“A mother got off the bus with a newborn baby. . . . Six days old. Almost three days they were on a bus.” An immigrants’-rights advocate describes receiving busloads of migrants from Texas in New York City.
A few months ago, immigrants’-rights organizations in New York City began receiving curious legal documents in the mail. The documents requested that the groups send lawyers to immigration hearings on behalf of clients whom they had never heard of before. Soon, large numbers of people began showing up at the organizations’s offices in the city.
On Thursday, I called Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, which is among the oldest and largest immigrants’-rights organizations in the country. Lately, he has spent much of his time at the Port Authority, as part of an effort mounted by community-based organizations, mutual-aid groups, and the city to create an ad-hoc welcome center for the new arrivals.
“We do not provide services in our offices. We never do that here. We do it in the community. In July, we started asking other organizations if they’d been seeing this happen and a few said, ‘Yeah, we’ve been getting a ton of Notices to Appear, and we’ve been getting tons of people coming to our offices.’ The mayor’s office said that they were aware of an increase of asylum seekers in the shelter system.
“Historically, when folks have migrated to New York City, there’s always been a familial, friend, or community connection who people are able to stay with. The big difference here is that folks don’t. They need support and access to shelter and housing right now. I was thinking about this the other day. My family, when they got here, stayed with a relative. And that relative, when they got here, had stayed with another relative. And I don’t remember who the first person was in that chain.
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