Two left-wing nonprofits spearheading protests against President Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C., crime crackdown have received millions of dollars from liberal megadonor George Soros, according to a new report.
Community Change and Community Change Action—the two progressive nonprofits that have funded anti-Trump “Free DC” protests this week—received $12.6 million from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the New York Post reported Tuesday based on an analysis by watchdog group Americans for Public Trust. They have also received $5.6 million from Arabella Advisors and $1.9 million from the Tides Foundation between 2020 and 2023.
Soros has long faced scrutiny for donating to liberal causes through the Open Society Foundations, including more than $40 million to elect scores of soft-on-crime prosecutors in half of America’s largest jurisdictions, many of which are now roiled by crime. In Baltimore, violent crime rates started to plummet shortly after the city’s Soros-backed prosecutor was ousted in 2022.
The Arabella and Tides networks are also no strangers to controversy. The Tides Foundation, for example, bankrolled the fiscal sponsor of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, an anti-Semitic group sanctioned in the United States for providing financial support to terrorists, the Washington Free Beacon reported last year. And Arabella Advisors funds a network of nonprofit organizations that funnels money from its billionaire benefactors into progressive lobbying, activism, and elections.
“It is ironic that a protest to ostensibly ‘Free DC’ was hosted by Community Change, a group funded by massive amounts of outside dark money to push a pro-crime agenda,” Americans for Public Trust executive director Caitlin Sutherland told the Post in a statement.
“D.C. is facing shootings, carjackings, and assaults, and yet progressive groups like the Pritzker Foundation, George Soros, and the Arabella Network all spend millions of dollars to manufacture protests that weaken our communities,” Sutherland added.
Trump on Monday announced that he is deploying the National Guard to D.C. and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under federal control to “reestablish law, order, and public safety” in the nation’s capital. While crime in the district has fallen since last year, when the city council reversed its stance on criminal justice reform and passed a tough-on-crime bill, the district has long struggled with high rates of violent crime and saw spikes as recently as 2023, with homicides up 35 percent, robberies up 67 percent, and carjackings up 82 percent that year.
Trump said the Monday actions will “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor,” declaring, “This is Liberation Day in D.C. And we’re going to take our capital back.”
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