Gavin Newsom just got caught running the biggest political machine scam in modern American history.
Now investigators have traced exactly where $1 billion in California taxpayer dollars went – and who it was always meant to serve.
The answer will make your blood boil.
Newsom Gave $1 Billion in California Taxpayer Money to Anti-ICE Nonprofits
A bombshell City Journal investigation by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo and RealClearPolitics national correspondent Susan Crabtree traced the money – every dollar of it.
California Governor Gavin Newsom funneled approximately $1 billion to a network of nonprofits that spent it encouraging illegal immigration, fighting Trump's deportation orders in court, and leading street protests against ICE.
The contracts aren't small. Catholic Charities alone pulled more than $250 million. Jewish Family Services? $85 million. Centro Legal de la Raza took $12 million, the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area another $23 million – and those are just the ones they'll admit to.
And then there's CHIRLA.
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles pulled down $110 million from Newsom's government. CHIRLA's executive director Angelica Salas took that money and stood at a street protest to tell crowds that ICE agents were conducting a "militarized siege" against illegal migrants.
"We are going to stop Trump's terror campaign against our community," Salas declared. "We will not stop marching. We will not stop fighting."
That's taxpayer money she was spending on a bullhorn to scream at federal law enforcement officers.
How CHIRLA Used Taxpayer Funds to Riot Against ICE and Save Newsom's Recall
When anti-ICE riots broke out in Los Angeles in June 2025 – cars burning, cops assaulted, federal agents attacked – congressional investigators immediately started asking who funded the organizers. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan launched a formal inquiry. Sen. Josh Hawley opened a Senate investigation.
IRS records obtained by Fox News showed CHIRLA received $34 million in government grants in a single fiscal year – a jump from $12 million the prior year. The overwhelming majority of CHIRLA's budget came from California state government.
The same organization tracking ICE raids in real time and sending teams to disrupt federal immigration enforcement was being bankrolled by California taxpayers.
And PJ Media found something even more explosive: CHIRLA funneled $500,000 of its taxpayer-funded budget into a PAC that defended Newsom against his 2021 recall election.
California taxpayers were literally paying to keep Gavin Newsom in power.
His machine is now moving to lock the operation down permanently. A bill sponsored by CHIRLA – AB 2624 – would make it a crime to photograph or identify employees of taxpayer-funded immigration organizations. Taxpayers paid for it but they can't look at it.
California Sanctuary State Democrats Have Run This Political Machine Before
What Newsom built isn't original. It's 150 years old.
New York's Tammany Hall ran the same playbook starting in the 1840s. Waves of Irish immigrants fleeing the famine poured into New York. Tammany bosses provided services, jobs, and social welfare – not out of charity, but to manufacture loyal Democrat voters. It worked for a century.
Newsom is running Tammany Hall with a billion-dollar budget and California's bureaucracy as the patronage machine.
The illegal aliens serve multiple purposes simultaneously. They provide low-wage labor for California's wealthy elite – cheap gardening, manicures, car washes.
Landlords love them because 15 illegal aliens cramming into a two-bedroom apartment keeps rents artificially high for everyone else. Democrat-aligned welfare agencies love them because every new illegal alien means new contracts, new budgets, new headcount.
And eventually – through naturalization, through anchor babies, through decades of deliberate political cultivation – they become Democrat votes.
Rufo's investigation put it in plain language: the 2 million illegal aliens in California are pawns – instruments of an activist class that has no interest in assimilation, only in replacing the country they walked into.
Trump Is Defunding Newsom's Illegal Immigrant Nonprofit Machine
Trump is already dismantling it.
The administration terminated DHS grants to CHIRLA and clawed back $101,000 in unobligated funds. ICE operations in California are accelerating. Rufo's investigation is now driving active congressional inquiries – the kind that end careers and dissolve funding streams.
Tammany Hall fell when New Yorkers finally decided enough was enough. A reform mayor named Fiorello LaGuardia won in 1934, cut off the patronage, and the machine died within a decade.
California's machine has the same vulnerability. Cut the money and the whole apparatus collapses – the nonprofits, the protest organizers, the legal fighters, the recall defenders. Every last one of them depends on Newsom keeping the spigot open.
Trump is turning it off. Rufo just showed America exactly where the pipes run.
Sources:
- Christopher F. Rufo and Susan Crabtree, "How Gavin Newsom Subsidized the Migrant Invasion," City Journal, April 22, 2026.
- Neil Munro, "Report: Gov. Newsom Spent $1 Billion to Import 400,000 Extra Illegal Migrants," Breitbart, April 22, 2026.
- House Judiciary Committee Republicans, "Jordan, McClintock, and Biggs Open Inquiry into Activist Groups Funding LA Riots with Taxpayer Grants," June 24, 2025.
- Victoria Taft, "Investigation Finds What Looks Suspiciously Like Anti-ICE Group to Newsom Money Laundering Op," PJ Media, February 21, 2026.
- Jen Van Laar, "NGO Tied to LA Anti-ICE Riots Sponsored CA Bill Known As Stop Nick Shirley Act," RedState, April 21, 2026.
- Louis Casiano, "Anti-ICE Riot Funding Investigated After Numerous High Budget Requests for Paid Agitators Reported," Fox News, June 12, 2025.