Happy New Year!: Funding Crisis For Immigration NPOs Due To Madoff Scandal

A huge number of non-profit organizations (NPOs) are having to slash their budgets or close up shop, after their donors were wiped out financially by the Madoff financial scandal. One legal-justice donor in particular, the JEHT Foundation, has stunned its grantees by announcing that it was completely halting all donations and would not be receiving any applications for grants, because the entirety of their funds were managed by Madoff. JEHT’s loss is a huge deal, because it donated to a variety of vitally important institutions like the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Immigrant Justice Center, whose fates are now uncertain. A director of a San Francisco rights group commented:

“What is really sad for us is JEHT is one of the few foundations in the United States that was dedicated to human rights litigation. They were thought leaders.”

To survive, many JEHT grantees will likely scale back their operations to account for the loss in grant money. Some larger organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) were hit by the loss of JEHT but will most likely stay afloat, thanks to their firmly established name and reputation.

The National Immigrant Justice Center works to provide legal help to immigrants in detention, and they were half-way through an intensive six-year project so the loss of funding has been a crushing blow for them.

“We’ve made a lot of progress in that we’ve raised awareness regarding the treatment of immigrants in detention, including a number of deaths and the fact that they are not given access to lawyers, even though the Constitution states that prisoners should get them,” said the group’s director, Mary Meg McCarthy. “We’ve made some inroads, but a lot more work needs to be done.”

Work that will have to wait, now that JEHT has gone under-National Immigrant Justice Center lost their $720,000 grant from JEHT and subsequently had its budget reduced by a third.

Funding for immigration non-profits hit by Madoff [Bender's Immigration Bulletin]