Lemkin House

About us

Lemkin House is an asylum community in Grand Rapids, West Michigan, offering legal, physical, social, and spiritural support for people seeking asylum in the U.S.

Lemkin House provides asylum-seekers a safe and welcome place to stay and prepare their cases while they undergo the difficult legal and mental transition from asylum-seeker to asylee. It also provides legal assistance to asylum seekers who do not need a place to stay, but who lack financial resources.

Mission
The primary mission of Lemkin House is to provide shelter and support— physical, legal, social, and spiritual— for those people in the West Michigan area who are seeking asylum in the United States.

We are supported and encouraged by many social service agencies, legal clinics, private attorneys, and members of religious and academic communities. We collaborate with other NGOs in order to provide more tailored assistance to a particular community– for example, Rwandan genocide survivors, and trafficking victims escaping violence in Central America.
The name “Lemkin House” was chosen to honor the memory of a man who dedicated his life with an absolute passion to give ethnic slaughter a name and make it a crime. In doing so, we hope to continue his legacy and bring a name left in the shadows back into the light.
Lemkin House Inc was born in Grand Rapids Michigan and began its life in a six-unit apartment house. We served several dozen asylum seekers from all over the world, giving them a free place to stay if they needed it, free legal representation, and food.
After several years, the maintenance, heating, and mortgage bills grew way beyond our ability to pay them, and so we sold the building, and moved our base to Kalamazoo. Instead of buying another building, we began slowly by renting apartment space from an agency serving the working poor, OPEN DOORS. We have kept this apartment occupied ever since.

Maia Justine Storm is an Immigration Attorney and the Director of Lemkin House.

For other net participants we can offer an expert guidance through trained staff, give an expert opinion, procure expert information and establish new contacts in the field of our work.