Internal turmoil has plagued Make the Road New York, the state’s largest immigrant-led community-based organization, with staff speaking out against planned layoffs.
Beginning on May 31, Make the Road New York (MRNY) laid off 32 staff members and reduced the hours of another 15 staff members across five of its community centers. Before the layoffs, MRNY employed 248 people.
With the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrant communities in full swing, staff who spoke exclusively with Documented claim that the organization is failing the very community it claimed to protect.
“If you ask me, I think it’s a capitulation to Trump,” said Exequiel Mignaton, immigration paralegal for MRNY and who is on the staff’s union steering committee. “Management is protecting their jobs and their salary over the community.”
MRNY’s 2023 tax filing, the most recent publicly available, shows that the organization’s expenses exceed its revenue. The 2023 filing reported that MRNY had $31.8 million in revenue but had $33.4 million in expenses. According to the staff union, in 2025, the organization’s financial situation worsened. On March 11, MRNY’s Board of Directors passed a resolution mandating that the organization reduce its operational deficit from 18% to no more than 16% by April 1, 2025, and no more than 12% by June 30, 2025.
Two weeks later, on March 27, MRNY’s management issued a memo to staff announcing the layoffs. Management informed staff that despite intensive fundraising efforts by MRNY’s development and leadership team, the organization was in an untenable financial position. Entering 2025, the memo stated, the organization had a projected budget deficit of roughly $8.3 million, which constituted 25% of MRNY’s overall budget.
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“We have no clear path to significantly close the gap by the end of the year without streamlining existing programming,” the memo read.
MRNY’s memo explained that for the past two years, MRNY had begun instituting several measures to cut costs, such as implementing a hiring freeze, canceling specific events, and restructuring the operations department. They also dipped into $1 million of the organization’s investment savings to help close the funding gap. Despite those efforts, the organization is projected to continue running a deficit for 2025 and 2026, leaving them with little choice but to begin issuing layoffs.
“The organization experienced intense growth under the first Trump administration and then again during the COVID pandemic, growing from approximately 160 employees to over 220,” said Yatziri Tovar, senior manager of media relations for MRNY, in a statement. “Since 2023, however, with a 17 percent cost-of-living increase, paired with inflation, our fundraising efforts have not been able to keep pace and have made our costs unsustainable.”
Of the 32 workers who lost their jobs, three positions in the organizing department will be eliminated. Four legal department positions will be eliminated, which includes two paralegals who provide free immigration legal screenings. Another eight staff members in the MRNY’s health program are set to lose their jobs, as well as an additional eight in the adult education department. MRNY will also eliminate 12 management positions. To further cut costs, MRNY will close its office one day each week, effective July 1.
However, many in MRNY’s newly unionized staff said they were left feeling abandoned by an organization they had grown to love. Monica Navarro, 37, worked at MRNY first as a receptionist, then as a paralegal for 20 years. A single mother of two boys, she said she was devastated to learn that she was going to be let go.
“I raised my kids through here,” she said during a rally protesting the layoffs. “This is how I became the woman I am right now. It’s my whole life that they’re yanking from me. Now they’re literally just pushing me away.”
David Haro, a 51-year-old immigrant from Peru, had worked for MRNY for nine years as an immigration navigator, helping human trafficking survivors obtain U-visas, before being informed that he, too, would be laid off.
Before he began working for MRNY, he had turned to them for help during a wage theft case. But he says the loss of his job has caused him to grow disillusioned with MRNY leadership.
“It was a good place to go to tell your story and feel like you’re not alone,” he said. “This is a great organization, but the leaders are just messing up.”
According to the staff union, which reviewed internal financial information, the 13 highest-paid management positions were scheduled to receive a collective $313,226 in raises this year while staff were being sent pink slips. The salaries of the organization’s three co-executive directors increased collectively by $96,406, while the salaries of two deputy directors increased collectively by $45,108.
“This organization was founded to take care of the immigrant community, not to enrich the people at the top,” said Haro. “If they lived the values of the organization, they would have cut positions at the top, not at the bottom, because this organization is designed to protect the most vulnerable.”
According to Tovar, the union is mischaracterizing the raises leadership has received. After the staff union contract was ratified in early January, Tovar says that the staff and management were all given salary increases to ensure that compensation remained in line with industry standards.
“The average increase for the top 13 paid people was 12.8 percent,” she said in a statement. “The lowest-paid staff saw increases averaging 26.3 percent, with individual increases as high as 37 percent. The base salary for full-time, entry-level staff in administrative positions is $49,000, while most make in the mid-$50,000s after adding increases for experience.”
However, in light of the organization’s financial situation, Tovar stated that the executive directors and deputy directors took a 10% and 5% cut, respectively.
Founded in 2007 after the merger of Make the Road by Walking and the Latin American Integration Center, Make the Road has grown to be the largest immigrant rights organization in the state. With a membership of over 28,000 members across the state, MRNY provides immigrants across New York City, Long Island, and Westchester with vital resources such as healthcare, education, child care, and legal assistance.
The layoffs come after MRNY celebrated the opening of its new 24,000-square-foot community center in Corona, Queens, in 2024. The three-story building cost $36 million to build, most of which was covered by funds from both New York City and New York State, as well as $7.4 million from private financing. The rest, $12 million, was raised through a fundraising campaign, according to Make the Road.
Standing outside the building on a rainy evening last Wednesday, Navarro, along with her laid-off coworkers, held a demonstration demanding their jobs back. She points towards the building she once worked at and shakes her head.
“You’re taking the services away from the community,” she said. “You have this building that costs what, $36 million, and no one is in there — it’s empty.”
Tovar says that the construction of the new building did not contribute to MRNY’s financial deficit, with more than half of the funding coming from government grants earmarked for capital projects only.
“The new Queens center, designed to create a permanent home for our community, was not funded at the expense of our team,” she said in a statement to Documented. “This project, for which a designated capital campaign was launched in 2016 and which we broke ground on in 2019, has been a dream in the making for quite a long time, though we hoped it would open its doors in 2022.”
On March 27, April 4, April 21, and May 20, the union submitted a Request for Information (RFI), which is a formal communication from the union to an employer requesting specific information relevant to their collective bargaining unit. The union demanded that management share internal salary history, job descriptions, a detailed layoff impact assessment, grant information, and complete financial disclosures.
However, the union claims that MRNY required the union to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to see complete grant information. They also claim that they initially refused to share information on manager salary increases and refused to share financial statements. Eventually, management relented and shared the information with the union.
According to the union, after several meetings with management, on May 22, the union staff voted to approve a proposal to management for a one-day pay reduction for all staff, which could save approximately $121,335 and allow layoffs to be pushed back to at least June 30, giving them more time for alternatives to be explored. Management rejected that proposal.
“Over time, the organization has become more and more top-heavy,” said Mignaton. “After the layoffs. We’re talking a one-to-one ratio of management and staff, which is ridiculous.”
Tovar told Documented in a statement that MRNY followed all of the steps outlined in the staff’s collective bargaining agreement for implementing the layoffs and that the union was given a certain amount of time to offer alternatives to management’s layoff plans.
Although Tovar said that they have been in constant communication with the union and complied with every request for information so that staff are able to understand the need for layoffs, the union failed to propose a feasible alternative course of action that would make up for the large deficit MRNY is facing.
“All directly impacted employees were given at least two months’ notice as well as severance pay up to 12 weeks, depending on their longevity in the organization,” she said in a statement. “The union did propose a plan to ask all staff to forgo a day of pay in order to keep laid-off staff on for an additional month. We understand the sentiment behind the proposal, but it is ultimately not a viable alternative to the unfortunate need for layoffs. It is not a long-term solution, which is what the union is being asked to consider.”
Regarding the request made by management for staff to sign NDAs, Tovar confirmed that this was the case.
“We asked some members of the union steering committee to sign non-disclosure agreements because we were sharing sensitive financial information that pertained to our funding sources and individual staff members’ salaries, including many staff who are not members of the executive team and are entitled to privacy,” she said. “However, all of the information was provided.”
As of this week, the layoffs have not been reversed. Still, workers like Haro are unwilling to give up the fight to get their jobs back.
“If we don’t win this, the union is going to be for nothing.”
