Courtesy Santa Fe Dreamers Project
Santa Fe Dreamers Project staff in November 2019.
The Santa Fe Dreamers Project has work to do.
The well-known local nonprofit is in its seventh year providing free legal services to immigrants, and demand is spiking as the Biden administration and Congress flail and federal judges play ping-pong with the nation’s immigration laws.
Meanwhile, the Dreamers Project is struggling to raise money. Donations, which make up a substantial portion of the nonprofit’s bottom line, are down 68% this year, and a community fundraiser has yet to pay off during the couple of months it’s been ongoing.
Michael Santillanes, interim executive director for the Dreamers Project, has a pretty good idea as to why.
“There is a prevalent belief that now that Trump is out of office, everything is OK for undocumented immigrants, that somehow their situation has been magically fixed, but that’s absolutely not the case,” Santillanes tells SFR. “We’ve seen a rise in demand for services coupled with a drop in donations.”
New applications to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program (DACA), which was established by the Obama administration and allowed undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children to apply for work permits, were keeping the Dreamers Project’s pared-back staff busy until last month, Santillanes says. The Trump administration closed DACA to new applicants in 2017 and tried unsuccessfully to dismantle the program, but a federal court order temporarily reopened it late last year.
From December 2020 to June, there were more than 81,000 first-time applications pending approval. Then in July, a federal judge in Texas ruled DACA is unlawful and ordered the Biden administration to stop approving applications.
With new DACA applications off the table for now, the Dreamers Project is working largely on DACA renewals and on family-based green card services—Santillanes says the group is the only organization in the state that offers this particular service at no cost.
The waiting list is growing.
As donations declined—also attributable to financial hardships brought on by the pandemic, according to Santillanes—and demand for services increased, the Dreamers Project had to decrease staff and stop taking new cases over the summer. Workers were able to resume full operations this month after getting grant funding from several national and local foundations.
The grant funding will allow the organization to continue to operate at full capacity for at least the next few months, but the sooner donations come in, “the more secure and stable the organization will be in the long-term,” Santillanes says.
The Dreamers Project’s fundraising goal is $75,000. So far, it has raised a little less than $8,000.
Since the nonprofit’s founding in 2014, individual donations have made up about 40% of its annual budget. In 2019, the Dreamers Project raised a total of about $856,000, with donations coming in at roughly $349,000, according to an annual report. Last fiscal year, individual donations were under $200,000.
On top of fundraising, finding a new director after founder and well-respected Santa Fe immigration lawyer Allegra Love’s departure last summer has been another hurdle. Santillanes has been interim executive director off and on since July 2020. He briefly stepped down after a director was hired in March, but he came back into the role in May after that person “ended up not working out.”
“It’s been a challenge finding someone and filling her [Love’s] shoes,” Santillanes says. “It’s definitely been a process, but we’re hopeful to find the right person.”
Under Trump, the Dreamers Project was working in a state of crisis, Santillanes says. Now, the focus is on building a sustainable community organization that will endure for years to come.
“Families are still being separated, folks are still living in fear of detention and deportation,” Santillanes says. “We do rely on our community support, and we hope that if folks have the ability to give that they remember the importance of our work, in the past, in the present and the future.”
