How Leftist Politicians Used “Pandemic” Emergency Dollars to Build a Legal Defense Machine for Illegal Immigrants
Oregon's unique public immigration defense fund was paid for by COVID money.
In the spring of 2020, Oregon legislators were in an emergency session. It was an emergency that they themselves created. They shuttered businesses, killed livelihoods and drove hundreds of thousands of workers into the unemployment lines—and now, while ordinary Oregonians scrambled to survive, a coalition of immigration activist groups sat ready and waiting with a proposal years in the making. They hadn't been caught off guard by the crisis. They had been waiting for one.
They made a sympathetic pitch, in light of the austere conditions of the lockdowns: “Undocumented” immigrants had been locked out of any pandemic relief. No stimulus checks. No unemployment insurance. They were “essential” workers—farmworkers, food processors, meatpackers—and they were suffering. On April 23, 2020, Oregon’s Legislature appropriated $10 million of state funds to launch the Oregon Worker Relief Fund. By June, another $20 million of state taxpayer funds followed. Within a year, over $100 million in combined state, federal, and private money—every dollar of it distributed right here in Oregon—flowed through a network of more than 100 activist nonprofits.
But that’s not the story. The story is what they laid the groundwork for.
Hiding in Plain Sight
Tucked inside the Oregon Worker Relief program, from nearly the beginning, was a third category of service that had nothing to do with pandemic wages: immigration legal defense for people in the country illegally. The City of Portland’s own website, explaining how it bankrolled its American Rescue Plan funds, lists the three Oregon Worker Relief programs it funded: Household Relief, Small Business support, and—right alongside them—“Legal Defense,” described as providing legal assistance to people in the immigration system to “avoid or mitigate outcomes that will disrupt or destabilize families.” Families, in this context, meant households where at least one member is in the country illegally and facing deportation.
The website proudly proclaims:
Now is the moment to invest in and reimagine a city that is thriving and prosperous and centers underserved communities, especially Black and Indigenous people, people of color, Portlanders with disabilities, immigrants, refugees and undocumented Portlanders. Our actions today can help Portland emerge as a more equitable, vibrant and sustainable city.
The City of Portland committed $5.5 million in federal American Rescue Plan dollars—money collected from taxpayers in all fifty states—to Oregon Worker Relief programs. This is typical of Oregon, a state with a long history of misusing federal funds for its own political agenda. Oregon rerouted federal COVID stimulus money, passed by Congress to help Americans recover from a pandemic, to fund immigration deportation defense. Oregon Worker Relief’s own materials frame it plainly: the threat of deportation constituted a “pandemic harm,” and fighting it was therefore a legitimate use of emergency public health spending.
That framing was the key. During an emergency—real or manufactured—it is politically costly to ask hard questions. Who wants to be the legislator who voted against helping sick farmworkers? Nobody. So the legal defense component rode in on the coattails of pandemic relief money.
Ordinary Oregonians had no idea.
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste
Oregon Worker Relief didn’t exist before COVID. A coalition created it in March 2020—Causa Oregon, PCUN (Oregon’s farmworker union), the Latino Network, and Portland-based Innovation Law Lab launched it together. From day one, activist groups controlled the money, distributing state funds through a network of nonprofits rather than any government agency. That structure was not accidental. It meant no meaningful oversight or accountability, and no easy way for legislators or taxpayers to ask hard questions about where the money actually went.
While the pandemic gave politicians cover to do what they had always wanted to do anyway, the network wasted no time hardwiring its legal defense agenda into permanent state infrastructure. Oregon's radical left had spent two years using COVID as a battering ram against policies and norms the public never would have accepted otherwise. In June 2021—still technically the pandemic period—Oregon’s Legislature handed another $2 million to the Equity Corps of Oregon (ECO), the state’s taxpayer-funded immigration legal defense program. Portland added more federal American Rescue Plan dollars on top of that. With each funding cycle, what started as emergency spending looked more and more like a permanent institution—because that was always the point.
Then, on March 23, 2022, Oregon enacted Senate Bill 1543. With the governor's signature, the COVID emergency money that seeded this operation became permanent law—the Universal Representation Fund, the only statewide taxpayer-funded universal immigration legal defense program in the United States. The Legislature then handed control of those funds to Oregon Worker Relief, the same organization they created to distribute pandemic emergency cash two years earlier. And the clearinghouse contract—the operational heart of the entire program—went to Innovation Law Lab, the Portland activist organization that helped build the COVID coalition in 2020. Oregon’s Attorney General credits Innovation Law Lab by name on the state’s official immigration resources page with writing both Oregon’s sanctuary law and the universal representation program itself.
The same group that lobbied the law into existence got paid to run it.
Follow the money.
- April 2020: $10 million COVID emergency appropriation.
- June 2020: $20 million more.
- 2021: $46 million additional, plus Portland’s $5.5 million in federal American Rescue Plan funds—including for legal defense.
- March 2022: SB 1543 passes; first-cycle appropriation of $15 million from Oregon’s General Fund. The emergency became a statute. The statute is now seeking another $10 million, with HB 4117 pending before the Legislature at the time of writing.
From emergency spending to permanent and immovable institution.
1-800-COVID-Bucks
The state-paid, toll-free phone number undocumented workers called to get pandemic cash in 2020—1-888-274-7292—is the same number listed on Oregon’s Attorney General’s official immigration resources page today.
The organizations that handed out emergency checks to farm workers five years ago now run a permanent state program sending attorneys into federal immigration court to fight deportation orders on behalf of people in this country illegally.
Same number. Completely different mission. Now owned and operated by the State of Oregon.
This is not an accident. This is how activist organizations and sympathetic government officials work hand in hand—building the infrastructure for policies the public never voted for and locking them into law without accountability. In Oregon, that is exactly how it is supposed to work.
Most Oregon taxpayers were too busy trying to survive to notice what was happening. They thought they were helping sick farmworkers. They ended up funding the only statewide anti-deportation legal army in America—built piece by piece by the open borders crowd, and paid for by the taxpayers.
This was always the plan. The crisis was just the opportunity they had been waiting for.
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CODDLING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS: Oregon Taxpayers Are Funding a Legal Army to Fight Federal Immigration Enforcement
GOOD NEWS ON IMMIGRATION: Net Migration to U.S. Cities is Down, and That Means Less Crime
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