A year after the Hyundai Metaplant raid in Georgia affected nearly 500 people, Migrant Equity SouthEast is still responding to immigration enforcement, frightened families and a shortage of immigration attorneys. Its new Southeast Justice Fund aims to raise $100,000 to bring legal help closer to the people who need it.
Migrant Equity SouthEast (MESE) is a grantee partner of the Racial Justice and Equity Fund (RJEF), an Early Childhood Funders Collaborative affiliated fund.
In September 2026, ICE stepped up operations in several of the Georgia counties that MESE serves. Students stayed home. MESE staff wrote about 50 excuse letters to schools so teachers would know why.
In one small town, children were stuck at school because their parents were too afraid to come get them, and MESE had to mobilize allies to take them home. One mother asked a MESE volunteer for a smaller favor. Her son’s school bus drops him two blocks from their door, and she usually walks him the rest of the way. That day she was too scared to leave the house. She called her son first to tell him a woman she trusted would meet him.
On the walk, the boy asked the volunteer a question: “Are they going to take my mom?”
He is seven years old.
That gap is why MESE launched the Southeast Justice Fund on September 4, one year after the raid at the Hyundai Metaplant in Ellabell. The goal is to raise $100,000, and most of it will go to legal help.
MESE is one of the first-cohort grantee partners of RJEF, which provides multi-year, unrestricted support. During its first year of RJEF funding, MESE kept a full-time, language-accessible hotline running, put an immigration attorney on retainer for free consultations, and held power of attorney clinics across multiple counties.
“More than a headline”
When Rodriguez looks back on the past year, the first thing she wants people to understand is that “it was more than a headline.”
“The suffering that stays for the families, for the children, for the entire community, it goes beyond the headline, even when people are not paying attention,” she says. She notes that early coverage suggested most of the people detained had criminal records. Look closely at each person’s immigration pathway, she says, and “that’s not always the reality.”
Nearly 500 people were affected, and Rodriguez says almost everyone knew someone who was caught up in it. When a family’s main provider was taken, a spouse who had paid $800 a month for an apartment might find a shared room for $600 or less on the other side of the county. Then the children had to change schools, and some schools asked why the family had moved. “It’s not ideal that family separation happened,” Rodriguez says.
The health toll has been steady. People released from detention in the U.S. and people deported to their home countries describe the same things: stomach pain, body pain, a long recovery. Some were fitted with ankle monitors even after they paid bond or won their cases.
Rodriguez describes one man released from the Folkston detention center who could not keep a job and had panic attacks when he left his house. He told MESE staff he felt like a weak man. “You’re not weak,” they told him. “You just need time.” They connected him to mental health support. “It’s not like once you make it out of detention that everything comes back to normal,” Rodriguez says. “We know that there’s a process that’s going take time, and no one is trying to rush you.”
Trust built before the crisis
Within 48 hours of the raid, MESE was in contact with more than 100 impacted people. Rodriguez says that was no accident. “It happened because of the work that we had already done.”
Before the raid, MESE staff were tabling at PTA meetings, asking schools with large ESOL and Latino student populations to invite them, going to churches, and showing up at community events outside Mexican grocery stores.
“Rapid response will not happen if people don’t trust you,” Rodriguez says.
After the raid, MESE activated a rent assistance fund and connected families to food, bill support and mental health care. It kept calling. It also told workers something many had never heard: whatever their immigration status, and whether they worked directly for the company or indirectly, they were entitled to be treated with dignity and to be safe at work. “We know how to hold the system accountable instead of the person,” she says.
What the fund will pay for
MESE currently serves 30 counties in coastal and South Georgia. “Even that is not enough,” Rodriguez says. Communities keep asking when MESE is coming back, and they are helping make it happen by asking pastors to open church spaces and by promoting events.
The obstacle is lawyers. South Georgia has a scarcity of immigration attorneys and notaries, so MESE has relied on attorneys who drive or fly in from Atlanta. After the raid, even the free legal help hit capacity, and MESE began paying for consultations to move faster. “Time is the essence,” Rodriguez says. Legal help can be the difference between a person being sent to a country where they are not safe and staying.
The fund is meant to put that help in place before the next emergency. That means more in-person legal help, more family preparedness plans, and power of attorney clinics held where families live, not only when a pro bono attorney happens to have an open day.
What worked from funders, and what didn’t
Some funders reached out right after the raid and made it easy to say yes. They shortened application forms and approved general support that MESE could spend wherever it was needed most. One funder, who had planned to invite MESE to apply in October, moved the process up so the money arrived when it was needed. RJEF Director, Leng Leng, began helping coordinate fundraising immediately, recognizing that the raid affected whole families, not only the workers who were detained.
That flexibility matters because of where MESE started. “For every yes, we got 10 nos,” Rodriguez said in RJEF’s Year 1 evaluation report. Before RJEF, MESE’s largest grant was $75,000, and she notes that “Many foundations are not willing to fund organizations that are less than $1 million.” MESE has since gone “from a nonprofit with zero dollars, volunteer run, to now having a budget of over $1 million this year,” she says.
Other funders left a different impression. During briefings, Rodriguez says, funders asked question after question and never followed up. “It felt a little bit extractive,” she says. “They wanted to know how we were suffering. But they didn’t step up to help us address the suffering.”
Good follow-up, she says, can be as simple as an honest no: thank you for explaining what your community is going through, we can’t help right now, maybe next year.
She also asks funders to rethink what counts as a win. Counting how many immigrants were served in a given quarter reduces people to metrics, she says. After the raid, one of MESE’s small wins was helping detained workers’ families reach their loved ones by phone so the children could talk to a parent. “Winning right now can look very different,” she says. For many organizations in the region, it is simply surviving.
Rodriguez frames the choice funders face as a question about history. “This is not about immigration. This is about human rights,” she says. “It is not a violation of rules to help kids, to help families when they need it the most.”
Ten years from now, she says, funders will be asked what they did with the resources they had.
Who gets overlooked
The farther MESE works from Savannah, the harder it is to hear from immigrants in rural communities. Some are afraid to drive to events. Others live too far away, or have no phone signal. With little in-language or local media, injustices in rural areas can go unreported. When MESE asks reporters to cover a case and gets no response, staff go to the families themselves and ask for their testimonies, offering to leave out a name or have a reporter blur a face. “People need to hear from you,” Rodriguez tells them.
Reminding people of their power
What gives Rodriguez hope is the young people MESE works with. High school and college students are helping organize events, and the younger children in MESE’s programs are already making plans. When MESE took a group of kids to the state Capitol earlier this year and asked who wanted to run for office someday, they answered, “Me, me, me.”
MESE’s goal for the next year is to see more people organize themselves. “We’re not here to give them power,” Rodriguez says. “We’re here to remind them of their power.” She adds, “We’re not here to speak for the voiceless. We’re here to remind people that people have a voice. It’s just that their voice is in languages other than English.”
In the first Trump administration, Rodriguez says, MESE did not yet exist and people had nowhere to call. Today they still struggle, “but at least they know where to call.”
“We will meet you where you are,” she says. “We are here for you. You need to remember your rights. And remember your power.”
To support MESE’s new Southeast Justice Fund, visit migrantequity.org.
To learn more about the Racial Justice and Equity Fund, visit ecfunders.org/rjef.