Our client Silvia was recently granted asylum in the US! Here is her story:
“‘They are shooting at us! They shot him!’ people were screaming,” recalls Silvia. The man was an active member of OFRANEH, an organization that protects the Garifuna culture and their ancestral community lands in Honduras.
The Garifuna are a black indigenous people whom British colonizers exiled to a deserted Honduran island. The Garifuna people then created communities along the coast, but the Honduran state marginalizes them and denies their claim to land.
Silvia recalls a particularly traumatizing day while she was participating with OFRANEH in their effort to recover communal lands under threat. Garifuna community members were at risk of eviction from their collective lands for real estate gain by an influential family. As Silvia, her fellow OFRANEH members, and Garifuna community members stood in protest within their collective property, suddenly a gunshot rang out and a Garifuna man fell to the ground.
Everything happened very fast. “I felt paralyzed by fear,” says Silvia. “I thought they had killed him. I thought they were going to kill me, kill everyone.” Community members were pointing at men in plain clothes outside the fence, saying that they had fired the shot. These men were members of the influential family. Even after the man was shot, the police on the scene did nothing to help, so community members had to pick him up from the ground and take him to the hospital.
Silvia was terrified she would end up in a similar violent situation again and felt intimidated for her involvement with OFRANEH. To make things worse, Silvia was later forced out of her home by armed members of an extremely violent street gang because they believed that Silvia had witnessed a crime they had recently committed in her neighborhood. Without help or protection from the police, she realized she could no longer stay in Honduras, so she began the difficult journey to the United States to safeguard her life.
She could no longer contact her family out of fear they would be persecuted. Alone in a new land, she turned to TakeRoot Justice, a New York nonprofit, to take on her case.
After arriving to the U.S., she learned that the Honduran government was prosecuting OFRANEH members for still protecting the Garifuna community’s lands. Members of OFRANEH were being arrested under the false charge of “usurping land.”
“They could put me in jail, or they could kill me,” Silvia feared.
Faced with over 40 pages of documents that needed translation, which would have cost upwards of $1800 commercially, TakeRoot Justice reached out to the Refugee Translation Project. We provided the translations of these documents for Silvia’s asylum application free of charge, which was only possible thanks to the generous support of our donors. We were thrilled to learn that Silvia was granted asylum last month, allowing her to finally find peace and safety.
The Refugee Translation Project is committed to providing free and timely services to our clients, which play an instrumental role in positive asylum outcomes. Our current Summer of Refuge fundraising campaign supports our continuing efforts to provide these crucial services to more asylum seekers.
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