes it’s unfair to round up criminal illegal immigrants and expel them from the country that they have invaded. FIRM “forcefully condemns” what it is painting as the Trump administration’s “increasingly authoritarian and violent campaign against immigrant communities and the people of the United States.”
I asked the far-left activists if they:
› “Forcefully condemn” the violence against federal law enforcement officials who are doing their jobs enforcing U.S. immigration laws?
› “Forcefully condemn” the criminals identifying as protesters who are smashing up and burning down private and taxpayer-funded property in a wave of lawlessness?
› “Forcefully condemn” violent, illegal aliens roving the streets in search of their next victims?
› “Forcefully condemn” the rule of law that the vast majority of Americans voted for?
FIRM representatives did not respond to my questions. Surprised? They also had nothing to say about where they stand on the actual terrorizing of communities by violent gangs made up of illegal immigrants insanely granted “asylum” by the Biden administration.
We know where groups like FIRM come down — in support of mass illegal immigration and against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers sworn to enforce the laws.
But the people behind Fair Immigration Reform Movement are not the fabricated masses of angry Americans the leftist group and others like it is trying to sell. FIRM, like so many such left-wing organizations, is a well-funded echo chamber putting lipstick on a pig most Americans aren’t buying.
“It seems like FIRM is another one of those left-leaning attempts to present a really wide public front when there really is a narrow set of pillars supporting them,” Parker Thayer, investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, told The Federalist in a phone interview. The point of FIRM and illegal immigrant advocacy groups like it, Thayer said, is to make it seem grassroots.
“This group is pretty much the mouthpiece of the Ford Foundation, which is one of the most wealthy and powerful entities in the world,” Thayer noted.
‘Ugly, Warped View of America’
FIRM has long been deeply dependent on the generosity of the Ford Foundation, as its nonprofit filings show.
Last September, the Ford Foundation cut a check for $100,000 to FIRM to “develop and implement a national communications strategy on immigration,” according to the foundation’s grant filings. Now, what kind of a communications strategy would a multi-billion dollar foundation with an “ugly, warped view of America” demand from a leftist pro-illegal immigration group?
As Ken Braun, Capital Research Center’s senior investigative researcher, reported in 2023, the Ford Foundation was built on money earned a century ago by Henry Ford in gritty Dearborn, Michigan. But it has long since ceased being a charity of the famous automaker family that bears its name.
“Decades ago, it was taken over by left-wing bureaucrats working in a glitzy New York City building. Everything the Ford Foundation does today can and probably should be understood from the perspective of well-paid would-be revolutionaries who sit atop a $16 billion mountain of money and believe most Americans are irredeemably awful,” Braun wrote.
The foundation, which reported total net assets of $16.8 billion in 2023, boasts a “history of social justice.” Apparently its idea of social justice is pouring money into Marxist movement causes, such as the Women’s March Network, taking to the streets under the banner, “WE ARE STILL THE RESISTANCE,” and the Sunrise Movement Education Fund.
“This is the education affiliate of the Sunrise Movement, a leftist clan so crazed that they have staged disruptive protests outside the offices of Democrats they deem insufficiently insane on climate and energy policy,” Braun reported.
FIRM is cut from the same cloth, advocating for left-wing expansionist immigration policies. The Fair Immigration Reform Movement was the brainchild of The Center for Community Change (CCC) with marching orders to promote expanded civil rights for legal and illegal immigrants, InfluenceWatch, a project of the Capital Research Center, reports. CCC and its action arm, like so many of the left-wing organizations leading the anti-ICE movement, is the beneficiary of millions of dollars from socialist sugar daddy George Soros. FIRM is a Soros stooge, too.
“FIRM represents a coalition of several dozen smaller advocacy groups across the country,” the nonprofit tracker notes. “Since its inception, FIRM has called for legal status for effectively all illegal immigrants, and higher levels of legal immigration to the United States. The coalition opposes all border security measures, and maintains that the existing security is the border’s most prominent issue. More funding, FIRM believes, will lead to more instances of violence between illegal immigrants and border agents.”
The activist organization appears to have split off from the CCC, receiving its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service late last year. It’s 501(c)(4) political engagement arm, of course, takes donations through ActBlue, the left’s troubled fundraising platform.
‘The Definition of Insurrection’
So, is it any wonder that FIRM is a coalition voice of some of the more militant leftist organizations in America, such as the innocuous-sounding Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). In its press release “forcefully” condemning the Trump administration’s efforts to take violent illegal immigrants off the streets and out of the country, FIRM included this sweeping and false indictment of the Trump administration from CHIRLA.
“The real crisis is the deliberate escalation by federal immigration authorities — and the effort to shift blame onto communities who are responding to fear, grief, and injustice. We encourage people to demand fairness and justice from our government and elected officials and do so strategically and peacefully,” said Angela Salas, executive director of the Los Angeles-based radical group. “Our voices must not be silenced by this government-sponsored repression and we must ensure the reconciliation bill, which would further add fuel to the Trump deportation apparatus, does not see the light of day in the Senate.”
CHIRLA, as civil rights attorney Lauren Powell noted on X, “is one of the key players in fomenting the violent response to immigration enforcement actions.” In 2018, CHIRLA pushed a campaign to abolish ICE. It currently leads the Los Angeles Raids Rapid Response Network, which defends illegal immigrants “caught in enforcement operations.”
The group has close ties to the California Democratic Party, and may have closer ties to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who has insisted that the riots and violence against law enforcement will not end until ICE ends its raids in Los Angeles.
“I just have to say that, if you dial back time and go to Friday, if immigration raids had not happened here, we would not have the disorder that went on last night,” Bass ludicrously asserted this week on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”
On Tuesday, Trump adviser Stephen Miller said the leftist mayor’s threat was “explicit,” and the “definition of insurrection.”
“The Mayor of LA is effectively saying the mob violence is caused by the mere presence of ICE in the city and the violence against ICE will not stop unless federal law enforcement is withdrawn from the city. This is the definition of insurrection,” Miller wrote on X.
‘The Nonprofit-Industrial Complex’
And California taxpayers are paying for the chaos. Powell said she obtained a financial audit that shows that, for he fiscal year ending June 2023, CHIRLA received $34 million from the state, “mostly through the Department of Social Services, accounting for 72% of its total revenue.”
“Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex—now we face a nonprofit-industrial complex,” Powell said on her X account.
The coordination of these leftist activist groups and their funders is extraordinary. As Thayer noted, many of the groups run in the same small circles. FIRM, for instance, is represented on tax filings by an activist by the name of Lawrence Benito, who also is the longtime director of the Illinois Coalition of Immigration and Refugee Rights. The ICIRR, too, has received a lot of public funding. According to InfluenceWatch, the Chicago-based group in fiscal year 2023 reported revenue of $80.42 million and expenses of more than $81.87 million, for a deficit of $1.45 million. The group also reported receiving $77.67 million in government grants.
Benito, listed as a community organizer and board member of Chicago Public Media, was lauded by President Barack Obama as a “Champion of Change. He’s made a good deal of change as ICIRR’s chief executive, north of $170,000 in fiscal year 2023, InfluenceWatch reports.
ICIRR has received some hefty grants from the Ford Foundation as well.
‘The Left’s Playbook’
The folks at FIRM have stepped up the vitriol and lies amid the lawlessness in L.A.
“Donald Trump is waging an all-out war against our communities and our democracy,” said Murad Awawdeh, President and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition and FIRM Co-Chair. “The coordinated assault on immigrants — raiding homes, stalking people in courthouses, and targeting children at school — now expands into a terrifying threat to use military force against lawful protestors. This action does nothing but incite fear and chaos, while exerting control through the threat of violence.”
ICE has not been “targeting children at school,” and legal immigrants are not being targeted in the long overdue law enforcement effort.
The left’s echo chamber may be growing louder and more violent in defense of illegal immigration, but its universe remains dominated by big-money liberal groups and led by a cadre of Marxist activists that have been trying to burn down the republic in the name of “social justice.”
“We’re right back to the left’s playbook from Obamacare and BLM when you had the big street protest movement. It always seems dozens of groups showing up but half of them are run by the same guy, and FIRM is no different,” Capital Research Center’s Thayer said.