Millions of immigrants are at risk, and everyday, families are needlessly and inhumanely torn apart.
In what can only be described as an all-out war on immigrant communities, we are enduring the worst attacks on basic civil liberties and human dignity in recent memory. This administration continues to target and criminalize immigrants of color and seek their deportation through aggressive immigration enforcement. Unscrupulous employers exploit immigrant workers and subject them to unsafe working conditions, knowing they are less likely to speak up. Local police discriminate against, and often re-victimize, undocumented trans people and survivors of hate violence. Unethical landlords harass and neglect tenants in an effort to drive them out of gentrifying neighborhoods.
Many feel that their only option is to live in the shadows, unable to access critical services like healthcare, education, and legal support for themselves or their loved ones for fear of abuse and deportation.
Fighting back with critical services and organizing
We provide a full range of services to 17,000 people each year, including legal representation in immigration, housing, and worker exploitation cases. We teach English as a second language to 1,600 people annually, and have helped over 12,000 people gain US citizenship.
In the aftermath of the election, we led or co-led most of the post-election mobilizations in New York City to drive the broader immigrant rights resistance. We created a rapid response network throughout NYC and Long Island to respond to rumors of ICE raids around the clock and immediately deploy support teams to impacted families.
We provide Know Your Rights training to thousands of people with a new Deportation Defense Manual, and help parents create child custody plans in case they are deported. When federal immigration policies threatened the data of undocumented individuals in the IDNYC program, we successfully pushed the city to stop retaining the information. After a decade of organizing with our allies, Governor Cuomo signed an executive order to protect the data of immigrant New Yorkers.
And when the federal government announced it would end DACA, we worked around the clock to file renewal applications ahead of the unjust and arbitrary deadline, and made personal calls to almost 1,000 DACAmented young people to provide support and guidance.
- We filed the first federal lawsuit challenging the termination of DACA with six Dreamers who are also MRNY members.
- We provide legal representation in thousands of immigration, housing, and worker exploitation cases each year.
- We led the campaign to win the strongest anti-wage theft legislation in the country, helping to protect immigrant workers vulnerable to exploitation.
- We provide Know Your Rights training to thousands, and help parents cope with a sudden loss of income and create child custody plans should they be taken by ICE.
Luba Cortés arrived from Mexico in 1999 with their mother. With MRNY’s help, they applied for and obtained DACA. Luba joined our Youth Power Project, and now, Luba is our youth organizer, organizing other young people around urgent issues our communities face. But Luba’s mom remains undocumented, and they share her story in their New York Times op-ed, “My Undocumented Mom, America’s Housekeeper.”
“None of the people whose houses my mom has cleaned know that she was a lawyer, that she is an intellectual and passionate person,” Luba writes. “We will have to keep fighting to live without fear in this place we call home. But in moments like these…I think of the night that we crossed the border. As we were running, I fell and for a moment looked up to the night sky, scared that I would be left behind. But my mom was there, she was there all along — she picked me up, and we started running again.”
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