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Since his election, Donald Trump has made clear he’ll goal immigrants as quickly as he takes workplace. As not-for-profits working on the intersection of the immigration, household, and legal authorized methods, we urge the Metropolis Council to take pressing motion to assist to make New York Metropolis a spot of hope and security for the greater than 8 million individuals who name it house and guarantee New Yorkers can belief native businesses to guard their rights and provide assist.
Immigrant New Yorkers within the Metropolis’s shelter system will face a few of the biggest threat: we’ve seen many examples of how the present shelter system violently targets and criminalizes Black and brown immigrant households. We consider it’s going to get even worse.
We can not anticipate immigrant households to belief in our native businesses once they don’t expertise our metropolis as protected and welcoming. With out much-needed modifications in Metropolis regulation, extra households can be pushed additional into the shadows by Trump’s anti-immigrant plans. Despite the fact that New York Metropolis has sanctuary legal guidelines on the books that shield immigrant households, there are crucial gaps we should tackle to assist hold households safely collectively.
The present gaps have precipitated grave hurt for individuals like Jennifer, a newly-arrived asylum seeker who got here to New York Metropolis after a harrowing journey on foot from Venezuela to flee the specter of political violence there. Jennifer sought assist in a shelter, asking for household remedy companies to assist her and her youngsters get well from their traumatic experiences. As a substitute of serving to her, shelter employees reported her to the Administration for Kids’s Companies (ACS). Jennifer didn’t notice she was below investigation. In truth, ACS by no means advised her what her rights had been or the potential penalties stemming from her contact with ACS.
At her subsequent appointment with ICE, which she anticipated to be a routine check-in as she continued to battle her case in immigration courtroom, ICE unexpectedly detained her. Solely later, Jennifer’s lawyer from the Middle for Household Illustration came upon it was because of ACS sharing details about their investigation with ICE, in clear violation of the company’s personal inner insurance policies and New York Metropolis’s assets regulation, which says no metropolis workers ought to spend their time or assets on immigration enforcement. She was in ICE detention for a month. Jennifer and her youngsters are nonetheless affected by the trauma of her detention and their household’s separation as she fights to stay within the U.S. and construct a life right here.
Over-policing of immigrant communities of coloration means tales like Jennifer’s are all too widespread. We hear tales from many long-term and newly arrived immigrant New Yorkers about their interactions with businesses, like Kelvin Josue Servita Arocha, who was detained by ICE in a coordinated raid with NYPD, and Javier Castillo Maradiaga, who the Division of Corrections illegally transferred to ICE custody.
Whereas the sanctuary insurance policies in place are supposed to guard households, we’ve witnessed native businesses violate these legal guidelines with impunity.
Immigrants contribute a lot to our metropolis however as anti-immigrant rhetoric and restrictions have elevated nation-wide, and are poised to focus on tens of millions, we urgently want to guard the authorized rights of all New Yorkers.
We’re calling on the New York Metropolis Council to take pressing motion to cease these abusive ways and to guard immigrant New Yorkers from Trump’s plans to focus on and separate tens of millions of households, particularly a few of the most susceptible people and households in our shelter system.
The Metropolis Council should go Intro 214, a invoice that may allow immigrant New Yorkers to go to courtroom to hunt justice when Metropolis businesses violate the legal guidelines prohibiting them from conspiring with ICE. Intro 214 will create a significant accountability mechanism that may provide rather more safety to immigrant households and a way of recourse if an company breaks the regulation.
We additionally hear from New York households that shelter employees use the specter of contact with ACS as a instrument to exert management and energy over them and different marginalized individuals. The intersections of town’s policing, immigration, and so-called little one welfare system (higher named the household policing system), exacerbate the racial disparities underlying the three methods and the myriad harms stemming from what the intersecting methods produce: a policing-to-deportation pipeline.
The Council should go laws to make sure households know their rights when interacting with ACS. An identical invoice is pending within the state legislature.
If immigrant households are afraid to work together with Metropolis businesses or ask for assist, it places them at elevated threat of violence and exploitation. Our collective security as New Yorkers will increase when everybody, no matter immigration standing, feels protected. The time is now for the Metropolis Council to take motion to make sure our security for the following 4 years and past.
Zoe Schonfeld is Litigation Supervisor, Immigration, on the Middle for Household Illustration.
Yasmine Farhang is Director of Advocacy on the Immigrant Protection Venture.
