Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff cut checks to a progressive legal group that pushed to defund the police and make Washington, D.C., a permanent “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants, documents show.
Legal Aid DC, a nonprofit organization in the district that works on housing law and represents low-income clients in other areas, received a $1,000 donation from Harris and Emhoff in 2023, according to a copy of their joint tax return. In 2021, the couple also directed $1,000 to Legal Aid DC, a Washington Examiner review of financial disclosures found.
News of the donations, which have not been reported on until now, comes as Harris faces scrutiny on the 2024 campaign trail over her support in 2020 for defunding the police and her handling of the border crisis. Harris has reversed course on a variety of her left-wing policy positions after becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. But the vice president’s willingness to fund Legal Aid DC as recently as 2023 could raise questions about her ties to controversial progressive activists — including after Harris selected Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), who has been widely criticized over his response to the 2020 riots in Minnesota, as her running mate.
Formed in 1932, Legal Aid DC calls itself “the district’s oldest and largest civil legal services organization” helping to “make justice real in individual and systemic ways.” In 2020, as riots shook cities across the United States in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Legal Aid DC published a statement on its website by project coordinator Adam Jacobs noting that it “stands in solidarity with those speaking out, demonstrating, and demanding a country and society that will treat every one of its residents with dignity and respect.”
Days later, in June 2020, the left-wing group’s housing law attorney Amanda Korber was quoted in a story pressing for fewer police officers in the district. Legal Aid DC shared the article on social media, writing, “As Legal Aid’s Amanda Korber noted in the article, we are concerned, especially given the ongoing protest movement, about any solution that involves more police and policing in DC public housing. #BlackLivesMatterDC.”
Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, helped lead the unsuccessful charge in 2020 to “dismantle” the Minneapolis Police Department.
Meanwhile, Legal Aid DC also supported a since-approved law in the district to make it a “permanent” sanctuary city. The legislation restricted cooperation between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local agencies. Jacobs, Legal Aid DC’s project coordinator, said at the time that the law “could lift some of the terror our immigrant neighbors and their families have faced for many years.”
“It also restricts the city’s prisons from functioning as immigration detention centers and amends a loophole used by ICE and the U.S. Marshals to detain immigrants outside of D.C. Superior Court,” NBC4 Washington reported in 2020 upon the City Council approving a permanent version of the then-temporary law.
To Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the U.S. “has seen the consequences of sanctuary policies play out over and over again.” Harris, who has defended such policies in the past, was tapped by President Joe Biden in 2021 to address the “root causes” of migration at the southern border. But Republicans argue it’s apparent the Biden-Harris administration is failing to address the border crisis, with the Trump campaign releasing an ad in late June holding Harris responsible for fentanyl-related deaths and border crossings.
“They simply do not want our immigration laws enforced and they’re prepared to let criminals walk rather than turning them over to ICE to be removed,” Mehlman said. “It should be a matter of routine that a local jurisdiction will comply with ICE.”
Walz, Harris’s running mate, has supported “sanctuary state” policies in the past and also a law allowing illegal immigrants to get a driver’s license, the Republican National Committee sought to highlight Tuesday.
In 2023, the same year Harris and Emhoff gave $1,000 to Legal Aid DC, the organization submitted testimony in support of a bill to “create a reparations task force and fund to address the impacts of slavery and institutional racism in Washington, D.C.,” documents show. Legal Aid DC’s policy counsel, Jen Jenkins, told the City Council it’s essential for the district “to acknowledge that slavery, colonialism, and systemic racism have left deep scars in D.C. and to begin rectifying those impacts for black D.C. residents through enacting this bill.”
The D.C. Council approved funding in 2024 for a reparations commission for black residents in the district, the Washington Post reported. Republicans have long opposed reparations, holding they are both discriminatory and based on the false idea of systemic racism — while also penalizing non-black people who neither owned slaves, nor, necessarily, had ancestors who did.
“The actions called for in these proposals,” said director Gene Hamilton of America First Legal, a group of former Trump administration officials, “are unconstitutional.”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates defended Harris’s donations in a statement to the Washington Examiner, noting that Legal Aid DC “helps clients who are suffering from domestic violence.”
Bates pointed to donations Legal Aid DC received from Kirkland & Ellis and Jones Day, two of the largest law firms in the world, and claimed they are “conservative.” Kirkland & Ellis and Jones Day employees donate to both Democrats and Republicans, Federal Election Commission records show.
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One top donor to Legal Aid DC in 2023 was notably Eric Holder’s law firm, Covington & Burling, according to Legal Aid DC’s annual report. Holder, the former attorney general under President Barack Obama, oversaw Harris’s vetting process for 2024 running mates.
Legal Aid DC did not return a request for comment.
