Anti-Trump progressives see fundraising boom: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, we sift through the latest campaign finance reports showing the most vocal Democratic opponents of President Donald Trump experiencing financial windfalls. Plus, Andrea Mitchell examines a recent little-noticed immigration decision from the administration. 

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— Adam Wollner

Anti-Trump progressives see a fundraising boom

The energy on the left during the opening months of President Donald Trump’s second administration hasn’t quite matched the “resistance” levels of his first. But that energy is still out there, and as the first campaign finance reports of 2025 reveal, the most outspoken Democrats in Washington are benefiting from it.

As Ben Kamisar, Bridget Bowman and Joe Murphy report, a handful of vocal anti-Trump progressives posted massive fundraising hauls during the first three months of the year — even though they either aren’t up for re-election in 2026 or won’t face competitive races. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., led the pack, collecting $11.5 million over that span, including almost $10 million from donations of less than $200. He spent $3.2 million and had a whopping $19 million in the bank.

Sanders just won re-election in November. And at 83, he seems unlikely to mount a third presidential bid in 2028 or seek another Senate term in 2030. 

But he has been holding rallies across the country in recent weeks that have drawn huge crowds alongside another progressive star, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. She raised $9.6 million in the first quarter of 2025 while spending $5 million, leaving her with $8.2 million on hand. Ocasio-Cortez, 35, will face re-election next year in a safe Democratic House seat, but some members of the party are already encouraging her to seek the Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat in 2028, if not the White House. 

As for the other up-and-coming Democrats seeking to fill the party’s leadership void, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., raised $8 million from January through the end of March. He also spent $4 million and had $9.6 million on hand. Like Sanders, Murphy, 51, just comfortably won another term in the Senate last fall, but he may have his sights set on higher office. 

Those fundraising totals are well out of the ordinary for candidates in non-election years without high-profile races on the horizon. By comparison, they dwarf the numbers Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Murphy posted over the same period in 2023.

Some of this cash has flowed to the party’s top candidates in 2026 battlegrounds, too. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., Republicans’ top target for defeat on the Senate map next year, raised an eye-popping $11.2 million.

One thing all four Democrats have in common: They were among the top spenders in the party on fundraising ads on Facebook and Instagram during the first quarter, Andrew Arenge of the NBC News Decision Desk notes. 

Read more takeaways from the new campaign finance reports →

Related read: Rep. Ro Khanna wonders who might lead Democrats in 2028 — while making a case for himself, by Henry J. Gomez 

What to know from the Trump presidency today

• U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said in an order that he has found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in contempt over deportation flights it sent to El Salvador.
• Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., flew to El Salvador to push for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported by the U.S. government. 
• The Trump administration sued Maine for not complying with its push to ban transgender athletes in women’s sports. 
• California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom sued the Trump administration over its sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners, arguing that it was illegal to use certain emergency powers to impose them.
• The NAACP is also taking the Trump administration to court, suing the Education Department over leveraging funding to push schools to cut diversity, equity and inclusion programs. 
• A federal judge blocked a new executive order from Trump punishing a prominent law firm that successfully sued Fox News for promoting false claims of election fraud. 
• Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said he hasn’t heard from Trump since the arson attack on his home Sunday. The man accused of setting fire to Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence early Sunday dialed 911 after the attack and suggested he was upset by Shapiro’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to newly released search warrants.

The Trump immigration move that flew under the radar

By Andrea Mitchell

Many people across the country are galvanized by the case of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, as Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, discovered when angry participants confronted him at a town hall. 

Almost unnoticed amid the furor was an order the Department of Homeland Security issued late Friday to send tens of thousands of people back to Afghanistan and Cameroon, where they could face starvation, imprisonment or death.  

It is a familiar tactic when administrations of both parties want to “bury” unfavorable news: releasing decisions just before the weekend. (Script writers on “The West Wing” used to call it “take out the trash day.”) 

The DHS move canceled a program giving Temporary Protected Status in the United States for almost all Afghan and Cameroonian asylum-seekers who qualified. As of late last year, 9,000 Afghans and 3,000 people from Cameroon were in the program, according to the Congressional Research Service. Under the program, they can remain in the United States temporarily and get jobs. Many of the Afghans are women, who were targeted by the Taliban for their gender, especially those linked to the U.S. military, the State Department or civic organizations during decades of American war and occupation.  

In Cameroon, many of those affected are minorities in a country ravaged by racial and ethnic violence. An estimated 900,000 people in Cameroon are displaced internally, and 60,000 have fled the country. The United Nations reports that Cameroon is also harboring refugees from Nigeria, Chad, Niger and the Central African Republic, countries that also suffer from extreme poverty and ethnic strife. 

James Sussman of the International Rescue Committee told NBC News that sending those people back to their homelands is a violation of both federal and international law, even as asylum-seekers already face yearlong delays because of backlogs. And last week, the State Department canceled humanitarian aid programs in Afghanistan provided by what used to be the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

Sussman said, “People who come to the U.S. under the protected status are supposed to be protected from being sent back to the turmoil in the countries from which they’ve come.”   

Critics say a common thread connects the administration’s treatment of those about to lose their Temporary Protected Status with its abrupt cancellations of student visas and deportations of people like Abrego Garcia. In all such cases, they say, there is a lack of due process and humanitarian concern that undergirded past Republican and Democratic administrations. 

That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner.

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