Escape to New York
Central American Legal Assistance (CALA) provides free or low-cost legal services to New York’s immigrant community. Our mission is to protect and defend Central and South American asylum-seekers and to expand the civil rights of all immigrants. CALA has had an open door to newly-arrived immigrants since 1985. CALA’s staff are all bi-lingual. Based in a Brooklyn church, CALA offers immigrants a home base for advice or counseling as well as legal representation. We have put thousands of Latino immigrants on the road to citizenship.
Francisco Goldman in the New York tells about work of CALA and the people that the organization serves. The article begins:
I first learned of Central American Legal Assistance in the fall of 2009, from a letter mailed to my Brooklyn address that I read months after it was posted, having just returned from a long summer in Mexico. The letter was written by Betsy Plum, a CALA caseworker, and described the situation of a Guatemalan woman living in the metropolitan area who was in deportation proceedings while also seeking political asylum. In Guatemala, the woman had discovered that her romantic partner had been involved with men previously linked to the 1998 murder of the Guatemalan bishop and human-rights activist Monsignor Juan José Gerardi Conedera . . . . Alarmed by what she’d discovered about her partner’s deepening entanglement with this group, the Guatemalan woman had sought to leave him. Months later, she was kidnapped, tortured, and repeatedly raped. A relative whom she was suspected of having told about what she’d witnessed was murdered. Through a subterfuge, she managed to escape her imprisonment and fled to the United States, where for a few years she lived the hidden life of an undocumented migrant, until she was detained by U.S. authorities.
KJ