Protecting the Promise of New York City for Immigrant Communities
As part of the Make Our Voices Heard campaign granted by the New York Community Trust, Immigrant ARC curated guest blog posts, each written by one of our members. These insightful and informative pieces highlight their insights, learnings, and recommendations around the current issues in immigration and immigration legal services. The posts reflect only the views of the member organization authoring them, and don't necessarily reflect the views of I-ARC, or our coalition as a whole.
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By: Joseph Celestin, social work assistant, Policy & Advocacy, and Kevin Siegel, staff attorney, Civil Rights & Law Reform, Brooklyn Defender Services
In 2022, Republican-led states took it upon themselves to transport newly arrived and paroled asylum seekers to different parts of the Northeast, including New York City and, more recently, to California, sardonically calling on so-called sanctuary cities to honor their commitments to immigrants. What began as an inhumane political stunt has elucidated New York City and the Adams administration’s struggle to provide adequate housing and social services to immigrant communities. This moment represents an opportunity to safeguard New York City as a place where immigrants have the tools and ability to thrive.
Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS) is a public defense office whose mission is to provide outstanding representation and advocacy free of cost to people facing loss of freedom, family separation and other serious legal harms by the government. We represent approximately 22,000 people each year who are accused of a crime, facing loss of liberty, their home, their children, or deportation. Our staff consists of specialized attorneys, social workers, investigators, paralegals and administrative staff who are experts in their individual field. BDS also provides a wide range of additional services for our clients, including civil legal advocacy, assistance with educational needs of our clients or their children, housing, and benefits advocacy, as well as immigration advice and representation. BDS’ Civil Justice Practice aims to reduce the civil collateral consequences for the people we serve who are involved with the criminal, family, or immigration legal systems. Since 2009, BDS has counseled, advised, or represented more than 16,000 clients in immigration matters, including deportation defense, affirmative applications, advisals, and immigration consequence consultations in Brooklyn’s criminal court system.
In this blog post, we will provide a brief overview of New York City’s response to the newly arrived asylum seekers, examine the support the city government is currently offering, and provide additional, concrete recommendations for the areas the city is failing to honor its promises to support immigrant communities and families.
So, how did this begin? In August 2022, Republican governors in Texas and Florida engaged in a political stunt in which they bussed newly arrived asylum seekers in their states to sanctuary cities and jurisdictions far from the Southern border. In addition to those transported by other states, many people have continued to travel to New York on their own, as they have for years—and decades—because of their own community networks and the opportunities for stability.
Since spring 2022, more than 65,000 asylum seekers have arrived to New York City. There has been widespread concern over the adequacy of city initiatives to provide housing and social services. Many people are returning to the Port Authority Bus Terminal to seek services, creating an unofficial resource center manned by newly arrived immigrants, community members, and aid workers. The Adams administration created plans to help people access social services upon their arrival to New York City, but operational and implementation details remain scarce. These initiatives include the Asylum Seeker Resource Navigation Center, intended as a place where people can enroll in health insurance and schools, schedule healthcare services and appointments, and access resources like mental health counseling and immigration legal services. However, there is only one physical location, at the American Red Cross in midtown Manhattan, and the other locations are direct services organizations. The Adams administration also announced in March 2023 that it was creating the Office of Asylum Seeker Operations, but there has been no further information regarding its implementation.
Similarly, the city has tried various methods to provide access to housing. In October 2022, Mayor Adams opened several tent camps across the city to house asylum seekers. Advocates, rightfully, strongly opposed housing newly-arrived people at the sites, as did several City Councilmembers.
Not only did the tent camps not comply with city rules for congregate shelters, but there were also concerns related to capacity, accessibility to public transport and social services, and the weather, as winter approached. The city closed one camp on Randall’s Island just one month after its opening. To stem some of the overflow from the humanitarian relief centers, and to save face after the closing of the Randall’s Island facility, the city transitioned some people into hotel housing.
Just a few months later though, after the opening of a fifth humanitarian relief center at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook, the city attempted to force people to move out of hotels and into the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. Newly arrived asylum seekers, advocates, and allies rallied against this forced move, describing the new humanitarian relief center as “barracks-like.” Chief among the concerns about the potential new housing were the low temperatures inside the facility, a lack of adequate places to store personal possessions, and sleeping arrangements being cots in a communal space. Despite these concerns, the city engaged police and sanitation workers in destroying a camp of protestors that had sprung up around the Watson Hotel, which had been a city-sponsored housing facility. The city already has a blueprint for how temporary housing, coupled with access to services, can help create stability through the MOCJ transitional hotel housing program. The program has been successful in helping formerly incarcerated New Yorkers access services while providing them the housing and stability they need to reacclimate to the world outside of the carceral system, but despite success is currently at risk. Newly arrived immigrants are, too, learning how to navigate a new city and country, and should have access to a similarly structured program.
The lack of adequate, permanent housing, as well as the lack of access to comprehensive resources, has had a negative impact on newly arrived immigrants and their communities. Immigrant New Yorkers, including asylum seekers, face many barriers to accessing and maintaining affordable housing. This includes delays in obtaining work permits and lack of access to credit/credit reports and banking systems. These delays make it difficult for recently arrived immigrants to secure housing in NYC. BDS previously testified before the City Council to express support for removing barriers to shelter and accessing and using the city’s voucher and rental assistance programs, noting that the problems newly arrived immigrants face with the shelter intake process are endemic to the system. Moreover, without a permanent mailing address, the city is setting people up for failure in their immigration proceedings. Without a permanent address, people are unable to receive notifications for check-ins, interviews, or court hearings from immigration authorities, or decisions on pending immigration applications for asylum or work authorization. This is to say nothing about the psychological and emotional impact the lack of stable housing and resources has on people who have already experienced trauma in their home country and during the journey to the United States in search of safety. Moreover, in May 2023, the Adams Administration used asylum seekers as an excuse to take steps to suspend the right to shelter for unhoused people, families, and children to allow the city to turn them away. This move is not only completely unacceptable and infringes on crucial and longstanding rights, but it will also have repercussions far beyond newly arrived asylum seekers.
Further, given the policing of communities of color and immigrant communities in New York City, there is concern that newly arrived immigrants might be policed, and in turn, detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or jeopardize immigration relief. Lack of adequate housing and resources could add to the vulnerable population in our city that is susceptible to low-level arrests and crimes of poverty. On the flipside, as the city and state governments respond to red-herring concerns about public safety across New York, there has been a renewed interest in the perennial false narrative that immigrants contribute to rising crime rates.
We must stop thinking of our newly arrived neighbors as an “influx of migrants,” and realize that they are now New Yorkers. This critical juncture presents New York City with the opportunity to shore up its promise of sanctuary for immigrants. To do that in good faith, though, requires the city to develop a system for delivering comprehensive social services to all New Yorkers, ensuring access to housing, employment, resources, and full legal representation. The city should address the legal services needs for all low-income immigrants and ensure full representation in immigration proceedings. New York City is a place where immigrants have arrived and settled for decades—this lies at the center of the city’s essence. New York City must honor its promise of making a good-faith effort to ensure our immigrant communities have the resources they need to succeed and thrive.
