On March 27th, two days after masked immigration officers nabbed Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street as part of the Trump administration crackdown on noncitizen activists, Canary Mission—the shadowy organization that operates a blacklist of Palestine solidarity activists—took credit for Ozturk’s targeting, tweeting that “her Canary Mission profile [w]as the primary cause [of her detention].” While the Trump administration has thus far refused to confirm or deny the veracity of such claims, the fact that Ozturk, as well as two other students, were targeted for deportation after being featured on Canary Mission testifies to the growing importance of the group, which was previously a relatively fringe outfit focused on calling on employers to fire pro-Palestinian employees.

In this work, Canary Mission has been supported by significant recent donations from American Jewish donors. On Wednesday, the Intercept reported that the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation, a nonprofit that backs mainstream pro-Israel groups, gave $100,000 to Canary Mission in 2023. But this was not the only recent donation Jewish American foundations made to the doxxing outfit: According to tax filings, the Ann and Robert Fromer Charitable Foundation also donated $20,000 to Canary Mission in 2023. One of the family foundation’s directors is corporate lawyer Robert Fromer, who is also a board member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)—one of the most prominent pro-Israel think tanks in the country, whose employees have gone on to to shape Middle East policy under numerous presidential administrations. The Fromers’ Canary Mission donation was routed through the Central Fund of Israel, a nonprofit that enables tax-exempt contributions to Israeli settlements in the West Bank. (When asked for comment, one board member for the Peisach foundation said he had no information on the Canary Mission donation, and another did not return a request for comment. The Fromer Foundation declined to comment; WINEP also did not return a request for comment.)

Both the Fromer and Peisach foundations are based in South Florida and have long been movers in pro-Israel politics. In addition to sitting on the board of WINEP and co-funding a fellowship at the institute, Fromer has been a donor to the United Democracy Project, the Super PAC operated by AIPAC which supports primary challenges against progressive Democrats; his family foundation is also a funder for groups such as the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County, Birthright Israel, and the American Jewish Committee. The Peisach Family Foundation, whose recent grant was slated to provide “general support” to Canary Mission, likewise regularly donates to institutions like Birthright Israel, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and notably, the University of Pennsylvania, which has received millions from the family. As The Interceptreported, Cheryl Peisach—the wife of the treasurer of the family foundation—is also a UPenn trustee. “It’s totally inappropriate that these academic institutions have relationships with people who are trying to destroy the lives of their students,” said Rifqa Falaneh, an attorney at Palestine Legal.

These 2023 donations are not the first time American Jewish philanthropists have supported Canary Mission. In 2018, TheForwarduncovered that the Helen Diller Family Foundation—a fund controlled by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco—as well as the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles had donated a combined $350,000 to Canary Mission in 2016-2017, with the latter gift coming from an anonymous donor. (Most of Canary Mission’s donations are anonymous: In 2023, the organization reported on its Israeli disclosure forms receiving about $1 million in foreign donations, far more than what has been reported on US tax filings.) Subsequently, in 2021, Jewish Currentsreported that Michael Leven, a hospitality executive who has served on the boards of major Jewish organizations including Birthright Israel, donated $50,000 to the website.

Over the years, as Canary Mission’s reputation suffered due to its unsavory tactics, some mainstream Jewish and pro-Israel groups distanced themselves from the group. In 2018, for example, Hillel student leaders published an op-ed in JTA criticizing Canary Mission’s focus on “intimidation.” Following the Forward story, the Diller foundation said in a letter it would not renew its funding of Canary Mission, and condemned “any organizations and ideologies associated with sinat chinam (baseless hatred).” But the recently released tax filings may show a reversal of this trend, in which American Jewish philanthropists are increasingly comfortable with the use of hardline tactics to suppress pro-Palestine activism. “In the past, some donors seemed to not want to be transparent about supporting Canary Mission,” said Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of Jewish history at New York University and the author of the book The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution. “These new donations seem to indicate that, at least for some set of donors, Canary Mission has become a more acceptable place to give.”

The Canary Mission website was launched in 2015 to ensure, in the group’s own words, that “today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.” To further this goal of rendering pro-Palestine activists unemployable, the group posted profiles of thousands of students who spoke out for Palestinian rights, often including their photos, resumes, and links to their LinkedIn pages and published work. Over time, these profiles came to be utilized not only by companies seeking to distance themselves from pro-Palestine employees, but also by Israeli border officials to deny people entry to Israel/Palestine, as well as by FBI agents to question student activists about instances of their pro-Palestine speech. Due to these successes, in recent years, Canary Mission’s tactics have been adopted by a wide array of right-wing Jewish groups, including Betar US, StopAntisemitism, and Accuracy in Media, as well as campus-specific groups like Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia University—and they have now escalated their tactics by calling for the deportations of foreign students. “Canary Mission was one of the first groups to use doxxing to go after the Palestine movement. Other groups are seeing how destroying people’s lives through this doxing works, and they’re emulating it,” said Falaneh. Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said “it’s not a surprise that, as it became normalized to treat criticism of Israel as antisemitic or support of terrorism, there is now an escalation of those methods.”

In the aftermath of October 7th, as pro-Israel groups, university administrations, and law enforcement demonstrated a growing willingness to forcibly repress pro-Palestine activism and punish individual activists, Canary Mission’s work gained a new prominence. After 34 Harvard student groups posted a letter denouncing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, the website posted profiles of students involved with those student organizations, whether or not they had crafted the missive. After an Egyptian American student attended a pro-Palestine demonstration at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2024, Canary Mission posted a profile of her, leading to death threats and calls for her deportation, according to Reuters. In November 2023, the group likewise posted a profile of Kinza Khan, a 34-year-old woman who was filmed as a bystander near an activist taking down Israeli hostage posters, leading to threats and hate speech against her, according to a lawsuit against Canary Mission filed by the Council on American Islamic Relations.

For pro-Palestine activists, these developments portend serious dangers. “It’s not only your employment that is at risk, or the risk of being banned from Palestine as a result of Canary Mission. Now, there’s the risk of being deported,” said Falaneh. “These fascist tactics are creating fear, and the danger is real.” But Canary Mission continues to attract donors. In 2021, for instance, Leven, the hospitality executive, told Jewish Currents that he stopped funding Canary Mission because he “didn’t think [the grant] reduced antisemitism to the extent that I would like to see it reduced.” This month, however, Leven admitted to The New York Times that he had resumed his funding.