February Update from the CEO

There is a particular cruelty to watching history repeat itself while being told it is necessary, lawful, or inevitable. Across the country right now, Black families are being reminded – again – that belonging in the United States has always been conditional. Haitian and Somali communities are facing intensified ICE targeting in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, Portland and Lewiston, Maine, and Springfield, Ohio – places where Black immigrant families have built lives, economies, and futures, only to have the state move in to surveil, detain, and separate them, and many in the public erase them from the broader immigration justice narrative.

Reproductive justice teaches us that family is not incidental to freedom. It is central. The right to have children, not have children, and to raise families in safe, sustainable communities has always been contested terrain in this country. Unfortunately, the separation of families is not an aberration; it is a throughline.

This month, life has also continued to unfold in ways that remind us what is at stake. Two members of our Groundswell team welcomed new babies into the world: new life, new beginnings, and the quiet insistence of hope. This is in contrast to recent weeks, in which there has been significant attention on the case of Liam, a child who was allowed to leave detention—a small but meaningful win amid an otherwise brutal system. These wins matter. They remind us that the courts do not always rubber-stamp cruelty, and that resistance – legal, cultural, collective – can create cracks in even the most violent systems. At the same time, we know how many families remain separated, how many children remain detained, and how much harm continues unabated as pregnant people miss doctors’ appointments to avoid being kidnapped by ICE.

This tension – naming the full scope of violence without surrendering our capacity for care, survival, and forward motion – is also guiding our grantmaking as we move deeper into 2026.

This month, our Movement Solidarity team is reviewing applications with care and rigor, grounded in our commitments to fortify what must endure, resist what must be stopped, and build the new worlds our communities deserve. We are committed to completing all of our grantmaking by April so that much-needed resources reach the field, and we can spend the rest of the year building with our donor and movement-organizing communities of practice. We know the way forward is to deepen our relationships, analysis, and solidarity with each other.

As we mark the 100th anniversary of Black History Month, we are reminded that while survival itself is a form of resistance, so is joy. We see that joy finds ways to reveal itself: in the laughter of a newborn, in a court ruling that interrupts cruelty, and even in moments of collective celebration. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance – vibrant, culturally rooted, unapologetically alive – lit up millions with dance, unity, and resilience, a reminder that joy is also resistance and an affirmation of belonging.

We are holding all of this as we move forward, grateful for new life, clear-eyed about the harm, and steadfast in solidarity with the movements building futures where freedom is not conditional. Join us.