The Biden administration handed nearly $36 million in taxpayer grants to a group that calls immigration enforcement racist.
That same group just assembled an army of lawyers in Chicago.
What they trained them to do could end careers for every ICE agent who does his job.
Democracy Forward and UnidosUS Launch 100-Lawyer Campaign to Sue ICE Agents
60 organizations sent more than 100 attorneys to Chicago last week to learn a single skill: using the Federal Tort Claims Act to drag ICE and Border Patrol agents into federal court.
The training was organized by Democracy Forward – the litigation group chaired by Marc Elias, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign lawyer and the man behind the phony Russia dossier operation.
Democracy Forward has filed more than 150 lawsuits against the Trump administration since January 2025, plus dozens more in the first six months of 2026.
Elias also served as election lawyer for the Democratic National Committee and it one of the leaders of the Left’s lawfare agenda.
The co-leader of the coalition is UnidosUS – formerly known as the National Council of La Raza – which pulled in $35.9 million in federal grants during the Biden years alone.
The National Immigrant Justice Center, another coalition partner that openly advocates defunding ICE, collected $2.6 million in government grants in 2024 – 32 percent of its total revenue.
That is not a fringe position buried in fine print — the NIJC has publicly called for halting ICE detention operations entirely.
The federal government spent years cutting checks to these organizations — and now ICE is trying to enforce the immigration laws they spent that money fighting.
How the Federal Tort Claims Act Turns Your Tax Dollars Against ICE
The weapon of choice is the Federal Tort Claims Act – a 1946 law that lets individuals sue the federal government for wrongful conduct by its employees.
Individual ICE officers cannot be named as defendants, but every successful claim draws directly from the U.S. Treasury.
Robert Stilson, senior research analyst at the Capital Research Center, separated the legal mechanism from the political machine running it.
"The Federal Tort Claims Act is for individuals wronged by government employees, and it could be legitimate complaints," Stilson told the Daily Signal. "On the other hand, Unidos is clearly politicized. Democracy Forward is clearly politicized."
The coalition's statements make the goal plain.
UnidosUS president Janet Murguía said the effort is specifically designed to combat what she called "mass deportation efforts" – federal law enforcement doing exactly what voters sent Trump to Washington to do.
Democracy Forward president Skye Perryman called the FTCA "an incredibly powerful civil rights accountability tool" and promised a "coordinated network" of attorneys to deploy it.
The infrastructure is already built — litigation toolkits, intake pipelines, a national attorney listserv, and training materials ready to deploy the moment an ICE agent makes a move the coalition decides to challenge.
The Decade of Federal Grants That Built the Coalition Now Targeting ICE
UnidosUS's website states that immigration laws "in this country are often designed to keep Latino immigrants out."
That is the ideology the federal government financed for years.
When Obama brought UnidosUS's former senior policy analyst Cecilia Muñoz into the White House to run domestic policy, federal grants to the group nearly tripled in a single year – a pattern Biden continued, pumping $35.9 million into the organization between 2021 and 2023.
Trump's first term shut it down entirely – zero federal grants from 2018 through 2020.
Biden turned the spigot back on the day he took office.
Now 100 lawyers trained by Marc Elias's organization are ready to bury every ICE agent who makes an arrest in federal paperwork.
Democrats didn't just oppose Trump's border enforcement – they spent a decade financing the army that would fight it.
Sources:
- Fred Lucas, "Taxpayer Dollars Backed Parts of Coalition Suing Over Trump Immigration Enforcement," The Daily Signal, June 20, 2026.
- Robert Stilson, Capital Research Center, quoted in The Daily Signal, June 20, 2026.
- "UnidosUS (formerly National Council of La Raza)," InfluenceWatch, updated 2026.
- "How Marc Elias Group Used States to Ramp-Up Anti-Trump Lawfare," The Daily Signal, August 7, 2025.
