In 2024, Ray Serrano walked into his first meeting of the Community Solidarity and Safety Coalition, organized by the Anti-Defamation League and the National Urban League and made up of leaders representing various religious movements and marginalized communities. Everyone in attendance was brought together by domestic tragedies. 

For Black representatives, there was the 2015 Charleston, S.C., church shooting that left nine dead. For Jewish attendees, there was the 2018 Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting that killed 11, and for the LGBTQ members, there was the 2016 Orlando, Fla., Pulse nightclub massacre that killed 49. 

“For us, it was Walmart in El Paso, [Texas],” Serrano told eJewishPhilanthropy. Twenty-three people murdered at an El Paso Walmart in 2019. It was the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern American history. Twenty minutes before the shooting, the gunman, Patrick Crusius, posted a four-page anti-Hispanic and anti-immigrant manifesto online, titled The Inconvenient Truth, brimming with conspiracies about Latinos displacing white Americans and taking over the economy and government.

That coalition meeting forged a partnership between the ADL and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization, where Serrano serves as the national director of research and policy. Last month, at the 2026 LULAC National Convention in Fort Worth, Texas, the ADL announced that LULAC would be the latest partner in its Embed program, with the ADL co-funding a new position to research anti-Latino hate.

The announcement comes during a time when ADL has come under increasing fire from both sides of the aisle. From the right, the group has caught flak for its criticism of Christian nationalism and other conservative movements, while on the left, the organization has been denounced for shifting away from its broader civil rights agenda to focus on antisemitism. (Though the organization says it remains committed to fighting all forms of hate.)

In the early 2020s, the ADL began co-funding Embed positions with partner organizations, working with LGBTQ group GLAAD and The Asian American Foundation, with the goal of fostering relationships with other marginalized communities and combatting extremism.

The LULAC-ADL partnership will fund a part-time position for a researcher within the ADL Center on Extremism who will track and collect data that will lead to the first-ever State of Anti-Latino Hate report. That will be used to develop strategies to combat anti-Latino bigotry alongside the FBI, law enforcement and local communities. The goal is to launch the report at next year’s LULAC convention, which will be held in El Paso, to mark the eighth anniversary of the Walmart massacre.

The report will “draw more attention to the idea that xenophobia and anti-Latino hate is not just a Trump thing or Republican thing, it’s a disease that’s in there, it’s been there for a while, and it seems to come out in certain forms and certain environments,” Serrano said. “We can’t legislate ourselves out of this. It’s a culture we have to change. We have to change the national narrative.”

Serrano theorized that anti-immigrant and anti-Latino legislation is caused by hate groups, often seemingly under the guise of political organizations, pushing legislation. The partnership is “a very smart partnership,” he said, because “the resources that ADL can provide in terms of training to track extremism and hate are resources that we so badly need.”

Although discussion for the partnership was in motion before last year, after the 2025 Capital Jewish Museum shooting in Washington, “the conversation took a different dynamic,” Serrano said.

In May 2025, Israeli Embassy employees Sarah Milgrim and her soon-to-be fiancé, Yaron Lischinsky, were shot dead while leaving an American Jewish Committee young leader event. Elias Rodriguez, the gunman who said he killed the staffers “for Palestine,” is Latino. 

“It echoed when Max Sevillia, who’s the [senior] vice president [of national affairs] for ADL, came to our [2024] national convention in Las Vegas, there were a few students that were kind of heckling him and wearing the Palestinian head garb,” Serrano recalled. “A lot of us took a step back, saying, ‘Well, we need to do more work in the Latino community. Somehow they’re not seeing that the struggle of Jews is the struggle of Latinos.’”

When the partnership was announced at this year’s LULAC National Convention, conference organizers were concerned ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt would be heckled, too, and they took murmurs of a possible protest seriously.

“We don’t treat our guests this way,” Serrano remembers board members saying. Prospective protestors are “vilifying a partner that is really trying to right things, trying to track hate, trying to eradicate hate in all forms.”

In the end, Greenblatt’s announcement was well received, and both young and old LULAC members were excited to see partners coming to the table to combat hate, Serrano said.

Post-Oct. 7 and after the Trump administration took office the second time, ADL has outwardly narrowed its focus to “prioritize fighting antisemitism above other concerns,” Greenblatt wrote in an Oct. 16, 2025, opinion piece in eJP. The organization deleted numerous webpages related to civil rights and extremism, especially after the FBI publicly cut its formal ties with ADL — though the organizations still work closely together — after online blowback over its Glossary of Extremism, a digital database that included Turning Point USA, the organization co-founded by slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The ADL has not changed its work to condemn hatred and racism and still seeks to cultivate coalitions with other minorities, Oren Segal, ADL’s senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence, told eJP.

“As somebody who oversees our extremism work and terrorism work at ADL, many of the same extremist networks and online spaces that fuel antisemitism also fuel anti-Latino hate, anti-Black racism, anti-LGBTQ violence,” Segal said. “This has always been true. And our work protecting the Jewish community, the nature of that work has always meant that we are seeing threats against other communities, and we’ve never ignored that.”

Believing ADL can only focus on antisemitism and no other forms of hate is “a false choice,” Segal said. “Hate operates in places where there’s more than one target.” The ADL Center on Extremism “doesn’t have the luxury to ignore other types of hate, because of how it fits into this landscape that we’re dealing with, even just to protect the Jewish community.”

Segal hopes the report can turn the anecdotal stories of anti-Latino hate into data that can disrupt hate and threats targeting the Latino community.

For Serrano, the partnership “is very near and dear,” he said. “I grew up in Idaho in the ‘90s.” He remembers neighbors with swastikas and confederate flags in their windows.

“This stuff is not out of the blue. It’s the legislation. The acts of violence, the hate, the kind of the vitriol that you see online. It’s always organized, and it’s often organized to [target] multiple groups,” he said. “It’s not just [targeting] one group. It’s Jews; it’s Latinos. It’s also the same idea: the tropes that we’re foreign invaders.”

It’s probably “the hardest time” Latinos have “ever experienced,” Serrano said. “We can’t do this alone. We need partners. We need the NAACP. We need the ADL. We need Asian Americans Advancing Justice. We need a million other organizations. To see our struggle in their struggle, and their struggle in our struggle. In some ways, I think we’re starting to get it.”