Consider the following seemingly unrelated news stories:
- In July, 2015, chaos erupts at the progress NetRoots Nation conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Moderator Jose Antonio Vargas tries to keep order during a forum for 2016 primary candidate Martin O’Malley when Black Lives Matter activist Tia Oso storms the stage. The planned talk with Bernie Sanders is also scuttled by Black Lives Matter protestors.
- This week in the United Kingdom, a group called “Hope Not Hate” releases a report that attacks the Counter-Jihad movement as “anti-Muslim hate.” The report released by the London-based group mentions Breitbart News four times and goes after writers like Ben Shapiro and Pam Geller and Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert. For years in England, UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage has been berated by the group as they tried to disrupt his events, as shown in this 2013 video.
- Artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez promotes and uses a Butterfly motif as a symbol of “migration”, in an attempt to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration. The symbol becomes a cultural symbol of the movement and appears frequently at pro-illegal immigration protests, on posters at events, T-Shirts and as graffiti.
- A group called the Puente Human Rights Movement wages a years-long campaign against Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio over his enforcement of immigration law, including protests and a lawsuit. When GOP Presidential hopeful Donald Trump does an event in Phoenix in July 2015, Puente organizes a protest against him.
These seemingly unconnected stories — plus numerous other lawsuits, policy proposals and hundreds of more protests and disruptions promoting extremist positions on immigration — have one thing in common : they were all funded by a pair of Hawaiian-based multimillionaire mega-donors.
Meet William Huntington Reeve and Debbie Berger
Few people know the name Bill Reeves or Debbie Berger. Their names didn’t ring a bell to political insiders in Hawaii that Breitbart News spoke to, even though some of them had actually been targeted by groups Reeves funded.
However, Reeves could be described as the George Soros of Hawaii because of the massive funding he’s given to many radical groups pushing a pro-illegal immigration agenda.
Reeves and his wife Debbie Berger are the people behind Unbound Philanthropy, a group that has given tens of millions of dollars to pro-open borders activist groups both in the United States and the United Kingdom. Reeves and Berger are also both major Democrat donors, and they are their group also has connections to the exclusive Punahou School, the elite private school that President Barack Obama attended.
To help understand just a little of the impact of the vast web of funding that Reeves and Berger’s Unbound Philanthropy is responsible for, let’s revisit the four stories we mentioned earlier.
Tia Oso is the woman who helped shutdown events by Hillary Clinton’s rivals — Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley — at Netroots Nation. Oso also works as National Organizer for a group called Black Alliance for Just Immigration or BAJI. The Executive Director of BAJI is Opal Tometi, one of the three co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. William Reeves and Debbie Berger’s Unbound Philanthropy has given $100,000 to BAJI.
Jose Antonio Vargas is the gay illegal-alien journalist and activist who was the moderator at the disrupted Sanders and O’Malley, the person supposedly trying to restore order once the Black Lives Matter activists took over. Vargas also produced a show for MTV called White People and is the founder of a non-profit organization called Define American that “seeks to elevate the conversation around immigration and citizenship in America.” William Reeves and Debbie Berger’s Unbound Philanthropy has given $275,000 to Jose Antonio Vargas’ Define American group. Let’s be crystal clear on that point—both the group that shut down Netroots Nation AND the moderator trying “to keep the peace” are funded by Reeves and Berger. Nobody in the audience knew the referee and the disruptors got paychecks from the same source.
Not present at theNetroots shutdown event was another Black Lives Matter co-founder, Alicia Garza, who works as Director of Special Projects and a spokesperson for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Inc. William Reeves and Debbie Berger’s Unbound Philanthropy has given $155,000 to National Domestic Workers Alliance.
Puente Human Rights Movement is the group who’s spent years protesting Sheriff Joe Arpario and organized Arizona protests against Trump. BLM-cofounder Opal Tometi from BAJI is also board member of Puente. William Reeves and Debbie Berger’s Unbound Philanthropy has given $62,500 to Puente.
As this video shows, joining Puente in the Arizona anti-Trump protests were representatives from MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund in addition to groups La Raza and LULAC.
https://youtu.be/vnYGKZdPWT0
William Reeves and Debbie Berger’s Unbound Philanthropy has given $180,000 to MALDEF.
Just before the Arizona anti-Trump protests, Donald Trump was protested in Los Angeles in an event organized by CHIRLA or Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. William Reeves and Debbie Berger’s Unbound Philanthropy has given $185,000 to CHIRLA.
Favianna Rodriguez, the artist and activist who promotes the Butterfly motif heads two groups; the political group Presente and Culture Strike, an artistic organization. William Reeves and Debbie Berger’s Unbound Philanthropy has given $406,000.00 to Presente and $356,200.00 to CultureStrike.
In the UK, Hope Not Hate has relentlessly attacked the people like Farage and Geller who are exposing the dangers of radical Islam. The group was behind the petition drive that persuaded the Home Office to ban Geller and Robert Spencer from traveling to England. The group, which also does voter registration drives, has had major funding from American William Reeves. William Reeves has given £320,000.00 (around $485,000 U.S. dollars) to Hope Not Hate.
Understanding The Vast, Well-Funded Open Borders Web
Even politically aware Americans have no idea about the size, depth and funding of the movement to promote illegal immigration.
Promoting open borders, illegal immigration is an industry in America, with groups that work in politics, the legal realm, and culture. These groups have a small and growing army of activists ready to take to the streets, hold direct-actions and lobby for legislation.
Conservatives may have heard about the political activism of groups La Raza—which means The Race in Spanish—and that puts them ahead of most Americans who couldn’t name a single pro-illegal immigrant activist group.
However, even most of the those politically minded people aren’t aware of just how deep and connected the web of groups supporting the comprehensive immigration reform agenda really is.
It’s far, far beyond La Raza. (For the record, Unbound does not appear to have provided funding to La Raza.)
Who are these groups, working around-the-clock to open America’s border?
There’s MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens. There’s MTV star and journalist Jose Antonio Vargas’s group Define American. There’s the American Immigration Council, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
There are group that promote the ‘dreamers’—children brought here illegally by their parents—such as United We Dream Network and the Arizona Dream Act Coalition. There are groups that support illegal workers, such as National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
There are regional groups with national impact, like Arizona’s La Puente Human Rights Movement, the Florida Immigration Coalition, the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice and the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance.
There’s NALEO, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, the Migration Policy Institute, and American Civil Liberties Union Foundation. The ACLU in Los Angeles has made immigration issues their primary focus. There’s also the crucially important National Immigration Law Center.
There’s Caring Across Generations, and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, and the National Partnership for New Americans. There’s PICO National Network and the Mi Famila Vota Education Fund. There’s Catholic Legal Immigration Network, and Kids in Need of Defense, and there’s Culture Strike and Race Forward and Presente.org and CASA de Maryland and Woman’s Refugee Commission.
Every single group mentioned here has been given money by William Reeves and Debbie Berger’s Unbound Philanthropy. That’s not even all of groups pushing for immigration reform…and that’s just in the United States.
Many of these groups and the people behind them have an explicitly far-left, often revolutionary socialist or communist agenda that goes beyond immigration reform. These groups are funded by organizations with direct ties to establishment Democrats, like Unbound Philanthropy and, of course, George Soros and his Tides Foundation and their other offshoots. They work together and the staff and executives often bounce between organizations.
Who Are William Reeves and Debbie Berger?
In Part Two of this series, we’ll look into the people behind Unbound Philanthropy and at William Reeves and Debbie Berger.
However, just a glimpse at their short biographies shows that the people funding the far-left pro-illegal immigration groups in both the United States and the U.K. are not ragged revolutionaries living in third world squalor, but are the wealthy elite of the elite; the top 1% of the One Percenters.
These bios are posed from a website called Virtual Globetrotting that claims to show a photo of their Hawaain home.
William H. Reeves is a director and co-founder of BlueCrest Capital Management Based in London, BlueCrest manages investments for a predominantly institutional investor base across 15 diverse funds. Until April 2000, when he left to establish BlueCrest, Mr. Reeves was a Managing Director at J.P. Morgan in London and head of macro strategy and trading within the proprietary trading group. Prior to that, Mr. Reeves was a fund manager at Salomon Brothers Asset Management Limited and at Fisher Francis Trees and Watts, with responsibility for managing leveraged capital. He has also worked for JP Morgan New York where, from 1991 to 1993, he was a Vice President in charge of a team managing the company’s leveraged multi-currency proprietary investment portfolio. Mr. Reeves is a US Trustee of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. He holds an MA in Philosophy from New York University and a BA in English from Yale University. Mr. Reeves was born in Honolulu and raised in Richmond, Virginia.
His wife, Debbie Berger, worked in also worked in finance before going into the non-profit world. They two founded Unbound Philanthropy. Based in New York, the foundation promotes the ideal of self-determination by working to equalize the distribution of opportunities in refugee and immigrant populations worldwide. In 2007 she returned to Hawaii and founded The Learning Coalition or TLC. TLC’s goal is to assist Hawaii’s public schools by building and strengthening a grass roots movement around their transformation into world class institutions of 21st century learning.
Yet, despite their wealth and political activism, Reeves and Berge have managed to fly under the media radar…until now.
In Part Two, we’ll take a deep dive on Reeves, Berge and their political funding empire.
Follow Breitbart News investigative reporter and Citizen Journalism School founder Lee Stranahan on Twitter at @Stranahan.
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