West African Asylum Seekers Find Safe Haven in NYC Volunteer-Run Kitchen

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to a story right here, not far from Democracy Now!‘s studios. As New Yorkers protest escalating ICE raids in the city, some are also volunteering to support newly arrived migrants and asylum seekers, including those from West Africa. I want to turn to a report by Democracy Now!‘s Messiah Rhodes.

MESSIAH RHODES: We’re here in front of Plado, where Cafewal weekday kitchen provides over 150 meals a day. With its origins in supporting West African migrants escaping political oppression and violence from their home country, as well as the violence of colonialism as they journey to the United States, Cafewal provides a warm meal and a safe haven for West African migrants just newly arriving in New York City.

TYLER HEFFERON: So, my name is Tyler Hefferon. I’m the executive director of EVLovesNYC. We are a organization founded back in 2020 with a mission to fight food insecurity all over New York City. In our third year of operations, we started to work with a lot of refugee and asylum seeker populations coming through the city-run St. Brigid migrant reticketing center in the East Village. And at that point, we began to meet a lot of asylum seekers from West Africa who were coming over as single adults to seek asylum from their respective countries.

So, from there, what we started to do is we opened a volunteer program focused on asylum seekers to get them the letters they needed to stay in the New York City shelter system. That began in Ramadan of 2024, where we invited the handful of people that we had been meeting on a close basis to come into our kitchen and prepare authentic West African meals. They just sent us the ingredients. They knew all the recipes by heart, and it was some of their favorite childhood dishes from back home. So, it was a really fun week where every night we would prepare a iftar meal for a different mosque or community organization serving hundreds of New Yorkers who were observing fasting during Ramadan. And that sort of began this impromptu restaurant training program.

About six months later, we founded a full-time kitchen called Cafewal, which means “cafeteria” in the Fulani language. That’s developed to a fuller-scale workforce training program, where the hope is that the people that are getting paid wages to work in our kitchen are getting ready to work in some of your favorite restaurants around New York City. So, we work with different mutual aids, like East Village Neighbors Who Care, to help them with the different supporting services, like English lessons, résumé writing, job applications, all those different supports that we take for granted here as citizens, in addition to the workforce training that they’re receiving in the kitchen every day.

ABDUL KARIM: My name is Abdul Karim. I’m from Guinea. I have been in the Cafewal seven months. I’m cooking here rice and chicken, the salad, the potato.

MESSIAH RHODES: What future do you see in the United States?

ABDUL KARIM: I’m not to come here for looking for money and something. I’m come here for help the people here. When I help the people here, the people will help me one day.

DIAMY BAH: I’m Diamy Bah. It was back in January 2024, I was just trying to find a place where it’s warm, because it was cold at that time. So, at Tompkins Park, they told me about Earthchxrch. It was a warming center for everyone. So I went there, and, you know, I see how the East Village Neighbors Who Care was taking care of the guys. So I was very impressed. And then I proposed myself to be volunteer.

MESSIAH RHODES: Can you talk about the role of interpreters, how interpreters are a part of Cafewal when it comes to the language barrier?

DIAMY BAH: Oh, yeah. For the interpreter, it’s the good thing, because a lot guys here, they didn’t go to school. They just speak Fulani, and it’s very difficult for them to speak English. So, they are very confident to see the guys from their country and speaking their own languages. And to be an interpreter, they are very confident and comfortable to talk about their problem, even it’s very privacy. So, they do a lot of jobs here. So I’m so happy to have them alongside me to help and to continue to run Cafewal.

BRIAN DUGGAN: My name is Brian Duggan. I’m an attorney, and I volunteer for not-for-profit organizations like Cafewal and also provide “low bono” services for and pro bono services for some of the asylees here.

MESSIAH RHODES: Why is it harder for West African migrants to find legal representation compared to others?

BRIAN DUGGAN: Yes, well, it’s very difficult because of the language barriers in a lot of ways, but also because the system itself is so swamped with people applying for asylum, and there’s a low capacity for legal support, and a lot of attorneys require a lot of money up front, which these people are unable to provide. So they rely on a lot of people to provide pro bono services, pro se services, which are self-help-type services, and attorneys such as myself who try to provide low-cost services for them, so they can at least have some support at the hearings.

MESSIAH RHODES: And what countries do you commonly see people come from? And what are they usually escaping from, that you’ve seen?

BRIAN DUGGAN: The countries I’ve been associated with mostly are West Africans. Guinea is one of them, Morocco and also Mauritania. Those three areas have a lot of issues with their government, especially Guinea and Mauritania. They have government control, and most of the asylees here are refugees as ethnic refugees because they belong to an ethnic group called the Fulani, who have been persecuted by the powers in — that are comprised of another ethnic group, the Malinke. And so, historically, since France left Guinea, the government’s been occupied by one dictator after another, and they’ve always persecuted the Fulani. The Fulani make up the largest population, but they’re usually the targets of most of the violence. The government treats them and persecutes them with impunity. They beat them regularly. They have what they call enforced disappearances, where they are taken away from their homes and the families don’t know where they are, and usually have no opportunities to reclaim their bodies after they’ve found out that they were dead. This goes on all the time, and there is no recourse, doesn’t seem to be any kind of pressure for this to abate. So, this results in a lot of refugees coming to the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Special thanks to Democracy Now!’s Messiah Rhodes, Safwat Nazzal and Robby Karran for that report.

On Tuesday, I got a chance to ask New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani about protecting workers from ICE.

AMY GOODMAN: Zohran, can I ask a question about — many of the workers in this city are immigrants. When you met with President Trump, did you get a concession from him around ICE raids and not moving into this city?

MAYOR–ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: When I met with the president, I made very clear that these kinds of raids are cruel and inhumane, that they are raids that do nothing to serve the interests of public safety, and that my responsibility is to be the mayor to each and every person that calls this city their home, and that includes millions of immigrants, of which I am one. And I am proud that I will be the first immigrant mayor of the city in generations, and prouder still for the fact that I will live up to the statue that we have in our harbor and the ideals which we have long proclaimed as being those of the city, but which have too often been ones we do not actually enforce and celebrate on a daily basis. And that is who I will be as the mayor of this city.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, standing with Senator Bernie Sanders. They were walking the picket line with Starbucks workers, who are also going to stage another protest today at 1:00 in front of the Empire State Building. Murad Awawdeh, you are serving on the transition team of the mayor-elect, and the mayor, you’ll be advising him. As you listen to that report of groups that are serving the West African community, and this whole question of how the city will be working with or against the president when it comes to ICE raids, what kind of protection do people have? And what can Mayor Mamdani do?

MURAD AWAWDEH: Well, the first thing is, having a mayor who’s actually going to stand up and fight for New Yorkers is a amazing feat to have in this moment.

The other piece is that we already have numerous sanctuary policies on the books, which the current administration has been running afoul and which DOI, the Department of Investigation, released yesterday a report of several instances where they had to investigate and saw that there was some efforts of collusion from pro-Palestine activists to an NYPD officer going rogue and assisting ICE agents. So, we want to make sure that anyone who’s working for the city of New York is abiding by local laws, including NYPD, DOC and all city agencies. So, an audit of every agency and their communication is absolutely necessary, and then training workers to be able to understand that your job is not to harm and, you know, contribute to family separation or hurting our communities in our city, but it’s to actually uplift all New Yorkers.

Additionally, investing in immigration legal services. You heard the lawyer from EVLovesNYC, which is an amazing member organization of ours that serves thousands of people every year. A big issue is that we don’t have enough immigration lawyers, and we need additional immigration legal services funding from the city of New York.

So, making sure that we’re following the laws that we currently have on the books, expanding where we can, and then making sure that we’re investing in our communities. Forty-three percent of all workers in New York City are foreign-born. Forty-three percent. Fifty percent of small businesses are immigrant-owned, as well. So we need to make sure that we are ensuring that the safety and security of all these folks is protected by the city of New York.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, but we wanted to ask you about this Chinese father and son, 6-year-old son, the father named Fei, the 6-year-old named Yuanxin, who were picked up by ICE, the father sent to an ICE jail. The son, the 6-year-old, no one knows where he is.

MURAD AWAWDEH: The father is currently in Orange County in detention. The son is in OR custody, which means that’s where normally children who are unaccompanied — which is not the situation with this family. The Trump administration is continuing their family separation agenda, and we need to fight back against that, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Murad Awawdeh, thanks so much for clarifying that, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, part of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s Committee on Immigrant Justice.

That does it for our show. Tonight, I’ll be in Sag Harbor on the East End of Long Island, where there will be a 7:30 screening of the film Steal This Story, Please!, about Democracy Now! It’s at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. I’ll be doing the Q&A afterwards with the filmmakers, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. Check out our website at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks for joining us.