Watch the Panel Discussion

Adama Bah, a community organizer, serves asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants. She arrived in the United States at the age of 2 and at the age of 16, her whole world changed. The FBI raided her apartment and handcuffed her, along with her father. She was detained and told she was “illegal.” Her father was deported. Adama was allowed to stay but forced to drop out of school and support her family. Now Adama tells her story to call attention to the plight of others like her through her book, Accused: My Story of Injustice. Adama has been featured in Patriot Acts, a book about post 9/11 injustice and Adama, a shot documentary film. She also recently was awarded funds from The World Education Services (WES) Mariam Assefa Fund to continue her work in assisting asylum seekers in New York City.

Rabbi Barat Ellman is a rabbi, professor and professor activist committed to anti-racism, criminal justice reform, and undocumented people’s rights. She teaches theology, Judaism and Biblical literature in the Fordham University Theology Department, and has taught in adult and interfaith education settings as well as through the Bard Prison Initiative. She is a member of Tirdof: New York Jewish Clergy for Justice, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and the Advisory Committee for Faith Communities for Just Reentry, a coalition organized by Trinity Church Wall St.

Eileen Markey is a reporter and teacher of who writes about urban policy, social movements and the role of religion in the public square. A graduate of Fordham (RH '98) and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Markey is an assistant professor of Journalism at Lehman College of the City University of New York.  Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Citylimits, Village Voice, New York Public Radio, New York Magazine, Commonweal, America and a variety of other outlets. In 2020, she reported from the migrant camp at the Matamoros/Brownsville border for The Daily Beast. Markey is the author of A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura and is the editor of Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism that First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and the American Epidemic of Corruption, an anthology of the work of Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett. She is at work on a book about the community movement that resisted the destruction of the Bronx in the 1970s and 80s.

Miriam Ford, PhD, FNP-BC, was until recently the Associate Dean of Nursing at Mercy College and now teaches in Mercy's Family Nurse Practitioner Program and while also working as a Nurse Practitioner in a community health center in the Bronx. Currently she is also providing health care to newly arriving migrants through NYC’s Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center (HERRC). She’s been involved in issues of Central American justice and migration issues and peacemaking since the 1980s and worked with the Jesuit Refugee Service in El Salvador in 1992. She co-founded and ran a free clinic for undocumented adults in East Harlem. In recent years she’s provided crisis medical care at the US-Mexico border on multiple trips and long served in the human rights clinic at Mt Sinai, providing psychological and medical exams for people applying for asylum.

Shivani Parikh is a Stein Scholar, REAL Scholar and Crowley Scholar at Fordham Law School, where she is a second-year student. She is a board member of Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus and a member of the Student Advisory Board of Fordham Law's Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer's Work. She is committed to trauma-informed, movement/community lawyering that expands immigrants’ rights, curtails the War on Terror’s surveillance project, and provides legal support for our marginalized and disenfranchised Desi families who are building power.