Central American Legal Assistance (CALA) provides free or low-cost legal services to New York’s immigrant community. Our mission is to protect and defend Central and South American asylum-seekers and to expand the civil rights of all immigrants. CALA has had an open door to newly-arrived immigrants since 1985. CALA’s staff are all bi-lingual. Based in [...]

Central American Legal Assistance
240 Hooper Street
Brooklyn, New York 11211
(718) 486-6800

We are a short walk from the J, M, & G trains.

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CALA is a 501(c)(3) organization and receives funding from the New York City Council, the Interest on Lawyers Trust Funds Account (IOLA), and many individual supporters.

“In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virture, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“The survivors of these new shipwrecks, those who reach land and are not expelled from it, can look forward to the eternal Calvary of exploitation, intolerance, racism, hatred of their skin, suspicion, and moral degradation.”
- Nobel Prize Winner Jose Saramago, The Notebook