When President Obama announces major changes to the nation’s immigration enforcement system as early as next week, his decision will partly be a result of a yearslong campaign of pressure by immigrant rights groups, which have grown from a cluster of lobbying organizations into a national force.  A vital part of that expansion has involved money: major donations from some of the nation’s wealthiest liberal foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Open Society Foundations of the financier George Soros, and the Atlantic Philanthropies. Over the past decade those donors have invested more than $300 million in immigrant organizations, including many fighting for a pathway to citizenship for immigrants here illegally.  The philanthropies helped the groups rebound after setbacks and financed the infrastructure of a network in constant motion, with marches, rallies, vigils, fasts, bus tours and voter drives. The donors maintained their support as the immigration issue became fiercely partisan on Capitol Hill and the activists intensified their protests, engaging in civil disobedience and brash confrontations with lawmakers and the police.  The donors’ strategy arose in 2007, as immigrant groups nursed wounds from a rout after a bill pushed by President George W. Bush failed in Congress.  “For all our vaunted work, we were basically a fractious coalition that just got our butts kicked,” said Frank Sharry, a longtime advocate who is now executive director of America’s Voice, a core organization in the coalition.  Atlantic and several other philanthropies funded a series of soul-searching retreats. Days and nights of arguments produced a plan that came to be known as the four pillars. The groups agreed to redouble their local community organizing; to expand their work into mobilizing voters; to create policy research to underpin their pro-immigrant message; and to “turbocharge” their communications with the news media, as Mr. Sharry put it, a task that fell to him.  “The good news was that the funders really got the idea of building up a movement that could press for change at all levels,” Mr. Sharry said. “We were really talking about a movement that could win the grand prize: legislation that puts 11 million people on a path to citizenship.”  The philanthropies focused on a dozen regional immigrant rights organizations that make up the backbone of the movement. They also supported Latino service organizations like NCLR, also known as the National Council of La Raza, and legal groups like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or Maldef, and the National Immigration Law Center.  “The credit for our movement goes to immigrant leaders who had the courage to step out of the shadows,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, another core organization. “But the growth and speed of the movement was significantly aided by a small number of visionary philanthropies.”  The Ford Foundation already had a decades-long track record of funding nonprofit organizations aiding immigrants. In 2003 Ford and Carnegie joined with several other donors to create an unusual collaborative fund to augment support for local groups. Since then, Carnegie has given about $100 million for immigration initiatives, all in conventional charitable donations, including millions to help legal immigrants become American citizens.  The Open Society Foundations of Mr. Soros, an immigrant born in Hungary, have invested about $76 million in the past decade under the rubric of immigrant rights, according to Archana Sahgal, a program officer.  The Atlantic Philanthropies were founded by Charles Feeney, an Irish-American billionaire who built his fortune with a chain of duty-free shops. Atlantic has given nearly $69 million in 72 immigration grants in the last decade. About half of those grants were made in donations that allow lobbying.  Most of the philanthropies’ funds have been tax-exempt charitable donations that cannot be used primarily to influence legislation. In 2013, when the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill and the House was weighing its options, several foundations also made multimillion-dollar “social welfare” grants that can be used for lobbying.  “Our grantees are generally working in the direction of our long-term goal of protecting the rights and dignity of immigrants and our belief that immigrants should have a voice,” said Mayra Peters-Quintero, a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation, which has donated about $80 million to immigrant groups over the past 10 years, all in charitable funds.  “The compass that drives our work is not the political cycle of the moment,” she said.  After setting their course in 2008, the advocacy groups expanded rapidly, amplifying their street actions with news conferences, Twitter feeds and texting lists.  A rally on the National Mall in March 2010 drew tens of thousands of protesters from around the country. But internecine bickering weakened the push for the Dream Act, a bill with a path to citizenship for immigrants who came when they were children. It failed in the Senate in late 2010.  One organization, the National Immigration Forum, branched out beyond the main donors and shifted its focus to recruiting conservatives, including evangelical Christians and leaders from business and law enforcement.  Young immigrants who call themselves Dreamers agitated for faster change. With little more than pocket money, students staged protests in 2012 that prodded Mr. Obama to take his first major executive action on immigration, a program that has given reprieves from deportation to more than 580,000 Dreamers.  “We did it with nothing, and we won,” said Cristina Jiménez, managing director of United We Dream, one group that led that crusade. “It was a powerful feeling.”  In 2013, Ford gave $2.3 million to United We Dream for a national effort to help young immigrants sign up for the reprieves.  During the debate in Congress last year, the policy advocacy wing of Open Society gave $6.2 million to several groups in donations allowing lobbying.  “We have enormous faith in the groups with which we have had longstanding relationships, and we wanted to give them resources to pursue the best possible legislative fix for the problems in our immigration system,” said Caroline Chambers, deputy director of the Open Society Policy Center.  The advocates backed the bipartisan bill that passed the Senate last year. But the Republican majority in the House rejected it. In August, the House approved a bill to cancel the Dreamer reprieve program, an early warning to Mr. Obama that Republicans were ready to challenge any new unilateral action.  Foundation leaders said they have not had misgivings, even as Republican resistance to their beneficiaries’ agenda has intensified. “Name me something in the American political debate that isn’t partisan right now,” said Stephen McConnell, director of United States programs for the Atlantic Philanthropies. “It’s just the nature of the beast.”  Some opponents accuse the foundations of blatant partisanship.  “The whole apparatus has become the handmaiden of the Democratic Party,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which opposes legalization for unauthorized immigrants. “These foundations fund activist organizations designed to create ethnic identity enclaves and politically control them for partisan purposes.”  Mr. Stein’s group is funded by followers’ donations and by some large contributions from conservative donors.  Foundation leaders said they were vigilant to ensure their donations did not violate tax laws prohibiting them from funding partisan campaigns.  “We want to protect the interests of immigrants,” said Mr. McConnell of Atlantic. Echoing other foundation officers, he said, “Atlantic does not in any way support candidates or get involved in partisan politics.”  This year, as the prospects for legislation faded, foundation funding waned by at least 50 percent, activists said, leaving them scrounging. Atlantic, a mainstay, is winding down its operation, following Mr. Feeney’s instructions to give away his assets during his lifetime. Atlantic will make its last donations in 2016.  Immigrant and Latino groups carried on limited voter mobilization efforts for the midterm elections. They no longer have funds for showy rallies. They are frustrated that legislation with a path to citizenship seems out of reach.  But now that the White House has confirmed that Mr. Obama plans measures that could shield as many as five million immigrants from deportation, the advocates are mobilized and pushing him to act as broadly as his powers allow.  Last week, two days after the president held a news conference in the wake of the midterm elections, vowing to take executive action on immigration, Gustavo Torres, the executive director of CASA de Maryland and a coalition leader, was protesting once again in front of the White House.  “We expect the president to be big and bold,” he said. “This is his opportunity to make sure we are going to remember him as the president who made a difference for Latino and immigrant communities.”  An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the National Immigration Forum used funds from the Open Society Foundations to reach out to conservatives. The money for that effort came from other sources.  A version of this article appears in print on November 15, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cash Amplifies Call to Reshape Immigration. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
Many of the gains made by advocates for immigrants to the United States were helped by hundreds of millions in donations from liberal foundations.