He Won Asylum Without a Lawyer. Now He Helps West African New Yorkers Fight Deportation.

Fall’s services came in higher demand around 2023. That year, tens of thousands of West Africans crossed the southern US border seeking safe haven. Many made their way — or were sent — to New York City, which struggled to house them. Private lawyers, publicly funded clinics, volunteers, and nonprofits stepped in to help the new arrivals manage their asylum cases, but struggled to keep up. Since then, hundreds of people have contacted Fall for help with their claims, he said.

Some of them had already paid someone hundreds of dollars to help write the narrative part of their application. “There were so many errors, these poor guys,” Fall said. The stories lacked the granularity that Fall knows immigration judges base their decisions upon. “You have to trace the details precisely. You have to be specific and exact,” he said. Fall emphasized that his skill is in knowing how to ask his clients for the details that matter to a judge.

Mamadou, an asylum seeker from Senegal, wrote the first draft of his asylum narrative himself, in French, then translated it into English using Google. The volunteers who helped him file his initial application told him that the text he had written wasn’t sufficient, but they couldn’t help him improve it. Mamadou asked around and got connected to Fall through a friend.

“He knew all the terms that I was supposed to use for the judge. They were words I’d never heard before,” said Mamadou, whom New York Focus is identifying with a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing his immigration case.

Quality applications are increasingly important as President Donald Trump’s administration works to dismantle the asylum system, taking measures from implementing surprise fees to ordering judges to dismiss cases before they get off the ground. The administration has fired judges who approve higher numbers of asylum cases and ramped up ICE arrests in courthouses, which has deterred Fall’s clients from attending their hearings, resulting in automatic deportation orders.

Before, Fall said, “people could live normal lives” while they applied for asylum. “With Trump, they can’t even live.”

Fall grew up in the small city of Kaédi, in southern Mauritania, where most of the country’s Black, sub-Saharan ethnic groups are concentrated. He was born into a working class ethnic Fulani family of traditional jewelers and grew up speaking multiple languages: Pulaar, Wolof, Soninke, an Arabic dialect, and French. He studied English in university and wrote a thesis comparing north–south racial divisions in the United States and Mauritania.

In addition to teaching, Fall was a cultural organizer, gathering Mauritania’s orchestras for large concerts. The country was reeling from decades of military rule by a lighter-skinned Arabo-Berber group, and the military regimes pitted Mauritania’s various ethnic groups against one another. As a form of activism, Fall organized concerts that brought together ethnicities and castes that rarely mixed.

He organized the concerts with Malouma Mint El Meidah, one of Mauritania’s most famous singers and a vocal critic of the state. The government eventually banned Malouma, whose work blended musical traditions from different ethnicities, from performing or distributing her music. Around the same time, police raided Fall’s house, beating and imprisoning him, separating him from his pregnant wife. “I should have died,” he said. Authorities released Fall after a few days, and he spent much of the rest of his time in Mauritania in hiding.

In the early 2000s, Fall traveled to New York City on a visa as Malouma’s tour manager. Malouma said that she brought Fall along in part because of his English skills. She remembered walking with Fall in Times Square at the end of a long day of meetings, trying to convince him to return to Mauritania with her. Fall decided to stay. “It’s lucky for the United States that he’s there,” Malouma told New York Focus.

Fall applied for asylum, winning his case in about a year. That gave him the ability to live and work in the US indefinitely, as well as apply for permanent residence.

With his working papers and immigration status secured, Fall became a nightclub manager. He continued organizing concerts, bringing famous West African musicians to the US. He also became the president of the Pulaar Speaking Association, a member-based organization promoting cultural exchange and financially supporting Fulani immigrants.

“That’s how I started helping with people’s stories,” Fall said. “Members would come to me with their immigration applications. They knew that I was an English professor.”

At first, Fall translated and edited the narrative sections of people’s asylum applications for free. He eventually began accompanying people to meetings with lawyers, providing free translation for those whose attorneys didn’t have access to a Pulaar interpreter. As more people came to him for help writing applications, he recommended them to lawyers he had gotten to know. Soon, he said, lawyers were calling him asking for clients.

Fall said that he and other Fulani who came to the US in the early 2000s refer to those early days as a time of “mabbude,” a Pulaar verb that means to catch or attain something you’re hunting. It seemed like all his clients were winning their cases.

“I was so proud to help people. I did petitions to help people get their families here,” he said. “I got to see people find jobs, get married, build families.”

Then, Fall said, the immigration enforcement landscape began to change. President Barack Obama’s administration deported nearly 3 million people — more than any other — including many who’d crossed the southern border seeking asylum. The first Trump administration then began its ongoing project of mass detentions and dismantling the asylum system. Still, asylum seekers kept arriving. When West Africans started showing up in New York in large numbers in late 2022, Fall’s relatives were among them.

“I had 22 individuals at my house — sons of my brothers and sisters, other relatives, so many that I simply could not host all of them,” Fall said. Some of those relatives, and then their friends, also became his clients.

Practically all new arrivals needed help from translators like Fall. Many approached him for help, while others, desperate and unfamiliar with the US immigration system, fell prey to scams or sub-par services.

Fall said that he’s had to distance himself from former colleagues who perform shoddy work. He hasn’t spoken to one colleague in years, cutting him off after learning that he was allegedly furnishing his clients with false documents supplied from contacts in Mauritania and Senegal. Some conjured stories for asylum applications whole cloth, he said. Another former colleague falsely represented himself as a lawyer to new clients, Fall said.