Since Gavin Newsom took office as California's governor, the state has funneled more than $1 billion in contracts and grants to nonprofit organizations that provide services to illegal immigrants, a spending spree that coincided with an estimated 400,000 new illegal arrivals and helped finance groups now under federal investigation for their role in anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles.
That picture emerges from a Breitbart News analysis drawing on data from the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal investigation by Christopher Rufe. The numbers tell a story of a state government that didn't just tolerate illegal immigration, it built an infrastructure to sustain it, with taxpayer money.
The contracts are large, the recipients are politically connected, and the consequences are now spilling into the streets of Los Angeles and the hearing rooms of the U.S. Senate.
Christopher Rufe's City Journal article, titled "How Gavin Newsom Subsidized the Migrant Invasion," lays out the grant recipients by name and dollar amount. Catholic Charities received more than $250 million. Jewish Family Services took in $85 million. Centro Legal de la Raza got $12 million. The Immigration Institute of the Bay Area collected $23 million. And the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles, better known as CHIRLA, received roughly $110 million.
That last figure matters most right now. CHIRLA isn't just a social-services provider. Rufe described the group as "a one-stop activist machine, with the ability to produce propaganda, engage in legal action, and, most importantly, get people into the streets."
The organization coordinates the L.A. Rapid Response Network, which tracks ICE raids and, in Rufe's words, takes "direct action to shut down detention centers." At the height of recent anti-ICE unrest in Los Angeles, CHIRLA's executive director, Angelica Salas, spoke at a street protest and told crowds that ICE agents were conducting a "militarized siege" against illegal immigrants.
Salas didn't stop there. She declared:
"We are going to stop Trump's terror campaign against our community. We will not stop marching. We will not stop fighting."
That kind of rhetoric, backed by tens of millions in state funds, has drawn federal scrutiny.
Sen. Josh Hawley announced an investigation into CHIRLA over its alleged role in financially or materially supporting the coordinated Los Angeles protests. Hawley, who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, sent the group a letter directing it to preserve communications, financial records, and grant applications related to the demonstrations.
Just The News reported that the FBI is also probing the money trail behind those organizing and promoting the protests. Hawley wrote to CHIRLA that "credible reporting now suggests that your organization has provided logistical support and financial resources to individuals engaged in these disruptive actions."
The financial picture makes the investigation unavoidable. CHIRLA's own fiscal-year 2023 records show the group received $33,966,572 in government contract revenue. Of that total, $32,526,542, 96 percent, came from the State of California for immigration-related services.
Newsom's California didn't just fund a charity. It bankrolled an organization that openly coordinates resistance to federal immigration enforcement, and that organization is now under investigation for its possible role in violent street protests.
Hawley put it bluntly: "Who is funding the LA riots? This violence isn't spontaneous." Fox News reported that IRS records show CHIRLA also received $34 million in government grants, including three grants totaling $750,000 during the Biden administration.
President Trump described the protesters as "professional agitators" and "insurrectionists" who "should be in jail." Whatever one makes of that characterization, the financial links between California's state government and the groups at the center of the unrest are documented.
The migrant-services spending is not an isolated line item in Newsom's record. It fits a broader pattern of ambitious programs that consume enormous sums while producing questionable results. Consider that Newsom's $236 million mental health program reportedly aided just 22 individuals, a ratio that would embarrass any private-sector manager.
The governor has also faced criticism for his frequent absences from the state. Travel records showed 229 days spent outside California since 2023, raising questions about who is minding the store while billions flow out the door to activist nonprofits.
Meanwhile, the City Journal investigation traced the human cost of the migration surge that California's spending helped sustain. A March report from Mission Local profiled a man named Carmelo, 43, who works at a neighborhood grocery store on 16th Street in San Francisco. He looked for a place to live for almost six months after arriving in the United States three years ago. He now shares an apartment with three others and pays $2,950 in total rent.
"Here we are. There isn't another option," Carmelo told the outlet.
Mission Local also reported that during the pandemic, one immigrant family from El Salvador lived with 15 people in a two-bedroom unit in San Francisco's Excelsior neighborhood. These are the living conditions that California's billion-dollar migration pipeline produces, not for the nonprofits collecting the checks, but for the people those nonprofits claim to serve.
The Breitbart analysis, drawing on the City Journal investigation, argued that California's Democratic leadership has a political motive for sustaining the flow. Low-wage migrants become customers for state education and welfare agencies. Over time, once naturalized, they become Democratic voters. The cycle feeds itself: more arrivals mean more demand for services, which means more contracts for advocacy groups, which means more political mobilization.
Rufe's conclusion was blunt. He wrote that "the 2 million illegal migrants in California are pawns, merely the instruments of an activist class." The New York Post published a companion piece noting that California recorded more than 400,000 illegal immigrants between 2021 and 2023, during which time the state funded transportation, shelter, social services, and legal protection for migrants.
Federal funding played a role, too. The Breitbart report noted that money was directed by then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas under President Biden. But the overwhelming share of CHIRLA's government revenue, 96 percent, came from Sacramento, not Washington.
One of the legal-aid attorneys funded through California's network made the quiet part loud. Al Otro Lado litigating attorney Diego Teixeira said in an Instagram video, as quoted by the New York Post: "I honestly just believe that there's no reason for why we should have borders."
That's the philosophy California taxpayers have been underwriting. Not a managed immigration system. Not a legal process. A belief that borders themselves are illegitimate, funded at public expense.
The open questions here are significant. What specific California agencies issued these contracts? When were they awarded? What oversight, if any, accompanied grants totaling hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations that openly coordinate against federal law enforcement?
Newsom has shown little interest in answering. His public posture during the L.A. unrest was combative, not toward the protesters, but toward the Trump administration. That combative streak is nothing new for the governor, who has a documented history of lashing out when pressed on uncomfortable subjects.
The contrast between state and federal approaches could not be sharper. A January 23 report from RestaurantBusinessOnline.com, citing Oxford Economics, noted that wages in the restaurant industry are projected to rise 3.7 percent this year and 5.6 percent by 2027, a trend linked in part to reduced illegal immigration under the current administration's enforcement posture.
That's the trade-off California's leadership has refused to acknowledge. Every dollar spent importing and sustaining a low-wage labor supply is a dollar that works against the earning power of legal residents, many of them immigrants who came the right way.
Hawley's investigation, the FBI's reported probe, and the documented grant figures have now placed this spending under a spotlight that Newsom cannot wave away with press conferences. The numbers are in the public record. The contracts have names on them. The street protests have faces, and funders.
A governor who bristles at tough questions is about to face a lot more of them.
When a state government spends a billion dollars building a pipeline that undermines federal law, shelters activist groups now under investigation, and depresses wages for the people already here, the word for that isn't compassion. It's a racket.
