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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.