Why Did NPR Assign a Reporter With Ties to Soros-Funded Groups to Cover a Story About Illegal Alien Voting?

By Tyler O’Neil (Daily Signal) 

Are your own tax dollars funding an effort to discredit news about flyers encouraging illegal aliens to vote for President Joe Biden in U.S. elections?

National Public Radio’s recent efforts to “cover” the story suggest an attempt to delegitimize it. NPR assigned a reporter with ties to left-wing groups funded by billionaire financier George Soros to write the story. That reporter refused to answer a question about whether she was concerned about illegal aliens voting in the 2024 presidential election.

Last month, The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and the news site Muckraker exposed flyers posted at Resource Center Matamoros, just across the U.S.-Mexico border in Tamaulipas. (Heritage created The Daily Signal in 2014.)

The flyers, written in Spanish, urged migrants headed to the U.S. “to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States,” explaining that the resource center needs “another four years of his term to stay open.”

Gaby Zavala, the center’s founder, didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment, but she told other news outlets that she didn’t post the flyers. NPR told the story from Zavala’s perspective, quoting her before discussing the flyers.

“We have never encouraged people to vote for anyone,” Zavala told NPR, saying that she knows illegal aliens aren’t allowed to vote in U.S. elections.

Federal law prohibits illegal aliens from voting in federal elections. Some jurisdictions, such as Washington, D.C., allow them to vote in local elections.

The NPR article raises many questions about the vote-for-Biden flyers, suggesting that they represent a political ploy, rather than a legitimate discovery. It frames the Oversight Project’s executive director, Mike Howell, and Muckraker founder Anthony Rubin as troublemakers.

NPR’s article quotes Jared Holt, who used to write for the far-left website Right Wing Watch, warning that “claims like these … may very well be another possible avenue to try to delegitimize democratic processes in this country.”

The article also didn’t seriously address the “Vote Biden-Harris” sign found at a camp outside the center, nor a social media post showing balloons celebrating President Donald Trump’s loss to Biden in the 2020 election on Nov. 7, 2020.

A recent study estimates that 10-27% of non-citizens are registered to vote, and based on previous elections and federal data, at least 1-2.7 million non-citizens will vote in the 2024 election.

Not Concerned About Illegals Voting?

NPR, a publicly funded news outlet that recently faced renewed criticism for left-wing bias after parting ways with now-former business editor Uri Berliner, assigned the story about the pro-Biden flyers to a reporter who had just joined the outlet last month.

The reporter, Jude Joffe-Block, once volunteered for the discredited left-wing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN.

NPR released video of Joffe-Block’s interview with Howell and Rubin alongside the article. In that interview, Howell and Rubin pressed the NPR reporter on her history, and she confirmed that she did voter registration for ACORN but tried to end the interview when asked about it.

“Are you concerned at all with illegal aliens possibly voting in our upcoming election?” Rubin asked.

“I am not answering any more questions,” Joffe-Block said.

ACORN spearheaded liberal causes such as affordable housing and voter registration, but it shut down in 2010 after scandals involving voter registration fraud and reported offers to help prostitution.

Multiple ACORN staffers were convicted of voter registration fraud in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election. ACORN hired more than 13,000 part-time workers and sent them into 21 states to sign up voters in minority and poor neighborhoods.

The group bragged that it had submitted 1.3 million registration cards to local election officials, but election officials rejected 400,000 of those registrations for a variety of reasons. Many of those registrations involved fictional characters such as Mickey Mouse. Barack Obama had worked as ACORN’s lawyer before becoming president. Accusations of voter fraud at ACORN traced back to 2004.

Joffe-Block insisted that she did not register any illegal aliens to vote while working with ACORN. Yet her stances on immigration and voting rights suggest a willingness to turn a blind eye to the issue of illegal aliens voting.

🚨NPR Confronted on Recording@NPR sent an alum of a voter fraud organization (@judejoffeblock) to write a hit piece about us and @realmuckraker and the BOMBSHELL story on the invasion camp in Mexico with flyers encouraging illegals to vote for Biden

WATCH TILL END 👇 pic.twitter.com/nicvRox5io

— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) May 10, 2024

Who Is Jude Joffe-Block?

Jude Joffe-Block has worked in journalism for 18 years, according to her LinkedIn profile. She often has covered immigration and election issues with a left-wing bias. She wrote a book condemning former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and claiming that backlash against Arpaio helped change Arizona from a conservative state to a battleground state.

Joffe-Block had a fellowship with a nonprofit that takes millions from Soros-established foundations. She helped contribute to a voting rights report from a left-wing group, partially funded by Soros, that opposes voter ID laws.

Joffe-Block accepted the fellowship from the nonprofit New America in 2017. The fellowship helped her write the book “Driving While Brown: Sheriff Joe Arpaio versus the Latino Resistance,” which she published with co-author Terry Greene Sterling in 2021.

A New America webinar event described the book as providing “critical insights into effective resistance to institutionalized racism and the community organizing that helped transform Arizona from a conservative stronghold into a battleground state.”

Joffe-Block revealed more of her perspective in an interview with Arizona radio station KJZZ. She partially credited the efforts of “Dreamers” for the political shift.

“Dreamer” refers to an illegal alien who came to the U.S. as a child and would be protected from deportation under the proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act. Although the bill failed in Congress in 2011, as president Obama directed his administration to enact some of its provisions in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

The DACA program faced legal challenges from the start and remains in legal limbo after Trump attempted to rescind it and his successor, Biden, attempted to resurrect it.

Joffe-Block suggested that Arizona shifted from a conservative state to a battleground state due to a backlash against Arpaio’s policies, just as—she claimed—California shifted blue in response to Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that aimed to deny social services to illegal aliens. Proposition 187 was approved by voters but died in the courts.

Joffe-Block said in the radio interview that Lydia Guzman, a Latina activist featured in her book, had been “involved in a mass naturalization effort to get immigrants registered to vote” in California. “People like Lydia were waiting for years to see if that would happen in Arizona,” she added.

“I think there are a lot of people—Lydia Guzman included—who felt on election night of 2020 that this long process, this long backlash, the organizing, the registering voters, the telling immigrants and Latinos that they had to vote out people who were opposed to them, that that had finally paid off,” Joffe-Block added. “This kind of organizing and the political power that happened, the young people that were brought into the process to help their parents and grandparents, all of that that happened, and some of them Dreamers, who were advocating for themselves and their families, as well.”

“I think that without that—that imminent threat that many of them felt to themselves and their families, to the integrity of their families, whether someone might be deported, that that really did inspire some of the organizing that has changed the state’s politics,” she concluded.

Joffe-Block didn’t explicitly state that Dreamers who registered to vote turned the tide in Arizona, but her remarks suggest that family members of illegal aliens, motivated in part by a desire to prevent deportation, organized the political movement responsible for propelling Democrats to victory.

She has also claimed that “people use the words Mexicans and illegals interchangeably.”

George Soros Connections

New America, the organization that incubated Joffe-Block’s book, has received hefty contributions from influential left-wing donors and foundations, most notably the Open Society Foundations established by Soros (and now run by the financier’s son, Alex Soros).

According to New America’s website, the Open Society Foundations has directed more than $6.5 million to the organization.

Other major contributors include the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

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The left-wing Arabella Advisors and the Tides Foundation set up nonprofits to allow donors to pour “dark money” into left-leaning projects without disclosing which projects these donors fund.

According to IRS tax forms accessed via ProPublica, the Arabella network group New Venture Fund sent New America more than $1.6 million between 2014 and 2021, while three other Arabella funds (North Fund, Hopewell Fund, and Sixteen Thirty Fund) sent it more than $500,000 in 2020 and 2021. The Tides Foundation sent New America $1.1 million between 2018 and 2022.

The Brennan Center

In August 2019, the Brennan Center for Justice credited Joffe-Block for contributing to a report on “Restoring the Right to Vote.” That report calls for repealing laws preventing felons from voting, saying the laws “serve no legitimate purpose.”

The report also claims that felon disenfranchisement laws “are rooted in the Jim Crow era and were designed to lock freed slaves out of the voting process.” It urges states to restore voting rights for felons automatically when they exit prison and urges law enforcement to educate inmates about their voting rights as they leave.

Yet the claim that felon disfranchisement has racist origins is false. As explained by Han von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, most states took voting rights away from those convicted of serious crimes long before the Civil War, when many black Americans were slaves and could not vote.

The Brennan Center also condemns election integrity efforts such as laws requiring ID to vote, restricting voter registration, and “purging voter rolls.”

The Brennan Center also has ties to Soros and the Left’s dark money network. Soros’ Open Society Foundations directed at least $4.8 million in grants to the center between 2016 and 2021, according to IRS records. The Arabella network’s New Venture Fund gave the center $1.6 million between 2014 and 2022, while the Tides Foundation funneled more than $1 million to the group between 2018 and 2022.

NPR did not respond to The Daily Signal’s multiple requests for comment for this story.

Zavala did not respond to questions about whether she is concerned that NPR would assign a reporter with ties to ACORN to defend her amid concerns that her center might have encouraged voter fraud.