She Left Her Abuser. Now the Shelter That Helped Her Is Losing Federal Funds Under Trump

She came to the United States in 2017, after marrying her husband in their home country in the Middle East.

“I left everything, everything, my family — I was working in my country, I had a life in my country — so I left everything for him and for the family,” she said recently, choking back tears.

She had one baby, then became pregnant with their second in the U.S. But after arriving, she said, her husband turned violent.

“He is not the guy I married in my country,” she said. “It’s abuse. I was abused,” she said.

She spoke with KQED in a conference room at a secure location, her voice soft and choked with tears. KQED is not naming the woman or her home country, because she is a survivor of abuse and still worries for her safety.

She called the police, but says her husband blamed her and told the officers she was the one being abusive. She appealed for help at their family mosque, but says nothing changed.

In 2019, the woman first learned of the Asian Women’s Shelter, a San Francisco nonprofit that serves victims of domestic violence and human trafficking with a focus on immigrant and refugee communities.

“I was pregnant, so I called them. And after, I just said, ‘OK, just take your time. You are pregnant, you have another baby, it’s gonna be hard.’ So I just took it easy … but he didn’t stop. My ex, he didn’t stop,” she said.

It took two more years and multiple conversations with Rakya Ahmed, a case manager and advocate at the shelter, for her to finally leave. Now, she has an apartment, a driver’s license, and a car. Her young children are in school and she is studying to become an educator. She has an attorney to help with the ongoing divorce case.

If not for the Asian Women’s Shelter, she said, “either I’m in a hospital or I’m dead.”

Millions of dollars in cuts

Asian Women’s Shelter is more than a shelter — in addition to providing emergency housing for survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, they connect clients with everything they will need to rebuild their lives: food, clothing, health care, legal advocacy, transportation, counseling, job training.

Perhaps as importantly, case managers build relationships and trust with their clients. Ahmed, the case manager, said abused women often see going to a shelter as taboo and think it will be unsafe. Her job, she said, is to walk beside these women, offer them the resources they need — and wait until they’re ready.

“Some girls, they call me mom,” she said. “They melt my heart, you know, when they hug you. They are far away from family, they don’t have anybody here. So when they see us, they feel like there is somebody who will take care of them, will show them the way.”

But programs like this one are losing federal funds under the Trump administration — part of the White House’s broader effort to decrease federal spending and cut off funding from programs it sees as unnecessary or counter to the administration’s agenda.

In April, the Asian Women’s Shelter received a letter from the Department of Justice informing the nonprofit that a $500,000 grant awarded it last fall was being rescinded.

The three-year grant was the main source of funding for the shelter’s program aimed specifically at supporting Arab and Muslim survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, clients like the woman who spoke to KQED.

The program is designed to serve 14 families, including 31 children, fleeing domestic violence.

The DOJ wrote that the program “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities,” and stated that the department “has changed its priorities … to focus on, among other things, more directly supporting certain law enforcement operations, combatting violent crime, protecting American children, and supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault, and better coordinating law enforcement efforts at all levels of government.”

The Asian Women’s Shelter is not alone. Its grant is one of 373 grants totaling about $500 million nationwide, all from the Office of Justice Programs that the Department of Justice abruptly canceled in April, according to an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice.

About $81 million of those cuts hit California organizations.

Among those losing money is Stop AAPI Hate, a San Francisco-based coalition created in 2020 amid rising hate crimes against Asian Americans fueled during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The group had been awarded $2 million over the next three years, nearly a third of its projected budget in 2026 and 2027.

Like the two San Francisco organizations, most of the affected nonprofits and law enforcement organizations are working in areas that the DOJ says it wants to focus on: helping police interrupt street violence and investigate crime; supporting crime survivors, including victims of human trafficking; and combating violent crime, including hate crimes.

That’s why critics, including those in law enforcement, accuse President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi of hypocrisy.

Bondi spent time at her confirmation hearings detailing her visits with human trafficking victims at the border and a Mexico safe house, and pledging to help those survivors.

And in a March speech at the Department of Justice, Trump said he had no “higher mission” than “making America safe again.”

“We want to protect Americans and we protect everybody that’s in our country, American or not American. We want to have a safe and proud country,” he said. “We’re joined today by dozens of police officers, sheriffs and sheriff’s deputies from all across the country. My message to these law enforcement heroes is simple. With me in the White House, you once again have a president who will always have your back.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the grant cuts will have the opposite effect, especially when you combine them with the president’s budget proposal to cut billions of dollars more from local police departments and federal law enforcement agencies.

“I’m shocked, like usual, but not surprised,” Bonta said. “This is an area where I think it’s really important to call out the just raging hypocrisy. … He says he’s gonna be a president for victims, a president of public safety, but then we have to look at what he’s actually doing.”

Bonta said these cuts target “critical programs that help solve crime, that help victims heal, that help prevent gun violence, that address mental health and substance use disorder and provide treatment and care that support re-entry.”

In a written statement, the Justice Department said it is “focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off the streets, and protecting all Americans from violent crime. Discretionary funds that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities are subject to review and reallocation.”

But the department didn’t answer KQED’s questions about why organizations like the Asian Women’s Shelter and Stop AAPI Hate were targeted, given that their missions appear to largely line up with those priorities.

‘Very short-sighted’

Bonta argues it’s obvious that these programs are being cut because of who they serve: communities of color and immigrants.

He called it “very short-sighted and very narrow — this lens that they’re trying to put on to focus on certain victims and be contemptuous of other victims.” Another California organization that lost funding, he noted, was Youth Alive!, an Oakland nonprofit that seeks to interrupt cycles of gun violence.

“They go to the hospital bed of a shooting victim to help them heal and help them make decisions that don’t include retaliation in their raw, emotional, traumatized state,” he said. “Not only is it the right thing to do to help folks heal, to restore them to being productive members of our society and our community, but it also can prevent additional crimes, retaliatory crimes, a cycle of crime and violence.”

In some cities, critics have called for more oversight of these types of DOJ grants, which have totaled $15.5 billion nationally since 2021. California organizations received more than any other state over that period, securing $1.5 billion.

Retired Los Angeles Police Department deputy chief Phil Tingrides spent time as a gang intervention liaison and worked alongside community-based groups doing the same sort of violence interruption work as Youth Alive! does in Oakland.

He said when those groups work with police, they see success.

“We developed a very strong, cohesive relationship … and we saw, initially, a very significant drop in retaliation shootings,” he said. “In 2017, when I left the South Bureau, we had the lowest number of homicides and shooting victims that that bureau had seen since it opened in 1972.”

But Tingrides said the Trump administration is right about one thing: He believes there should be more oversight and accountability to ensure that these public funds are being used properly.

“I think there’s a perception in his administration, and I don’t think they’re wrong, that there’s so many grants that go out that there is no control over, that are going to fund programs that aren’t either what they were intended to be or not what they stated to be,” he said.

Bonta agreed that oversight is important, but said in this case, the administration seems to be arbitrarily cutting programs it labels as diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI — not undertaking a thoughtful analysis that examines outcomes.

Funding challenges ahead

Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, said the $2 million grant the Trump administration rescinded was the group’s first federal funding award, which was supposed to help expand their work.

“We’ve been able to raise national awareness around the surge in anti-Asian hate that was catalyzed by the COVID pandemic,” she said. “We’ve not only tracked and established that this is pervasive and widespread, but we’ve also advanced solutions, community-based solutions, and really focused on victims and survivors and ways that we can prevent incidents from occurring in the first place.”

Stop AAPI Hate is among five groups suing the DOJ as part of a class action lawsuit, alleging that the grant rescissions are unconstitutional.

“What I think is disturbing is that this administration — and Trump himself — paints himself as a champion of law and order,” Choi said. “But this administration has illegally canceled hundreds of public safety grants and has actually left communities across the nation more vulnerable to hate, violence and injustice.”

The Asian Women’s Shelter is appealing the loss of its grant through a DOJ process, said Saara Ahmed, a spokesperson for the organization.

She said the nonprofit remains committed to funding its program for Arab and Muslim women, but is now facing not just federal cuts, but local budget threats as well.

Ahmed said the program to serve Arab and Muslim women has been chronically underfunded since it started in 2015, in part because the U.S. government classifies people from the Middle East as white.

“I think the irony is because of the classification of the Arab community as white, they’re not eligible for a lot of the culturally specific streams that we get, government or otherwise,” she said. “We can’t use that funding to serve this community. And so that has also been a factor in being chronically underfunded.”

But anytime the nonprofit can secure multi-year funding streams like the federal grants, Ahmed said, it provides the staff doing the work on the ground the space to focus on their clients.

For the woman who left her abusive husband, that support has been life-changing.

Her divorce proceedings are ongoing, but she’s looking ahead and planning for the life she wants to provide for her kids.

“I want them to be free. I want to be free, too,” she said. “I want them to visit the world. I want to take them everywhere. So I wish I can do it one day.”

If you or someone you love needs immediate assistance addressing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233.