Our goals focus on minimizing barriers to economic security and opportunity that low-income immigrants face on a daily basis, and on creating opportunities for their families that serve as pathways out of poverty. We seek to: expand low-income immigrants' access to health care and safety net programs, as well as education and training opportunities; defend and advance workers' rights; and promote immigration policies that minimize integration barriers for immigrants and make it possible for them to fulfill their full potential. Our approach to addressing issues low-income immigrants face is holistic. For example, we examine not only how immigration enforcement policies undermine civil rights and promote discrimination, but also how they affect immigrants' access to healthcare, basic services, and education. Policymakers and advocates alike value our ability to view immigrants' rights issues from this wide-ranging vantage point. Given the depth and complexity of the challenges the country faces, we're developing short, mid-, and long-term strategies to respond to the needs of the low-income immigrant communities we serve. While working to address immediate challenges given harsh detention and deportation policies already underway, we're also trying to anticipate other potential policy changes so that we can proactively develop comprehensive litigation, advocacy, and communications plans to challenge them or minimize their harm. We're currently focusing on: educating policymakers on the need to advance a permanent policy solution for immigrant youth; ensuring that federal courts strike down the Muslim ban and related policies; fighting efforts to strip low-income immigrants' access to critical healthcare, safety net, and economic security programs; and building the capacity of state and local advocates to proactively promote pro-immigrant policies.

A distinctive feature of our work that sets us apart from other national, legal advocacy groups is our use of a core set of multiple, integrated strategies to advance NILC's mission: litigation, advocacy, and strategic communications. Our work is rooted in our core values of partnership and shared leadership with directly affected communities. We're committed to using our legal and policy expertise to help build community power so immigrants can directly bring about social change that improves their lives. Our communications efforts are geared not only on shaping public debate on immigration issues, but also on ensuring that directly impacted individuals play a protagonist role in this narrative change. Advocates have reported that, beyond our legal and policy analysis, we provide them with tools they need—legal counsel, trainings, educational materials, and messaging advice—to shape their own advocacy efforts.

We're uniquely equipped to play a leadership role in minimizing barriers low-income immigrants in the U. S. face. Our mission, focused exclusively on low-income immigrants, sits at the intersection of race, citizenship, and class, all of which are at the core of issues currently affecting the country. Our use of multiple, integrated strategies—litigation, policy analysis/advocacy, and strategic communications—distinguishes our work from that of other legal advocacy organizations. Over the last several years, we've become a leader within the immigrants' rights movement, playing a central role in shaping agenda-setting litigation and progressive policies that expand opportunities for low-income immigrant families. We've also played an increasingly-important role in shaping effective messaging and communications strategies on immigration issues, and helped build other advocacy groups' capacity to do the same.

Given punitive initiatives underway that threaten the economic well-being, safety, and dignity of low-income immigrant families, we're committed to defending policy gains achieved over the years, and advancing more inclusive and equitable policies. To that end, we'll monitor the number of pro-immigrant policies proposed by policymakers, and track whether government regulations incorporate NILC recommendations. In our litigation, beyond striking down unlawful policies or minimizing their harm, we also seek to raise public awareness that attacks on the rights of low-income immigrants and refugees undermine human and civil rights for everyone in the U. S. To measure our progress, we'll track rulings issued in cases we are co-counseling or supporting, and assess how effective we are in highlighting the voices and perspectives of affected low-income immigrants and refugees in our litigation efforts. We hope to successfully counter continued attempts to reframe immigrants as criminals, terrorists, and “others," but also reshape public debate so that immigrants are perceived as an integral part of our country's prosperity, health, and well-being. We'll monitor whether allied organizations, policymakers, and community leaders use the research and messaging tools we develop, measure response rates for NILC's social media and email communications compared to industry standards, monitor the level of media coverage that echoes NILC's perspectives, and measure whether the stories of directly impacted people we've highlighted in our litigation and advocacy efforts are widely disseminated via traditional and social media outlets.

We deployed a multi-faced strategy to prepare for and respond to the administration's decision to terminate the DACA program. We developed know-your-rights materials, hosted numerous trainings, mobilized allies in defense of DACA, and litigated to defend DACAmented youth targeted by immigration enforcement authorities. We're currently co-leading a campaign to highlight the termination of DACA as costly and inhumane, and promote the need for policy solutions that protect immigrant youth from deportation without resulting in harms to other immigrant community members. We've been co-counseling litigation challenging the Muslim ban. While the government has tried to circumvent court challenges by continually making minor adjustments to the executive order barring people from majority Muslim countries from traveling to the U. S. , our legal arguments have for the most part successfully convinced court judges time and time again that the ban is unconstitutional and discriminatory. Working closely with Muslim, Arab, and South Asian allies, we're also currently co-leading a campaign—leveraging the opportunity provided by the legal challenges—to raise awareness about Islamophobia in the U. S. , and inform a national dialogue about the impact of discriminatory policies beyond the ban on immigrants and other communities of color. In January, news was leaked regarding a draft executive order that would crack down on immigrants' use of a broad range of health, public benefits, and economic support programs and services. Immediately inundated with inquiries from advocates and service providers who told us of immigrants forgoing (in some cases life-saving) basic treatment and services, we developed a toolkit to help health care providers and associations protect themselves and their patients against immigration enforcement actions in their facilities. We're currently co-chairing a multi-sector, multi-strategy campaign designed to ensure that immigrants can continue to obtain the health, nutrition, and safety net services they need to remain healthy and thrive.