When Donald Trump first became president, the country saw an outpouring of civic action — from calls to “Resist” and airport protests against his travel ban to the Women’s March breaking records for the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.
Now, a new study suggests some of that anger may have made a real difference — representing billions of dollars in increased aid.
Research at UC Santa Cruz found evidence that “rage-giving” in response to Trump’s first term significantly bolstered nonprofits that helped migrants, offering an ongoing source of funding through 2019.
But with the nation on the cusp of a second Trump presidency, some immigrant advocates assert aid to these organizations is flagging compared to 2016 and are urging sustained support in an era that they fear will see renewed threats to immigrants.
“It’s no secret that right out the gate, Trump went after immigrants, early and often and loudly,” said Juan Pedroza, who studies immigration at UC Santa Cruz and co-authored the report. “It’s encouraging and impressive that all these different sources knew where to get the money to make a difference … Now, it’s newly relevant.”
The study published recently in the journal International Migration Review focused on funding to a set of nonprofits offering pro-bono and low-cost legal services to immigrants around the country.
The study reviewed IRS data from 2006 to 2019, the latest available, on community-based nonprofits and how funding for immigrant-serving groups changed compared to other organizations. The funding came from individual donations, foundations, and local and state governments.
While immigrant-serving nonprofits were in the middle-of-the-pack in 2014, aid steadily grew and by 2019 they had become one of the most well-funded categories of giving, the researchers found. While the migrant nonprofits received a collective $2.9 billion dollars in 2006, that number grew to $6.7 billion dollars in 2019.
The researchers sought several explanations for the jump in aid in 2015 — ranging from whether giving to migrants was dictated by the local partisan makeup or upticks in immigrant arrests — but the only reliable predictor of the boost was the nomination and election of president Trump.
“Every other thing that we had in mind didn’t pan out when we put it under the weight of the evidence. It really is a story of trends over time after Trump announced,” Pedroza said. “People stayed tuned in to the need.”
Both experts on nonprofits and those running them say that the findings line up with what they saw on the ground.
Jennifer A. Taylor, who studies nonprofits and co-authored the book “Rage Giving,” noted over email that the study falls in line with her understanding of the phenomenon and “demonstrates how politically charged environments can catalyze philanthropic behavior.”
Patrick Schmitt, current CEO of FreeWill — a company that aids charitable giving through will writing — and a former fundraiser with the Obama re-election campaign who has written about fundraising under the next Trump administration, said the findings aren’t ”the least bit surprising.” In his experience, organizations aligned with the losing party tend to see increased support after an election.
The challenge often comes in sustaining support beyond “rage-giving” in moments of crisis, Schmitt and Taylor noted.
For many nonprofits serving immigrants in California, that challenge rings true.
Latino Community Foundation, a nationwide organization based in San Francisco, “saw a huge outpouring of support,” said Christian Arana, the group’s vice president of Civic Power and Policy. After Trump’s election, the foundation created an emergency fund of $122,000 to support immigrant-serving organizations across the state. The organization saw continued support through COVID, Arana said.
Huy Tran, executive director of San Jose-based immigrant nonprofit SIREN, said while the jump during Trump’s first term allowed many nonprofits to expand their networks and build the infrastructure to help immigrants, many had to fight to maintain funding through the Biden years.
To Tran, there is a grim irony to the pattern in giving. “In a very perverse sense, we would be better off if it’s Trump in office,” Tran said. “From just a resource perspective, without…. Trump around, it was easier for folks to start saying ‘we don’t need to put money here.’”
Now, both Arana and Tran found support is flagging compared to the first Trump term.
Schmitt, of FreeWill, expects to see a jump in the coming months, but notes that giving can shoot up when results are surprising, as Trump’s 2016 election was for many left-leaning donors. “The 2024 election was significantly less shocking,” Schmitt said. “I do think you’ll see an immediate rise in giving, but I think that is more likely to spike after a particularly egregious action.”
Tran maintains that the need is urgent. “I think the fatigue is real, but this is one of those moments where even on the individual level there’s so much impact a person can have,” Tran said. “This is an all-hands-on-deck kind of moment.”