For decades, The Foundation For The Carolinas (FFTC) has supported causes ostensibly “dedicated to the collective strength of communities.” Beneath this altruism, the FFTC quietly shields their largest donor, anti-immigration funder Fred Stanback Jr., who contributed 64% of the foundation’s 2014 revenue.

FFTC and its President, Michael Marsicano, have refused to cut off Stanback, even in the face of public backlash and criticism over some of its beneficiaries which include anti-immigrant groups FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA. These organizations, founded or aided by white nationalist and eugenics proponent John Tanton, have had an enormous influence on immigration policy in the Trump Administration. According to financial records, from 2006-2017, the foundation provided more than $23 million to efforts to restrict immigration in the U.S.

Fred Stanback, heir to the headache-powder fortune, is one of North Carolina’s biggest donors to environmental causes, and has funded an internship program in his name at Duke University since 1995. For fifteen years, Stanback placed students in internships at FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA, until Duke pulled the groups from the program in 2014 after a report from Indy Week. Stanback and Tanton connected over their shared interest in overpopulation, and over the years Stanback has donated millions of dollars to groups Tanton founded or helped to found, both through his contributions to FFTC and directly to anti-immigrant groups such as FAIR. Like Tanton, Stanback admired the virulently racist novel The Camp of the Saints, and once purchased $5,000 in copies of the book to distribute. In a 1995 memo on a meeting between the two men, Tanton noted that they had discussed sterilization, and that Tanton had brought up the Quinacrine sterilization method. Quinacrine is a drug that has been used as an off-label form of female sterilization. The Quinacrine sterilization method is a dangerous and painful procedure, and evidence indicates that it has been disproportionately and coercively performed on low-income women of color in developing countries.