Help Our Friends in La Mif Protect Migrants from ICE Abductions
Light Industry has, for a little over a year, been hosting a monthly film club with La Mif, a collective of West African asylum seekers and their friends. These events—which are advertised exclusively through migrant networks in New York—are a place where people new to the city can enjoy a meal, a movie, and a space to just hang out, free of charge. We’ve screened classic New York films, great works by directors like Med Hondo and Djibril Diop Mambéty, a Bollywood romcom, a wuxia epic; there’s something for everyone.
Now many in La Mif, already managing a difficult situation, must also contend with ICE’s increasingly draconian tactics, and they need our support to lawyer up, as member Liv Veazey explains below.
You can donate to La Mif’s legal fund here.
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You have probably all seen what is happening in immigration courts right now. I have been present much of the last month, and I have seen fathers taken from children, young men taken from their brothers, and I receive regular messages from friends telling me that someone they know was taken.
One way that people can avoid the dragnet ICE is casting in immigration courts is by getting lawyered up. Crucially, with a good lawyer, most people can hold their hearings online and thus continue their legal proceedings without getting abducted. All evidence so far suggests that conditions in the detention centers are inhumane and virtually everyone I know who is detained has had almost zero access to their lawyers, let alone access to their friends and families. I find it unlikely that they will have a fair shot at making their cases before a judge from within these detention centers.
La Mif is opening a fundraiser to pay for legal fees. I've seen the difference that having access to legal representation makes for people in this situation and it is genuinely the difference between detention and walking free.
The fundraiser we ran last year made $8,000, all of which went towards food, medicine, clothes for job interviews, rent, medical bills, bike repairs, phone bills, traffic tickets, and more. It made a huge difference for our community, helping people to find and keep housing, find jobs, sign legal retainers with lawyers, call their families, avoid debt and criminalization, and even enjoy life in New York.
Many of the people we have already been working with don't have to worry about ICE in the courts, because they already have jobs and lawyers. Many of you contributed to make that possible. We are now raising money to extend the reach of our efforts to the many more people who need it.
Please help out, please send as far and wide as you can. If you have access to any larger platforms through which you can spread the word, please do so.
Thank you,
La Mif Migrant Collective