A left-wing group battling the Trump administration to maintain lucrative taxpayer-funded immigration contracts has called to defund police departments and abolish the federal agency that deports illegal aliens.
Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), a nonprofit chaired by Department of Justice employee Marisa Arrona, has received $17 million in federal funding since last year to provide legal services to illegal aliens facing deportation, according to federal records. ImmDef is a subcontractor for a $769 million program to provide services to minors apprehended at the border without parents.
ImmDef and its allies are desperately fighting against the Trump administration in an attempt to maintain funding for that program and others that provide services to illegal immigrants. ImmDef has accused the Trump administration of "playing games with children's rights and their safety" and says the program is needed to "protect due process" rights for illegal immigrants facing deportation.
But ImmDef has gone far beyond merely providing legal services to illegal immigrants facing deportation. The group, founded in 2015, has called for the government to "dismantle the systems that seek to deport our clients." During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, ImmDef called for dismantling "the police state by defunding and decreasing police budgets."
ImmDef says it is "high time we abolish the immigration prison system and abolish ICE" and sold "Abolish ICE" face masks during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. In September 2020, ImmDef circulated the since-debunked MSNBC report that a doctor at an ICE facility in Georgia performed unnecessary hysterectomies on female detainees. "#AbolishICE," ImmDef wrote on a social media post at the time.
According to former federal immigration judge Matt O'Brien, funding for groups like ImmDef highlights Democrats' efforts to "funnel taxpayer funds into the coffers of these radical groups" in support of an "anti-borders agenda."
"It's a basic principle of American-style democracy that reasonable minds may differ on political issues. However, there is a huge difference between advocating a policy position and actively encouraging foreign nationals to break our laws," said O'Brien, the director of investigations at the Immigration Law Reform Institute.
ImmDef receives most of its federal funding through the Acacia Center for Justice, a nonprofit that oversees a $769 million federal contract to house and counsel unaccompanied children. Acacia Center paid $17 million to ImmDef last year for contracts approved by the Department of Interior and Department of Justice to provide legal representation to minors who came to the United States without their parents.
Like ImmDef, Acacia Center has called for an end to the detention of illegal immigrants and a pause on nearly all deportations. Acacia Center has alleged that the immigration system is "intentionally designed" to exploit "Black and brown people." It opposes the use of police officers for "immigration purposes" and says that "no immigrant should be detained," the Washington Free Beacon reported.
According to O'Brien, the Biden administration engaged in a "deliberate attempt" to fill federal agencies such as the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security with officials "willing to ignore America's immigration laws on purely ideological grounds."
"Those kinds of actions undermine both the rule of law and the will of the American electorate," O'Brien told the Free Beacon.
ImmDef and the Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.