UnidosUS (formerly National Council of La Raza)

UnidosUs, formerly known as the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) or “La Raza,” is a left-of-center Hispanic-advocacy organization. Founded in 1968 as La Raza, the group also comprises of a lobbying and political arm, UnidosUS Action Fund. ¹

UnidosUS has previously advocated for left-of-center immigration policies and giving legal status to illegal immigrants. It supported then-President Barack Obama‘s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) executive maneuvers to grant legal status for migrants. In addition, they supported the “DREAM Act” that would provide legal status to certain migrants. UnidosUS also supported other left-of-center immigration policy proposals at the federal, state, and local levels that offer legal presence and protection to illegal immigrants, especially those from Mexico and Central America. ²

On July 11, 2017, the organizaiton announced it would change its name from La Raza to UnidosUS, claiming the need to expand beyond a Latino ethnic coalition. ²

History

UnidosUS, previously known as the National Council of La Raza (or La Raza), evolved from the National Organization for Mexican American Services (NOMAS), an organization started in the early 1960s to bring many disparate, largely ineffectual Hispanic-interest groups together. NOMAS approached the Ford Foundation, which financed an unprecedented University of California study of Mexican-Americans. ³ The Ford Foundation had been interested in immigration issues since the 1950s and would go on to become one of the primary funders of groups advocating for higher immigration levels. ⁴

Herman Gallegos, Julian Samora, and Ernesto Garza founded the Southwest Council of La Raza in 1968. Seed money was provided by the Ford Foundation, the National Council of Churches, and the United Auto Workers (UAW).In 1972 the organization changed “Southwest” to “National” to reflect its national character and ambitions. ³

Background

UnidosUS works through a nationwide network of 260 independent affiliates broken into six regions: California, Far West, Midwest, Northeast, Southeast and Texas, all overseen by regional “Affiliate Councils.” Many of these affiliates are influential in their own right, which magnifies NCLR’s already considerable influence. ⁵

According to the group’s website, “We partner with Affiliates across the country to serve millions of Latinos in the areas of civic engagement, civil rights and immigration, education, workforce and the economy, health, and housing.”⁶

Advocacy

Immigration

UnidosUS has opposed efforts (most notably California Proposition 187) to prevent state-level public assistance from going to illegal immigrants. In a 2003 NCLR annual conference speech, then-National Council of La Raza president (later U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic under President Barack Obama) Raul Yzaguirre said:

Proposition 187 in California and similar proposals elsewhere were ugly efforts to hurt the Latino community. They were direct and blatant attacks.

But we fought back. We didn’t passively sit back and accept someone else’s fate for us. Maybe we surprised the bigots and the xenophobes. We got angry when they expected us to be meek.⁷

UnidosUS has historically rejected efforts of Republicans to reach out for moderate pro-immigration policy. In 2003, then-President George W. Bush, who attempted to update the immigration system during his administration, was denounced by Yzaguirre, who claimed:

This time they don’t want to make you angry, so their tactics are subtle. But no matter how many nice words and glossy photos they hand us, a knife in the back is deadly even if it’s delivered with a smile.⁷

Similarly, Yzaguirre said of U.S. English, an organization dedicated to making English the official language of the United States, “U.S. English is, to Hispanics [the same] as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks.”⁸

Opposition to First Trump Administration

UnidosUS opposed the immigration policy of the first Trump administration. In 2017, when the Trump administration moved to rescind DACA protections, UnidosUS president Janet Murguía criticized the decision as “unspeakably cruel,” saying President Donald Trump chose “to appease the bigots in his base rather than do what is in the best interests of the country.” ⁹

UnidosUS joined with the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a coalition of 45 of nationwide Latino advocacy organizations, in lobbying Congress for a legislative fix to protect so-called “Dreamers,” and vowed to “continue to fight for Dreamers, their families and all immigrants” despite the administration’s actions. Murguía characterized Trump’s immigration approach as driven by “hate, discrimination and racism,” accusing him of prioritizing the demands of a “racist, anti-immigrant base” over the contributions of immigrant youth. ¹⁰

Black Lives Matter

Despite promoting alarmist rhetoric regarding COVID-19, UnidosUS endorsed and encouraged members to attend Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Janet Murguía and other executives at the organization attended protests. Murguía noted, “In other words, despite concerns about COVID-19, I felt both a sense of outrage and a sense of responsibility to march and to participate…I did not feel unsafe. Virtually everyone was wearing a mask.” ¹¹

Biden Administration

At the onset of the Biden administration, UnidosUS welcomed President Joe Biden’s reversal of many Trump administration policies and actively worked to influence Biden’s agenda on issues affecting Latinos. The group praised Biden’s executive orders loosening immigration enforcement and ending country-specific immigration restrictions, strengthening DACA, and rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement. Janet Murguía, the group’s president noted the “new optimism” of having an administration ostensibly committed to the critical race theory-inspired concept of equity, while stating that “Latino inclusion” had to be a priority in Biden’s first 100 days. ¹²

Murguía also called on Biden to address the COVID-19 pandemic in his first hundred days and “noted that the nation’s 60 million Latinos will be facing multiple crises on Jan. 20, 2021. COVID-19 continues to sicken and kill Latinos at alarming rates, the economic fallout from an uncontained virus still wreaks havoc on the financial security of families and continued incidents of flagrant racial injustice continue to outrage the public and fuel widespread civic unrest.” ¹²

Second Trump Administration

In January 2025, at the beginning of the second Trump administration in 2025, UnidosUS renewed its opposition to President Trump’s policy agenda, particularly on immigration. In a statement responding to Trump’s second inaugural address, the group criticized Trump’s speech and further criticized several of Trump’s executive orders as “strictly punitive measures… designed to inflict pain on the most vulnerable – families, children, and even the sick and injured.” ¹³

In June 2026, it was announced that UnidosUS would be partnering with Democracy Forward (DF) creating a new initiative to “expand the use of the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) as a tool to pursue accountability for federal misconduct, particularly in the context of immigration enforcement and protest-related abuses.” ¹⁴ Other listed partners of the initiative include the Institute for Justice, The Chicago Project, the MacArthur Justice Center, and the National Immigrant Justice Center. ¹⁴

People

Raul Yzaguirre became president of what was then the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) in 1978 and remained in that position for almost 30 years. After his retirement in 2004, he took a posting with Arizona State University. During Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, Raul Yzaguirre served as campaign co-chair and led her Hispanic outreach effort. ¹⁵ In 2010, then-President Barack Obama gave him a political appointment to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, a post he held until 2013. ¹⁶

UnidosUS’s president is Janet Murguía, who took over from Yzaguirre in 2005. She sat on the board of the labor union-backed advocacy group American Rights at Work (most notable for its push for the “Employee Free Choice Act,” a union-organizing bill that would effectively abolish secret ballot union elections), which later merged with the union-funded advocacy group Jobs With Justice. ¹⁷

Murguía previously worked for then-Vice President Al Gore’s Presidential campaign in 2000 and as a deputy director for legislative affairs in the Clinton White House. ¹⁸

Murguía’s twin sister Mary Murguía and brother Carlos Murguía, have both served as federal judges. Mary Murguía is the chief judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as of 2025. ^{19 20}

One of the most influential former NCLR/UnidosUS officials is Cecilia Munoz, who was NCLR’s senior vice president for the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation before accepting a position with the Obama administration. She also sat on the Boards of the Center for Community Change, the Open Society Institute, Atlantic Philanthropies, National Immigration Forum, ²¹ and CASA de Maryland. ²² During the Obama administration, she served first as White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, then as Domestic Policy Council director.  ²³

Munoz later took a position with the public policy organization New America as vice president for policy and technology and director of the New America National Network. ²⁴ In November 2020, then-President-elect Joe Biden added Munoz to his transition team, which led to pro-immigration activists denouncing Munoz over her “role in the mass deportation of immigrants” during the Obama administration. ²³

Funding

UnidosUS receives a significant portion of its funding through government grants, including $11.2 million in 2023 alone, amounting to approximately 20 percent of the group’s 2023 income. The federal government provided at least $38.4 million to UnidosUS from 2008 to 2017, with no grants going to the group from 2018 to 2020, during the bulk of the first Trump administration. The group’s federal grant receipts increased significantly under the Biden administration, with the group being awarded  $35.9 million in federal grants from 2021 to 2023. ²⁵ UnidosUS has received some of its funding from the multi-billion dollar bank settlement following the 2008 mortgage meltdown, a practice denounced by conservatives as a “slush fund.”²⁶

A 2016 report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs described this as “a textbook case of outrageous executive overreach.”²⁷ Banks were incentivized to give directly to designated left-of-center groups by being told that each dollar donated directly counted as $2 of their assessed penalty. The report noted, “Specifically, both the Citigroup and Bank of America settlement agreements include provisions providing a two-for-one credit for donations to third-party groups.” ²⁸ The Committee report indicated that UnidosUS received $1.5 million this way from Bank of America. ²⁹ Following a 2008 Department of Justice settlement against three banks, UnidosUS received $3.1 million. ³⁰

The National Mortgage Settlement Summary of the five largest banks does not mention UnidosUS directly, but lists a number of UnidosUS affiliates that received over $2 million from the fund: El Centro de la Raza of Seattle, Washington ($600,000); NeighborWorks of Orange County, California ($345,000); Unity Council of Oakland ($575,000); and Community Housing Works of San Diego ($500,000). ³¹

Donors listed on UnidosUs’s website as of 2025 included Amazon, Charter Communications, JP Morgan Chase, Coca-Cola, Airbnb, McDonald’s, the Walmart Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Pritzker Children’s Initiative, National Urban League, Oak Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. ³²

In December 2025, UnidosUS was one of multiple organizations that received a grant from Yield Giving, the philanthropic initiative started by MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. In 2025 alone, Scott, through Yield Giving, donated over $7.16 billion to philanthropies and other charity organizations around the world. ³³

Foundations have reportedly donated at least $158 million to UnidosUS between 2000 and 2017. The top ten shown in the following table represent big name organizations, and provided 85 percent of the total. Other big name-foundation supporters include like Verizon, Comcast, Wells Fargo, Fidelity, Rockefeller, Citibank, Open Society, and the California Endowment.³⁴