Dear BAJI Community,

As we approach 2024, we’re reflecting on the critical work that BAJI accomplished in 2023 with your generous support. Please click here to enjoy our fun interactive review highlighting some of the ways that BAJI continued fighting for Black migrants and African Americans at the intersection of racial justice and migrant rights. Our individual donors provide us with the flexible funding we needed for all that we did this year, and your donations are even more important now as we prepare for what promises to be a busy 2024. Please donate to BAJI today, and consider becoming a monthly donor to support BAJI’s work in 2024 and beyond.

Now in our 17th year of existence, we continue to bolster our work: organizing in Atlanta, Houston, Oakland, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City; a growing national program with Black migrant youth; a robust legal clinic that represents asylum seekers at the US/Mexico border as well as educate them and their families on their legal options; a growing civic engagement program working with the community on understanding local elections and public communication anchored by political education. 

As an abolitionist organization, we have joined the #StopCopCity efforts in opposition to Atlanta’s police military base that would terrorize Black Atlantans. 

Our seminal report-  Beyond the Border: US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Presence at Racial Justice Protests in Summer of 2020–  was a two-year project with our partners to bring to light the federal government’s heightened surveillance, use of brute force and the profiling of Black and Brown organizers. Beyond the report, we shared highlights on social media and hosted a webinar to share the report’s findings, advising our communities on protecting themselves during protests. 

We continue hosting our annual Protect Black Migrants week, with this year’s theme being “Fighting for Black Folx Protects Black Migrants.” Our organizers hosted in-person conversations and webinars and led direct actions in the cities we are located in. 

There continues to be an influx of Black asylum seekers across the US, and we have shown up across cities. In Los Angeles, we supported the release of over 100 Black migrants from detention; in New York City, we ran a mutual aid program that directly supported Black migrants with personal and hygiene products, transportation and laundry, and translation and interpretation services.  At the US/Mexico border and in Mexico, our legal team runs vigorous bi-monthly legal clinics in multiple languages. 

Our civic engagement work goes beyond elections: we are building a base of politically educated and engaged Black migrants and African Americans pushing for racial justice and migrant rights on the streets and in the glass houses of power.

We recognize that global migration’s push and pull factors are central to our work here in the US. To this end, our team has researched and testified worldwide with recommendations for a more just global migration system. Among other actions, when United Nations experts visited the US to hear from Black and Brown communities on racialized violence, BAJI hosted an event and published a report, Externalizing Asylum, which showed how U.S policies evade international obligations and spread the criminalization of migration into Central America. 

Our statement on solidarity with Palestinians speaks for itself, as our work over the years has demonstrated that we are anti-occupation and genocide. 

Support Black people organizing for racial justice and migrant rights. Your contribution is crucial for our impact and ongoing work. This year we have diversified the ways in which you can donate, please see here the different ways to give to BAJI’s crucial work. 

Thank you for being an integral part of our journey. 

In solidarity,

Nana Gyamfi
Executive Director