TESTIMONY
Manuel Castro, Commissioner, Mayor's Office for Immigrant Affairs (MOIA) on Immigration Support Services and Response to Humanitarian Crises
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11 min
Manuel Castro presents an overview of the Mayor's Office for Immigrant Affairs' (MOIA) key initiatives and services supporting New York City's immigrant communities, with a focus on the past fiscal year's achievements and future plans.
- MOIA's programs include the immigration legal support centers (Action NYC), immigration legal support hotline, and asylum seekers legal assistance network (Aslan).
- The office has expanded its language access team, providing services in over 50 languages and working to improve city-wide language accessibility.
- Castro highlights MOIA's community engagement efforts, which have made over 54,000 touchpoints with community members, including outreach, support, and immigrant media roundtables.
- The testimony touches on MOIA's role in responding to the SLM Secret Humanitarian Crisis, detailing immediate on-ground support for asylum seekers and the establishment of navigation centers and the immigrant peer navigator program.
- Finally, Castro acknowledges the breadth of MOIA's work, forthcoming in an annual report, and emphasizes the collaboration with the council on immigrant affairs.
Manuel Castro
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Thank you, Tara.
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I was in committee on immigration.
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In committee on finance for holding this budget hearing.
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My name is Manuel Castro, and I am the commission of the mayor's office of American Affairs.
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I am joined by Deputy Chief of Staff Jasmine Sanchez, Executive Director of Legal Support Initiatives Tom Tortorici and Director of the asylum's Secret Office of Operations Molly Schafer.
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First, I would like to thank council member Hanif for her work and dedication as chair of this committee over the last 2 years.
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I would also like to welcome chair Alexa Avelis to her new role as chair of this committee, and I look forward to working closely with you and your staff.
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The following testimony will highlight 5 key areas of Moia's work in the past fiscal year and that we are looking to further develop in the next fiscal year.
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These are Moieng's immigration legal programs, Moieng's English learning program, Moieng's language access work, Moia's community engagement work and Moia's role in responding to the SLM Secret Humanitarian Crisis.
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1st, Moia's immigration, legal programs.
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Moia's immigration legal programs include Moia's immigration legal support centers, also known as Action NYC.
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Moia's immigration legal support hotline.
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Moia's asylum secret legal assistance network also known as Aslan, Moia's patient response initiative, Moia's rapid response legal assistance program, and Moia's immigrant rights program.
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Together, these initiatives along with other efforts across New York City government seek to expand access to New York's immigrant communities with immigration legal support.
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Moyer's specific role is to reach hard to reach communities and develop local capacity within these communities.
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To do so we contract with nonprofit providers to achieve this work, acknowledging the critical role nonprofits play in reaching communities where they live, and cultivating, trusting, and ongoing relationships with them.
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In 2023, Moyah's immigration legal support centers conducted over 14,000 comprehensive legal screenings and opened over 5600 new cases.
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Along with these centers, Moyer Overseas And Immigration Legal Support hotline available to all New Yorkers for basic consultations and referrals in 2023, more than 60,000 people called our hotline.
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The asylum seekers legal assistance network or Aslan meet up of innovative partnership between Moia, community based legal service providers, and the City University of New York provide asylum seekers both in and out of the city shelter system with information, individualized screenings, and applications assistance.
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The network also provides immigration legal orientations to frontline staff such as shelter workers and self help workshops for asylum seekers.
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So that they may better understand their rights and responsibilities in the immigration process.
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Since launching in 2023, awesome.
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Has made more than 8000 people participate has more more than 8000 people participating as line information sessions and workshops.
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And more than 3300 community members received individual consultations with assling legal staff, which is followed by brief advice application assistance, either ISALM TPS, and work authorization, post application assistance, or referral to legal help.
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Now Moia's language access work.
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Moia made significant strides in building out the language access team since last year, in the last year, which now includes 20 in house experts and advisers on language access, up from 3 when I started my time at Moya.
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This includes 12 language access specialists who not only serve as professional linguists, but also as important links to their language communities.
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The team's main goal is to offer technical assistance to mayor offices, city agencies, and key external partners.
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It also provides translation and inter interpretation services for mayor offices and reports on city governments language access work.
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And local implementation relating to language access.
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To provide critical information to both long time and recently arrived in America, New Yorkers, Moria translated a range of materials into over 50 languages.
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Morris language access team provided translated communication materials, including signage, website resources, translation and interpretation services, service information, emails, and scripts, and so on.
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Because of these translated materials, our team has been working to better equip the city to provide shelter services, legal support referrals, shelter, protocol updates, and materials to promote humanitarian and emergency response relief.
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Language specialists also provide on-site language support to in Arabic, well, French, Spanish Mandarin, and Cantonese.
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To newly arrived immigrants at the Asalam application help center, federal work authorization clinic, humanitarian emergency response relief centers, reticketing center and the Roosevelt Hotel Arrival Center.
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Next, Moise English learning and support centers.
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As we work to build language access across the city, English language proficiency remains a factor in accessing education, employment, health and social services.
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That's why my office has launched Moia, English learning, and support centers located in McGraw Instance Communities.
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These centers use our award winning.
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We speak NYC curriculum to host beginner and intermediate level in person English classes.
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Our curriculum is unique as it uses filmed stories and workbooks that highlight city services and promote civic engagement.
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Our centers are hosted at 10 partner community based organizations and we are also scaling collaboration at more than 60 New York City public libraries across New York City.
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This year, the program is also rolling out a beginner level curriculum, which had for long been missing from our program's offering.
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This new curriculum aims to improve access to both language, English language learning, and familiarity with city services.
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Next, Moi's community engagement.
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Moi's outreach work is done to promote our specific programs, but also to complement outreach work.
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Done across city offices and agencies.
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But important to note here that all city offices and agencies have their own outreach staff which also conducts and are mainly responsible for doing outreach.
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In 2023, Moias external affairs team made over 50,000 54,000 touchpoints with community members, including some in some of the most underserved communities in our city.
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This includes active participation in resource fairs, tableing on your rights presentations, and canvassing across the Five boroughs.
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The team also connects immigrant New Yorkers to the help they need by offering real time support system through in person public facing events and through our phone and email hotline.
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In 2023, the team responded to nearly 6000 inquiries for assistance.
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Moya also led 9 immigrant media roundtables to ensure effective information dissemination.
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The roundtables facilitated information flow to the immigrant communities via hyper local newspapers and TV stations in their own language.
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The roundtables also strengthen relationship with immigrant focused media outlets.
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In the last year, we have worked with NYC Emergency Management, NYC Cares And Health And Hospitals, Department of Youth And Community Development, NYC Small Business Services, mayor's office to end domestic gender based violence, office of technology and innovation, the Department of Consumer Worker Protection, and the Civic Engagement Commission in NYC.
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Next, Asalam's secret humanitarian crisis.
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Moya's role.
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At the outset of the Salim secret humanitarian crisis, Moya has was on the ground Welcome to Salem Secrets when they started arriving at Port Authority.
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Bus Terminal.
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We responded immediately in our multiple teams together to ensure arriving at Salem's seekers and community groups mobilized and to support them had the assistance from our office.
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Well, we are very proud of this work.
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After many months of this work and myself personally welcome in asylum seekers, we realized this was not sustainable for our office.
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Which was not set up to up operate such situations.
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Therefore in 2023, the city pivoted to an interagency effort as New York City Emergency Management And Health Plus Hospitals took over the operational management of the humanitarian crisis to welcome asylum seekers.
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The city also created the offices of asylum seeker operations or also in 2023 to provide overall coordination.
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You will hear more about this office shortly.
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Recognizing the importance of connecting immigrant New Yorkers to services, Moria, funded community based organizations as navigator centers to help in this effort.
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The navigation centers were modeled after our Haitian response initiative which proved to be successful in supporting community organizations working to address the needs of newly arrived immigrants.
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We've also worked to include one of the most innovative projects to incubate one of the most innovative projects in response to the arrival of asylum seekers through the Maersk Fund.
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Working in partnership with the philanthropic partners, we funded 9 community based organizations to launch the immigrant peer navigator program.
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The program connects recent recent arrivals with longtime immigrant mentors to give them tips on surviving and navigating live in New York City, including finding work, housing, and building community connections.
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Aslan, as I mentioned before, was developed to complement the work of Oahu.
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That Oahu is is overseen at the ASALM application help center, which will you will hear more about shortly.
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And it's meant Asan is meant to serve as a a broader population and provide long term capacity to nonprofit partners on the ground.
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Addressing this humanitarian crisis also requires engagement with all levels of government.
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Therefore, in 2023, Moyer worked to coordinate local state and national advocacy on behalf of the immigrant New Yorkers.
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In part through a coalition of nearly 200 US cities and local governments called cities for action.
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The coalition mobilized the set sent sign on letters to the Biden administration to accelerate work permit processing and re redesignate or designate 11 countries for temporary protective status.
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2 of these countries, Cameroon and Venezuela were re redesignated in the weeks that follow.
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Opening access to work authorization, and we continue to advocate for more.
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In conclusion, finally, in this testimony, I am not covering all of Boeing's work as it would be simply too long.
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Moia's annual report will be available on March 15 and will include a full description of Moia's work.
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My hope by highlighting these 5 key areas will give you the sense the sense of our work and well within city of government.
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Thank you again for calling this hearing chair.
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I look forward to working with the council as the budget process continues.
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And as I usually do, I want to thank Maia's staff for all their work in the last couple of years.
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In addition to Jasmine and Tom, Lorena Lu Seadow, Aileen, Derek, and Miguel join me here today.
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Also, many of them are watching.
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I just want to give a special shout out to the many hundreds of city employees and our partners working in response to the humanitarian crisis.
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Thank you so much.
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Molly Schaeffer, Interim Director, Mayor's Office of Asylum Seeker Operations (OASO) on the Comprehensive Response and Budget Impact of NYC's Asylum Seeker Operations