Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP)Rooted in Resilience Funder Briefing | April 14, 2026
Co-sponsored by AAPIP, GCIR, NAPAWF, and GIH. Moderated by Connie Chung Joe, President & CEO of AAPIP.
Eligibility is not access
Across the hour, three speakers working from different angles, grassroots organizing, policy research, and funder infrastructure, landed on a shared diagnosis. The barriers facing immigrant AANHPI women aren’t just legal eligibility. They’re the layers between access and a person walking into a clinic: fear of ICE, missing language services, absent disaggregated data, and public narratives that misrepresent who actually gets harmed when benefits get cut.
HR 1, AKA The Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law with roughly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over ten years, is the flashpoint. But the briefing pointed to a more durable problem: even before HR 1, the architecture of access for AANHPI immigrant communities was thin. The current moment is exposing how thin, and how unevenly access and support holds up state to state.
Speaker Highlights
Christina Baal-Owens, Executive Director, NAPAWF
Christina opened by sharing what NAPAWF is seeing on the ground: ICE presence in immigrant neighborhoods (including specific reports of agents asking “where the Asians are” in Minneapolis), fear keeping people from clinics and schools, and persistent model-minority assumptions on Capitol Hill that erase the diversity of the AANHPI diaspora, over 50 ethnicities and more than 100 languages.
She pointed to three concrete philanthropic entry points: NAPAWF’s Gender Justice Collaborative (a cohort of seven AANHPI-serving organizations, many hyperlocal and otherwise unknown to national funders); the HEAL Act campaign in partnership with the Latina Institute, which would extend Medicaid/Medicare/ACA access regardless of immigration status and lift the five-year bar for green card holders; and NAPAWF’s Storytelling Institute, which trains community spokespeople to give congressional testimony and author op-eds.
“Access to healthcare really does not end at legislation, period, end of story. You can have legal access to healthcare, but if language access policies are not in place, if you live in a healthcare desert, if you have no infrastructure to be able to get to appointments or to a clinic, that is something that affects you.” — Christina Baal-Owens
Drishti Pillai, Associate Director, Racial Equity and Health Policy Program; Director, Immigrant Health Policy, KFF
Drishti revealed data through KFF’s 2025 survey of immigrants. The survey found that four in ten immigrant adults, nearly eight in ten among those likely undocumented, have experienced increased stress, anxiety, sleep or eating problems, or worsening health conditions since January 2025 due to immigration-related concerns. One in seven immigrant adults has avoided seeking medical care.
Undocumented immigrants are already ineligible for federal health coverage programs. The new HR 1 eligibility cuts are therefore falling primarily on lawfully present immigrants, refugees, asylees, survivors of trafficking and abuse, H-1B visa holders who’ve paid into Medicare through payroll for years, and on their US-born citizen children, whose parents are now afraid to enroll them.
On what funders can do: invest in community-based organizations providing language access (particularly urgent given the recent executive order declaring English the official language of the US), and fund the disaggregated data work that federal surveys increasingly cannot reliably produce.
“A lot of these cuts actually impact those with lawful presence in the US and also will have spillover effects on their children because parents are afraid to take their children to the hospital to sign up for coverage if they think their immigration status may be exposed.” — Drishti Pillai
Ivy Suriyopas, Vice President of Programs, GCIR
Ivy made the case for why this audience is already in the immigration funding space, whether they’ve claimed the label or not. She walked through GCIR’s new messaging toolkit and anchored her remarks in a point that reframes the entire conversation for health, children and youth, democracy, economic development, and criminal justice funders: each of those portfolios intersects directly with immigrant lives.
She pointed out the One in Four Project. One in four children in the US lives in an immigrant family, most of them US citizens, as the bridge for child- and youth-focused funders. And she was direct about the democracy dimension: HR 1 diverts funds from healthcare to ICE and CBP; allied state bills are testing whether ICE can be positioned at polling places; the chilling effect on turnout is already measurable in communities afraid to leave their homes.
Her call to action: move dollars now, before the election, and keep moving them after.
“If you focus on any of those priorities, you are also an immigration funder because immigrants touch each of those pieces.” — Ivy Suriyopas