Bail group for illegals in ICE custody lags behind in filing tax and annual reports but has $2.3 million in assets
Beyond Bond & Legal Defense Fund had an estimated net worth of $1.7 million in 2022 to combat "xenophobic state violence"
The Beyond Bond & Legal Defense Fund, a Cambridge non-profit with an estimated net worth of $1.7 million did not file a tax return in 2023 as required by a registered 501c3 organization with the federal government or state attorney general’s office.
No annual reports, detailing the current officers, directors and trustees, have been filed for 2021, 2022 or 2023 with the state attorney general’s office. The 2020 annual report wasn’t filed until April 2022.
Beyond Bond, which “raises money for immigration bonds to free people in ICE prisons in Massachusetts and Rhode Island” has only filed one tax return with the state attorney general’s office charity division for the year 2020 and not for the years of 2021, 2022 or 2023. Tax returns for 2024 are not yet due.
Courts in Massachusetts, a sanctuary state, routinely ignore ICE detainers and grant bail to illegal immigrants, however it is unclear who Beyond Bond has posted bond for. In 2018, a Massachusetts judge allegedly barred ICE from her courtroom and let an illegal immigrant out the back door of the courthouse to evade ICE. Judge Shelley Joseph now faces charges of “willful judicial misconduct” before the Supreme Judicial Court.
In Massachusetts, the state attorney general oversees charity compliance and transparency. The current attorney general Andrea Campbell has pledged to fight Trump and she told the Boston Globe earlier this month: “we have the tools to take on any type of threat, and we’re not afraid to use those tools’…There is ‘real fear and anxiety in Massachusetts’ about what Trump has promised to do.”
The Trump administration expects to conduct immigration raids in Chicago as soon as this week, with the Boston area not far behind. The group claims to have bonded out “hundreds of people” since 2018.
The Fund ended 2022, according to the most recent financial disclosure available, with $2.3 million is assets, $579,936 thousand in liabilities and a net worth of over $1.7 million.
According to beyondbondboston.org “bonds can range anywhere from $2,000 to more than $20,000 per person. Our Bond Fund works with families and other bond funds across the country to get our people out of ICE prisons. Together we will continue to free people from immigration prison, reunite families, and keep our communities together in the face of white supremacist and xenophobic state violence.”
The organization raised $640,000 in contributions and grants in the years 2020-2022, (significantly less than the $2.3 million asset total) and became an officially recognized IRS tax deductible organization in May 2020, after being represented by high powered Nutter McClennen & Fish, a Boston law firm founded in part by Louis Brandeis in 1879.
In 2021, Philip Rosenblatt, a one time partner and co-chair of the commercial finance group at Nutter McClennen & Fish, served as the assistant clerk of the tax deductible charity.
Each year the totally liabilities for years which records are available increased (assumingly outstanding bond liability): $347,550 in 2020, $446,650 in 2021 and $579,536 in 2022.
Annie Gonzalez, a volunteer with the Fund told the Boston Herald this weekend she’s been “fighting to free people from immigration detention and shut down ICE ever since [the first Trump term] raising money for bonds and supporting people directly.”
Beyond Bond shares a business address, 3 Church Street in Cambridge, with Sanctuary Boston a “community of vibrant worship and real connection grounded in Unitarian Universalism” in a building adjacent to the First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist in Harvard Square.
In February 2024 the Unitarian Universalists located a migrant shelter at their Boston headquarters on Farnsworth Street.
These are the type articles we used to get in newspapers - if they were doing their job. Good work JFG.
THANK YOU!!