California Governor Gavin Newsom quietly directed more than $1 billion in state funding to organizations that facilitated the entry and settlement of roughly 400,000 illegal migrants into California, according to data compiled by the Manhattan Institute and reported Wednesday by City Journal.
The money flowed through a web of contracts and grants to nonprofits with explicit pro-immigration political agendas. Catholic Charities received more than $250 million. Jewish Family Services took in $85 million. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles (CHIRLA) collected $110 million. Dozens of smaller organizations split additional tens of millions.
CHIRLA used its government-funded infrastructure to actively impede federal immigration enforcement. The group coordinates the L.A. Rapid Response Network, which tracks ICE operations and dispatches volunteers to investigate enforcement activity. During the wave of anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles earlier this year, CHIRLA’s executive director, Angelica Salas, took the stage and told crowds: “We are going to stop Trump’s terror campaign against our community. We will not stop marching. We will not stop fighting.”
The California spending was separate from the billions in federal dollars routed through the state during the Biden administration under then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Christopher Rufo, writing for City Journal, concluded that the 2 million illegal migrants now living in California “are pawns, merely the instruments of an activist class that would like to see America burn.” Rufo’s article, titled “How Gavin Newsom Subsidized the Migrant Invasion,” describes the spending as a long-term political strategy: migrants become clients of state welfare and education agencies, then dependents of the Democratic political machine, then eventually Democratic voters after naturalization.
The spending also benefits Newsom’s donor class. Migrants provide low-cost labor to California’s wealthy professional class, prop up real estate values in cities like San Francisco by accepting overcrowded conditions at high rents, and serve as customers for government-funded social services that employ unionized public-sector workers.
The report coincides with renewed pressure on California from the Trump administration over its sanctuary city policies, which bar local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration officers.
