A viral Facebook fundraiser has generated more than $20 million for immigration nonprofit RAICES

One night earlier this month — amid nationwide outrage over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which has forced more than 2,500 migrant children to be separated from their parents at the border — Hixon received an unexpected email from a married couple in the Bay Area, Dave and Charlotte Willner. A Facebook page the Willners had started just a few hours earlier to raise money for RAICES was taking off faster than expected as people across the country reacted with horror to photographs and news stories documenting family separations. With any luck, the couple predicted, the campaign might even break a million dollars. Over the next week and a half, the Facebook page quickly transformed from a promising online fundraiser into a viral phenomenon, generating around $20.5 million, three times RAICES’ annual budget and more than 40 times what the nonprofit raised in the entirety of 2017. The fundraiser has drawn support from celebrities like Jimmy Fallon, who made a donation to RAICES this week in Donald Trump’s name. “You could just sit there and watch the total change. It was incredible,” Hixon said. “At one point, I copied the number from the website and put it into a Word document to add commas. I really thought I was not reading the number correctly.”

Read more at The Texas Tribune.