A new article published by the International Migration Review is out now:
Pedroza, Juan M., Stephanie Potochnick, and Robert Santillano. “The 2016 United States election and financial support to migrant-serving legal-aid organizations.” International Migration Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183241309573
The article is a collaboration with colleagues who are social scientists and policy scholars.
UCSC has published a press release for the study:
"As Donald Trump prepares to take office for a second term as President, research led by the University of California, Santa Cruz is demonstrating the important role nonprofits played during Trump’s first term as a counterforce that channeled public resistance to anti-immigrant policies."
Based on a deep dive of IRS data, we find evidence of “rage giving” to immigrant-serving legal aid organizations as Donald Trump first rose to national office, as early as 2015 and 2016. Specifically, we found contributions to immigrant-serving legal aid nonprofits were between 4 and 11 percentage points higher during the 2016 election than those to other causes with similar prior trends. Contributions were 8 to 17 percentage points higher through 2019, the last year of available data. Over this time period, many immigrant-serving legal aid organizations rose to near the 90th percentile for donations among all nonprofits.
In summary, by 2019, immigrant-serving legal aid organization had become national leaders in donations received -- a sharp departure from historical trends in nonprofit giving.
We conducted several analyses and saw a pattern that tracks closely to Donald Trump's first rise to the GOP nomination and the presidency. The article presents a range of scenarios; which arrive at the same general conclusion as displayed below (Figure 3 from the article).

Notice how immigrant-serving legal aid organizations (about 700 total) approach and then exceed the 80th percentile of growth in contributions (in percentage points on the Y axis) only after 2015. Notably, contribution growth does not slow down and was instead sustained during Trump's first term (2017-2019).
See our paper for details on the data sources we used from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS; courtesy of the Urban Institute) as well as our synthetic control method.
Where to find legal aid assistance:
A list of organizations accredited by the DOJ is here.
A directory of immigrant-serving legal aid (searchable by zip code; updated by Justicia Lab and Probono.net) is also available online.
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