The Fight Against ICE Never Stopped — How Can we Protect our Communities?

A call to action and a grantmaking update

July 2026 — Moving the Needle // Woods Fund Chicago

This month, tragedy has swung the spotlight back on immigration enforcement — on July 15, Chicagoans held vigil for two men, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who were killed by ICE within a week of each other in Houston and Maine. The killings came on the heels of ramped-up immigration enforcement and a Supreme Court decision that ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, imperiling hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants.

Together, these actions mark a clear re-escalation of enforcement. But as immigrants, refugees, and the people and coalitions that support them know, ICE never left Chicago. Immigrant rights organizers are building on the infrastructure they created ahead of and during last year’s Midway Blitz to continue to protect their communities. Philanthropy must step up with efficient, informed, and steadfast support to ensure they can build a movement equal to the threat at hand.

Immigrant rights advocates have consistently warned that even as headlines turned elsewhere, immigration enforcement was continuing in Chicago. The fight against deportations has continued, too. After recent arrests of street vendors near courthouses, the Chicago Street Vendors Association has organized to move over a dozen court hearings to Zoom. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights has continued to adapt and expand their family support hotline, and to pressure local officials to enforce the laws a broad coalition organized for last year that barred ICE from courts, schools, and hospitals. With the support of legal aid firms, people are fighting back against unlawful detention via habeas petitions, and winning. All of this builds on networks formed in and before Midway Blitz: In Block Club, Organized Communities Against Deportations organizer Evelyn Vargas urged people to reconnect to rapid response and mutual aid networks: “This is a time when the community needs to come together to protect ourselves.”

Just as this work extends beyond the news cycles, it is more intersectional than has been present in dominant narratives. That’s reflected in the overlapping communities of immigrants themselves — ICIRR’s Know Your Rights factsheets have been translated into 20 languages, and the recent Temporary Protected Status that has imperiled Haitians is bound up in anti-blackness — but also in the shared tactics across police and ICE, and who bears the brunt of increased law enforcement presence. As the Chicago Alliance against Racist and Political Repression and other organizations have named, the ICE traffic stops that preceded the slaying of two fathers this month have a mirror-history of police stops that have resulted in the killings of Black men and women.

Alongside Black and Brown communities, those who live in economic precarity, from street vendors to people experiencing homelessness, have been additionally vulnerable to state violence over the past year. Local movement organizations are already proceeding from an intersectional — Philanthropy must widen its view on who is impacted in this crisis.

But if there is a single largest lesson emerging from Midway Blitz and the courageous, big tent organizing that came together to oppose it, it’s that funders must extend the flexibility and urgency mustered for rapid response funding toward a long-term, offensive strategy. During the surge in deportations this past fall, funders who hadn’t historically funded deportation defense delivered resources, and others streamlined processes to deliver funds rapidly where they were needed. That money supported a movement that was building infrastructure at a breakneck pace, standing up helplines, creating Know Your Rights trainings, building mutual aid networks, and pressuring lawmakers to back Sanctuary City rhetoric with action. We must extend that logic to the fight ahead.

We need that same urgency and trust present as organizations do the critical work of basebuilding, bringing those activated by ICE brutality into the long-term battle for profound change. In February, national polls found that 50% of Americans believed ICE should be abolished. At one point during the ICE surge in Minneapolis, nearly 5% of the city was active in a rapid response chat. This is a moment of deep potential. And it is a moment of unprecedented threat. In the wake of ICE violence and the protests to stop it, we are seeing aggressive criminalization of protest and community defense. And so just as funders must operationalize trust-based practices — general operating grants, multi-year funding, a wide-angle lens on who is in this fight — we must adamantly defend organizations and organizers exercising their civil rights. Funders are not immune from the threats of this administration, but we are generally more powerful and less vulnerable than our grantees: we have to hold the line.

As we watch a potential ICE escalation, and the criminalization of those who stand in its way, we have deep faith in the many on the ground fighting back — we’re committed to funding that work, and standing with our grantees as we build a movement that can force back rising repression.

Woods Fund Chicago funded 101 partners this July. We continue to emphasize multi-year awards, for long-term partnerships that match the time horizon of the fights grantee partners are engaged in: 97 of these awards are to returning partners. This year so far, Woods Fund Chicago has contributed $5,283,800 to organizing and advocacy in Chicago!

Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and Northern California Grantmakers have just released Effective Governance: Lessons from Philanthropy, a new series of governance case stories highlighting how six grantmakers have evolved their governance culture and practices.

Each story explores the featured organization's governance context, the changes it pursued, their impact and lessons for other funders. Woods Fund Chicago’s case is one of a diverse mix of funders prioritizing governance that aligns their operations with their values.

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