Help La Mif Pay Legal Fees!

Help La Mif Pay Legal Fees!

We are collecting donations to pay for lawyers for the members in our program. Crucially, this will allow our members to attend their immigration hearings online rather than in-person, during this time in which people attending mandated court hearings are vulnerable to detention by ICE, a process that we've been witnessing in the courts firsthand. We are in the process of connecting our members with relatively low-cost lawyers, but they still require initial payments of around $500 to begin working together, and a number of people have hearings coming up in the fall. This seems to be the best and most immediate way to keep our members safe and allow them to continue their court hearings. Our community is extremely appreciative of any help you can provide.

La Mif Migrant Resource Collective

We are a group of friends, volunteers, and West African asylum seekers in Brooklyn who work together to provide essential resources and host cultural enrichment activities. The name "La Mif" is a French slang word meaning Family.

For the past four months, La Mif has been running a “buddy program” that pairs asylum seekers with an English speaker who can help with essential and everyday tasks like looking for work, looking for housing, finding a lawyer, and navigating bureaucracy. For this program, we have run know your rights trainings and clinics on interviewing and applying for jobs, getting connected to city benefits, and more. We have accompanied our members to court and to the hospital, and have paid for traffic tickets and medical fees. We also organize recreational trips like beach days or museum visits. We have been continuing our monthly Film Club (with free halal dinners), which is in its second year, and in the past few months attended a concert by Senegalese star Youssou N’Dour in Brooklyn together and hosted an art show featuring drawings by one of our members.

La Mif's earlier work has included running asylum and work permit application clinics, resume workshops, a job fair, and a theater club. We have distributed medical supplies, hygiene kits, blankets, jackets, food, and other critical resources.

We rely entirely on donations to pay for programming and occasional emergency financial support, and are extremely grateful for any way you can assist us in these efforts. Thank you!