In response to these threats, together with partners at CLASP and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), I helped conceive, launched and implemented the multi-sector Protecting Immigrant Families (PIF) campaign, growing it from just a few organizations to over 500 active member organizations from many sectors including anti-poverty, health care, nutrition, disability, senior, and faith-based advocates. 

Operating under intense time pressure and with limited resources, we built a structure that allowed a wide variety of diverse partners to contribute in ways that matched their strengths and capacity. For example, early on, I identified the challenge that the harmful public charge rule was of interest to many groups, but unlikely to be their top priority given the many demands on their attention. We therefore requested opportunities to speak at existing meetings rather than expecting people to join a separate webinar, and identified sector leads to develop targeted template comments that would make it easy for their partners to participate. 

We recognized that we needed both quality and quantity comments to achieve our goals.  "Quality" meant identifying leads to write detailed technical comments that provided the substantive basis for both litigation and the Biden Administration's eventual replacement of the harmful rule. At the same time, we needed a mass engagement strategy to build political opposition to the proposed rule -- without creating additional fear among impacted communities. We set an ambitious goal of generating at least 100,000 public comments and ultimately delivered over a quarter million public comments.