Anna Brower, who served as chief of staff to New York Attorney General Letitia James, now presides over a liberal nonprofit that is helping bankroll a nationwide network of anti-ICE trainings — some of which have instructed participants to physically obstruct federal immigration officers.
The New York Post reported that Brower left James' office last September. She landed as president of the Hopewell Fund, a so-called "dark money" nonprofit that doled out more than $91 million in grants in 2024 for causes related to civil rights, social action, and advocacy.
The Hopewell Fund is now helping administer funding for an organization called States at the Core, which has trained more than 12,000 people in "ICE Watch" seminars since President Trump's second inauguration.
The pipeline runs from blue-state attorney general offices through nonprofit intermediaries to street-level obstruction of federal law. And the money trail is raising serious questions on Capitol Hill.
States at the Core was founded in November 2024 — weeks after Trump's election victory — and operates through a web of nonprofit fiscal sponsors. NEO Philanthropy received a $185,000 grant for program support related to States at the Core in 2024.
The Hopewell Fund itself took $2.8 million from the Switzerland-based Oak Foundation, a detail disclosed by Americans for Public Trust during a House Ways and Means hearing last week focused on foreign funding of U.S. nonprofits.
Foundations backed by liberal billionaire George Soros have also contributed millions of dollars to Hopewell in the past. The Trump Justice Department last year launched criminal probes of entities like Soros' Open Society Foundations.
How much funding Hopewell has specifically directed toward States at the Core remains unclear. That opacity is the point. These nonprofits are structured to obscure the flow of money from donors to activists on the ground — the kind of arrangement that would draw wall-to-wall media scrutiny if it existed on the right.
The Hopewell Fund's stated position sounds reasonable enough. Brower told The Post:
"Upholding human dignity and safety is central to our mission, and we actively discourage individuals from disrupting or interfering with law enforcement activity."
The training materials tell a different story.
A June 2025 handout from Protect Rogers Park — a Chicago-based group founded during the first Trump administration to "resist" immigration enforcement — instructed participants to "slow" immigration officers and form a "blockade" when five or more ICE Watchers are present. The materials characterize federal immigration arrests as "kidnappings" and "abductions" and instruct participants to surround the person being detained.
An October slide deck from a training co-hosted by States at the Core and Protect Rogers Park told participants to collect identifiable information from ICE agents. Another slide offered this carefully worded guidance:
"If law enforcement continues to tell you to get back, continue to take one step back while repeating this. You have the right to observe as long as you are not interfering with law enforcement activity. Turn your camera to the ground to document yourself moving back."
Read that again. The instruction is to keep advancing on officers while technically complying with orders one step at a time. It's obstruction dressed up as observation.
Perhaps most telling was this admission from another slide deck:
"We are not lawyers. We rely on the collective knowledge of our community to provide guidance in training for ICE Watch."
Not lawyers — but happy to train thousands of people on how to confront armed federal officers during enforcement operations. One of the leaders of Protect Rogers Park, Jill Garvey, also serves as co-director of States at the Core, binding the street-level obstruction groups directly to the nonprofit infrastructure above them.
The consequences of this kind of training aren't theoretical. Last month in Minneapolis, two members of ICE Watch groups — Renee Good, 37, and Alex Pretti, 37 — were fatally shot during encounters with federal immigration officers.
Good was asked to exit her vehicle before accelerating it in the direction of an ICE officer, who opened fire. Pretti, an ICU nurse, was carrying a loaded Sig Sauer pistol. A preliminary Department of Homeland Security review found there was "a struggle" after Pretti "resisted" officers and ignored "several verbal requests" to move out of a street during an enforcement operation.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem characterized their actions as domestic terrorism. Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, was dispatched to Minneapolis to quell the unrest that followed and meet with local and state officials. He ultimately authorized the withdrawal of hundreds of agents from the Twin Cities last week.
These deaths are a tragedy — full stop. Two people are dead, and their families are grieving. But the question that demands an answer is not why federal officers enforced the law. It's who convinced these civilians they should physically interpose themselves between armed agents and their targets in the first place.
When you train 12,000 people to form blockades, slow officers, and surround detainees — then disclaim legal responsibility because you're "not lawyers" — you have built a machine designed to produce exactly this kind of confrontation.
Rather than reckon with the consequences of anti-ICE mobilization, Democratic officials doubled down. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey rejected that ICE agents were lawfully arresting and removing criminal illegal immigrants. And Letitia James — Brower's former boss — launched her own "Legal Observation Project" to monitor federal immigration enforcement in New York. James framed it this way:
"We have seen in Minnesota how quickly and tragically federal operations can escalate in the absence of transparency and accountability. My office is launching the Legal Observation Project to examine federal enforcement activity in New York and whether it remains within the bounds of the law."
Notice the construction. Federal operations "escalate" — as though the officers created the confrontation rather than the trained activists who physically blocked them. The attorney general whose former chief of staff now runs money through the nonprofit funding these trainings is launching a project to investigate the officers those trainees confronted.
The circle is seamless:
Every step feeds the next. Accountability never touches the people who built the infrastructure.
APT executive director Caitlin Sutherland cut to the legal core of the matter:
"The IRS has made clear that nonprofits cannot fund illegal acts, and that specifically includes deliberately blocking traffic and disrupting government work."
She added:
"Every American has the right to peacefully protest, but it does not include the right to prevent government officials from doing their jobs."
This is the distinction the Hopewell Fund and its allies are desperate to blur. Observation is legal. Blockading federal officers is not. Training people to form human barriers around detainees is not peaceful protest — it is organized interference with law enforcement, and the organizations funding it are doing so with tax-exempt dollars, some of it flowing from foreign foundations.
The House Ways and Means Committee is already looking at the foreign money pipeline. The IRS has clear rules about what nonprofits can and cannot fund. The question now is whether anyone will enforce them — or whether the nonprofit industrial complex will continue to operate as though its tax-exempt status is a birthright rather than a privilege conditioned on lawful conduct.
Anna Brower's career arc tells its own story. She didn't leave government service and retreat to private life. She moved from the office of one of the most politically aggressive attorneys general in the country directly into the presidency of a nonprofit that funnels tens of millions to left-wing causes — including the anti-ICE training apparatus now linked to fatal confrontations with federal officers.
The revolving door between Democratic state offices and the progressive nonprofit world isn't new. But the stakes have changed. People are dying in the streets because they were trained to believe that physically blocking federal law enforcement is righteous civic engagement.
The organizations that trained them disclaim legal expertise. The nonprofits that funded the training disclaim any connection to obstruction. The politicians whose offices produced the nonprofit leaders disclaim responsibility for the violence.
No one built the machine. No one funded the machine. No one trained the people the machine sent into the street. And yet the machine keeps running.
