# America First Legal **America First Legal (AFL)**, legally the America First Legal Foundation, is a 501(c)(3) litigation and complaint shop founded on April 6, 2021 by [[Stephen Miller]] with [[Gene Hamilton]] and other first-term Trump administration alumni. It was conceived explicitly as a right-wing counterweight to the ACLU: an organization that would use lawsuits, FOIA requests, civil-rights complaints and administrative petitions to attack diversity programs, immigration policy, "woke" corporate practice and the administrative state. Between the two Trump terms it was Miller's institutional base; since January 2025 it has operated as an outside arm of the policy apparatus Miller now runs from inside the White House. ## Leadership and the Miller-to-Hamilton handoff Miller was president from founding until he returned to government as White House deputy chief of staff for policy in January 2025; NOTUS reported he took a large cash bonus from AFL on the way out. Hamilton, a co-founder and the group's general counsel, went with him as Deputy White House Counsel. In the interim Reed Rubinstein ran the organization as senior vice president until his Senate confirmation as State Department legal adviser, with Dan Epstein as vice president. Hamilton returned as **president on June 24, 2025** (AFL press release). Former acting attorney general [[Matthew Whitaker]] has served as executive director. The pattern — leadership rotating between AFL and the executive branch — is the organization's defining feature: it is staffed by people who write the policy in one year and defend it in court the next. ## Funding AFL's money is concentrated and largely anonymous. Per IRS filings compiled by SourceWatch, revenue went from $6.4M (2021) to $44.4M (2022), and the [[Bradley Impact Fund]] — the donor-advised vehicle affiliated with the [[Bradley Foundation]] — supplied about $27.4M across 2021–22, more than 60% of the total. [[DonorsTrust]] grants grew from $3.2M in 2023 to **$21.3M in 2024** (NOTUS, November 20, 2025), of which $20.7M was for general operations and the remainder earmarked for election-related work: "election integrity," monitoring, and legal defense. Both vehicles are pass-throughs, so the ultimate donors are not disclosed. ## Docket — what the litigation is for AFL's cases are chosen for policy leverage rather than volume. Representative work: - **Race-conscious federal programs.** Represented white farmers challenging the American Rescue Plan's debt relief for "socially disadvantaged" farmers; a preliminary injunction issued in June 2021 and Congress later repealed the program. - **Anti-discrimination law.** Won a November 2022 ruling that the Affordable Care Act's nondiscrimination provision does not reach sexual orientation or gender identity. - **Immigration.** Joined Texas's January 2023 suit against the federal migrant-parole program; filed on Title 42 and asylum rules; the immigration docket is the continuation of Miller's first-term agenda by other means. - **[[DEI]] and corporate practice.** Dozens of EEOC complaints and demand letters against corporate diversity programs, timed to the post-[[Affirmative Action]] legal environment after *SFFA v. Harvard*. - **Voting.** After Trump's March 2025 executive order demanding documentary proof of citizenship on voter-registration forms, AFL petitioned the [[Election Assistance Commission]] to add the requirement to the national form — the same requirement the [[SAVE Act]] would impose by statute and that the [[Honest Elections Project]] and [[Hans von Spakovsky]] have promoted through [[Heritage Foundation]] channels. In July 2026 Trump removed both Democratic EAC commissioners and the lone Republican resigned, leaving the commission without a quorum to rule on the petition — or to perform any of its statutory functions — ahead of the [[2026 Midterms Hub]]. Demand the change, then hollow out the body that would evaluate it: the petition is the clearest example of AFL as a two-step instrument. See [[Voter Suppression]] and [[Proof of Citizenship Requirement]]. ## Position in the ecosystem AFL sits in the [[Conservative Legal Movement]] alongside the [[Article III Project]] and the [[Federalist Society]] pipeline, but with a different function: where those bodies select and confirm judges, AFL manufactures the cases the judges decide, and it does so in coordination with the administration whose policies are at issue. It was named in the [[Project 2025]] architecture and is a recurring node in the [[Right-Wing Catholic Ecosystem]] and [[Christian Nationalism Lexicon]] pages because of its personnel overlap with those networks. Its use of [[SLAPP Lawsuits]]-style complaints against corporate and academic targets is documented on that page. ## See Also - [[Stephen Miller]] - [[Gene Hamilton]] - [[Election Assistance Commission]] - [[Voter Suppression]] - [[Proof of Citizenship Requirement]] - [[Bradley Foundation]] - [[DonorsTrust]] - [[Article III Project]]