A 56-year-old Rohingya refugee died in February after federal immigration officers released him outside a closed coffee shop during brutal winter weather. Nurul Amin Shah Alam spoke no English, struggled with mental health issues, and had spent months in custody following a routine police encounter. Days after his release far from any community support, he was found dead.
The incident has ignited a political awakening in Buffalo's East Side Rohingya community. Two months after Alam's death, the neighborhood remains gripped by fear. Residents carpool in groups of four or five to reach work. Assemblyman Jonathan Rivera reports immigrant congregations emptying as people stay home out of dread. Azimah Jalil, co-founder of the Rohingya Empowerment Community (REC), carries the weight of Alam's fate personally. Her own father has vision problems and limited English. "What if what happened to Amin happened to my dad?" she asks.
Yet from that terror comes determination. The Rohingya, a people historically cautious about confronting state institutions, are now mobilizing. They are pushing for the New York for All act, which would bar local police from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. More broadly, they are demanding accountability for the failures that claimed Alam's life.
The REC, founded just three months before Alam's death, has become the nerve center for this movement. The small hub provides health insurance help and daycare guidance, but it has transformed into something more: a place where residents sign petitions and prepare for rallies. For a community that survived decades in refugee camps across Bangladesh, Malaysia, and other countries without citizenship or legal status, political activism represents a profound shift. "Showing up politically is no small feat," said Jalil.
Jalil's husband, Imran Fazal, co-founder of REC, orchestrated a showing of 40 community members at Alam's immigration court hearing while he remained in detention. He coordinated an international letter-writing campaign demanding Alam's release. In early March, Fazal stood in Niagara Square alongside immigration advocates pressing the state legislature to pass New York for All. "I cannot sleep, and I cannot stay silent knowing that many of our immigrant, refugee and asylum-seeking brothers and sisters are suffering," he told the crowd.
Understanding the Rohingya context is essential to grasping what this community has endured. The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority from Myanmar, labeled by the United Nations as the world's most persecuted minority. Since 1982, Burma's citizenship law has formally excluded them from the country's recognized ethnicities. They have been denied citizenship in their own homeland, stripped of rights to work, travel, and attend school, and subjected to military violence that international investigators have described as genocide.
Their language, an oral tradition with no universally accepted written script, survives only in community memory because they were never permitted to document it. This linguistic erasure became tragically relevant when a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson claimed an officer communicated with Alam using Google Translate. Assemblyman Rivera disputed this claim directly: "It's clear that you cannot, because it's not a language on Google Translate." The absence of Rohingya from that platform is no accident. It reflects the same decades-long systematic erasure that created the conditions of Alam's death.
The REC operates under remarkable constraints. Jalil and Fazal fund the organization themselves, mortgaging their own house. Staff members volunteer without pay. In five months, they have served more than 800 clients by solving problems directly, often through WhatsApp voice messages sent late at night after people finish factory and retail shifts. "I only take basic information," Fazal explains. "And then in one hour we try to solve their problems and they leave."
The couple work part-time jobs to keep the lights on. The center opens for limited hours in the mornings and evenings, plus weekends. Within those hours, they handle everything from asylum paperwork to emergency calls from community members stopped by police.
Both founders draw on deeply personal experience. Fazal fled Myanmar by boat at age 23 without a passport or birth certificate, surviving fifteen days at sea before detention in an Indonesian refugee camp. When he attempted escape, his boat sank, and he spent five years in Papua New Guinea in legal limbo. "I learned English from scraps of paper I found on the ground and practiced with prison guards," he said.
Jalil was born in Myanmar, crossed into Bangladesh as a teenager, and undertook a dangerous boat journey through Thailand to Malaysia, where she interpreted for Rohingya women in medical clinics. When resettled in Buffalo in 2015, one of the first Rohingya families in the area, she never stopped interpreting.
Helping build REC is 28-year-old Ayet Ullah, born and raised in refugee camps in Bangladesh after his parents fled Myanmar in the 1990s. Growing up in camps, he learned that community was the only available safety net. He now organizes community dinners at the center as an alternative to clinical therapy, which many Rohingya find stigmatized or unaffordable. "You just create that environment, you put them there, you leave them alone," he said.
The New York for All act has become central to state budget negotiations, with a growing coalition of lawmakers and advocates demanding its full passage. For Fazal and Buffalo's Rohingya community, the legislation represents far more than a procedural item. It is an attempt to dismantle the pipeline of fear that mirrors the predatory state systems they fled. "As genocide survivors, we have endured immense hardship across multiple countries due to our statelessness," Fazal said. "We never imagined that we would still have to live in fear, worried about police encounters or feeling confined to our homes."
Fazal has represented the Rohingya community at the state capital alongside local organizations. He frames REC's work as reclaiming agency stripped away in Myanmar and in detention centers. A community once denied a written language is now powerful enough to help write the laws of their new home. "You have to have these individuals like us at the table when you are designing policy," he said. "If we are not at the table, you create a program or a policy that will only serve people like you."
Author James Rodriguez: "A community that survived genocide and statelessness should never have to fear dying alone in the cold in the country that promised them refuge."
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