Background

We urgently need to raise funds for the UK’s only legal helpline dedicated to undocumented migrants.

This government’s hostile anti-migrant agenda is cutting people off from the right to work, denying the most vulnerable access to healthcare, even barring people from renting a home. We need your help to fight back.

Our helpline has been open for 10 years. In that time, our legal experts have helped hundreds of people overcome the hostile environment, secure their status and get on with their lives. But today, more people than ever need support.

Please chip in today, to help us reach more people with life-changing legal support.

Funmi’s story

“My life changed, a total turnaround right from the first time I met Sairah. My contact with her gave me all the hope I lost. She empowered me to keep going and not to give up.”

Funmi had been undocumented for many years when she came to JCWI for help in 2018.

With no legal right to work or access the public safety net, Funmi was struggling to survive. She depended on friends, then strangers, for a place to stay, surviving abuse and a mental health crisis.

Things started to change for Funmi when she found JCWI's helpline. She spoke to Sairah, one of our solicitors, who took the time to understand Funmi's story, what she had been through, and subsequently submitted a claim for asylum.

Finally, Funmi got refugee status, and now she is able to get on with rebuilding her life in the country she calls home.

Funmi's story is one of hundreds. We run the UK’s only helpline dedicated to undocumented people, providing expert advice so people can get the life-changing papers they need. Please chip in so we can continue this work, and help more people like Funmi escape the nightmare of the Hostile Environment.

How you can help?

£10 could help us pick up the phone to someone with nowhere else to go, covering the cost of half an hour of a life-changing phone call

£25 could help us provide an hour of expert legal advice for an undocumented person

£200 could cover the cost of running our helpline for one week, supporting 14 people to begin their journey out of the Hostile Environment.

Please will you support us with a gift today, so more people can secure their status, escape the nightmare of the Hostile Environment, and get on with their lives.

What's at stake?

“The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration” Theresa May in 2012.

10 years ago, the government set about making life unbearable for undocumented migrants.

But no one at the Home Office ever stopped to ask the obvious questions – who is undocumented and why?

If they had, they might have realised that people who have called the UK home for years, even decades, are struggling to keep up with the mind-bendingly complex, and astronomically expensive, visa system.

The government has turned renewing your visa into walking a tightrope.

Shockingly, it’s estimated that 1.2 million people – disproportionately people of colour - have fallen off this tightrope. That’s the populations of Bristol and Glasgow combined cut off from basic rights, forced into dire poverty, barred from working and unable to get on with their lives.

For 10 years, hostility has been government policy. But for every day of those 10 years, we have been fighting back.

The same year Theresa May made her speech, we launched our helpline. We believe it’s the UK’s only helpline dedicated to helping undocumented migrants. It’s a space where undocumented people will be:

• Listened to – we are often the last hope for people with nowhere else to go
• Advised – our expert lawyers help people find the information they need to make an application to the Home Office
• Represented – for the most complex and urgent situations, we take callers on as clients, providing specialist legal advice so they can secure their status and get on with their lives.

We’ve picked up the phone to nearly 250 people this year already, and demand is growing. This work is a lifeline. Please will you donate today so we can be there for more people trying to escape the nightmare of this government’s Hostile Environment?