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Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan’s philanthropic organisation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), has ended all associations with the pro-immigration and criminal justice advocacy group, FWD.us.
This pro-immigration, pro-criminal justice reform advocacy group was founded by the Facebook founder in 2013. This organisational disengagement follows a realignment of Meta’s organisational ideologies to support the political environment created by the re-election of US President Donald Trump. This breakup comes despite the company’s significant reliance on foreign employees.A Bloomberg report reveals that the official breakup involves both removing CZI from FWD.us's internal bylaws and withholding all financial assistance for the 2025 operating year.
For the first time since its founding, no member of the CZI organisation, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is on FWD.us's board of directors. This event has occurred following the departure of CZI's chief of staff, Jordan Fox, this year.
This distancing has followed the two organisations' discussions about separating for several years.The departure is a consequence of what commentators see as a shift to the right of Zuckerberg’s priorities. Over the past few months, Zuckerberg has severed relationships with diversity initiatives at Meta and changed social media policies concerning hate speech to permit assertions of “insulting language” related to immigration issues, while still employing, through Meta, more foreign talent than most employers in the country; according to a statement by the Department of Homeland Security, this year, only Amazon led Meta in H-1B filings approved by foreign employees.
How Mark Zuckerberg’s relationship has been with Fwd.us over the years
Despite Zuckerberg's continued uninvolvement with FWD.us since leaving its board in 2018, his philanthropic efforts continued to support the group through 2024. Late in 2019, Zuckerberg met with Stephen Miller, a significant influencer in setting the Trump administration’s strict immigration policy. According to sources privy to the closed meeting, Miller asked Zuckerberg whether he was associated with FWD.us.
Miller’s query was disclosed in a previous story in The New York Times.Since then, the funding that FWD.us relied on has dried up at a particularly tough time for groups financing or otherwise advancing causes related to immigration. The Trump Administration has maintained a sweeping attack on the community of immigrants, involving arrests, deportations, travel bans, and efforts to prevent temporary employees from entering the US, as well as measures making it more difficult for legal, permanent residents to attain citizenship.According to records, well over half of the approximately $400 million donated to FWD.us since 2013 has passed through Zuckerberg’s charity vehicles at CZI. This amount does not include direct donations that Zuckerberg and Chan made to the organisation in the years leading up to CZI’s founding. In preparing for the change that FWD.us’s leadership has been planning, the organisation has been attempting to diversify its funding and cut costs.In a statement made to Bloomberg, the president of FWD.us, Todd Schulte, said that they were “thankful for our donors past and present and extremely thankful for the many donors that have stepped forward over the past several years—and even more so for the wave of new donors that have come on board this year. This will enable us to advocate on behalf of immigrants under attack today and put together a better vision for immigration and criminal justice reform for many years to come.” A CZI spokesperson said the philanthropy has been in a multi-year shift to narrow its focus to science and biomedical research and has phased out funding for social advocacy. The spokesperson added that a network of research centers known as Biohub is now Zuckerberg and Chan’s “primary philanthropy.”
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