TESTIMONY
Margaret Martin and Kelly Agnew Barajas on Supporting New York's Immigrant and Refugee Communities
3:31:54
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5 min
Margaret Martin and Kelly Agnew Barajas advocate for improved support and coordination for New York's immigrant and refugee communities.
- Highlight the diverse and impactful services offered by Catholic Charities to immigrants and refugees across New York City.
- Emphasis on the profound impact of more than 170,000 asylum seekers arriving in New York City on Catholic Charities' programs.
- Call for the New York City Council to support enhanced coordination of legal and social services for asylum seekers and to invest in capacity building for the long term.
- Urge the continued support for various initiatives and programs directly assisting immigrants, including education, legal services, and culturally responsive programs.
- Stress the importance of maintaining and expanding support for services addressing the needs of vulnerable child and family immigrants, as well as underserved immigrant communities.
Margaret Martin
3:31:54
Good afternoon, counsel Terry Abalos, and members of the New York City Council Committee on Immigration.
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I am Margaret Martin.
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The co director of immigrant and refugee services joined today by my fellow co director, Kelly Agnew Barajas.
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We are here on behalf of Catholic Charities Community Services of the diocese of New York.
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Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony to you today.
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Catholic Charities is proud of our decades long tradition of welcoming New York immigrants and refugees.
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Our services have tremendous impact on communities across New York City and all five boroughs.
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The scope and diversity of our services is exceptional.
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With the arrival of more than 170,000 asylum seekers to New York City, each of our programming spaces has been profoundly impacted.
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We strongly recommend that the city council support efforts to improve overall coordination of legal and social services aimed at serving asylum seekers and to invest in building capacity for the long term.
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We urge the city council to advocate for maintaining the NYC in schools program, which has provided critical legal services to thousands of school children, families, and community members in schools since 2016.
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In partnership with a 129 New York City public schools urged the city council to ensure the ongoing support of the Haitian response initiative, which is a unique culturally and linguistically responsive program that addresses the disparate legal treatment and lack of resources available to the Haitian immigrant community To ensure the continued support of Catholic Charity's Action NYC hotline, which provides critical legal information, appointments, and legal referrals to immigrant New Yorkers.
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To continue the support of Catholic Charities and the immigrant opportunity initiatives, citywide immigrant legal empowerment collaborative, Cilic, which provide services in partnership with grassroots community based organizations for immigrant New Yorkers and hard to reach communities, and to continue support for the legal aid society's immigrant opportunity initiative, of which Catholic Charities is a subcontractor providing legal representation for particularly vulnerable and underserved communities.
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And to maintain and expand the support of the eye care coalition, which provides legal assistance to record numbers of vulnerable children and families since 2016 in New York.
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Thank you.
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Excuse me.
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Since 2014 in New York.
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Thank you.
UNKNOWN
3:34:21
I'll carry on from a few more points on behalf of Catholic Charities.
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Wanna also emphasize that in addition to the new arrivals, our longstanding immigrant communities continue to need the support that they always have.
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And that the underinvestment in these programs and critical services is really, you know, coming to a head at this point that these services are needed more than ever.
3:34:47
So in particular, over the past 2 years, 25,000 Ukrainian arrivals have come to New York City.
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This would have been a much bigger story.
3:34:56
Sorry.
3:34:56
I'm on my new 3 minutes.
3:35:01
As well as long standing communities needing, you know, undocumented folks needing all sorts of different supports, language services, resources, legal services, and information.
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So in particular, I just want to highlight 2 areas.
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1 is that Catholic Charities is a member of our day labor worker initiative.
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And that we are seeing record numbers of waiting lists, managing a huge demand of people seeking work safe safety training, the OSHA training, need for wage theft protection advocacy is skyrocketing and we're wanting to invest and grow in that area in particular,
UNKNOWN
3:35:42
as well as
UNKNOWN
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has been raised many times earlier today, the underinvestment in adult literacy.
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In particular, the program that we run, we, you know, see members coming from all five boroughs because we're in a very accessible spot.
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This one of the the benefits of being in New York City that people can choose where they want.
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So that particular model really eliminated a program like ours where people come from all over, people might come because of the diversity of different language learners.
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That they want to really have a a different experience and not necessarily be in their own neighborhood for for whatever reason.
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So we're seeing that it's a lack of flexibility in that model and and really disadvantages a program like ours.
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So I would just, you know, urge for increased coordination overall services are needing much more investment, longer long term programs that really can be multiyear.
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And for the the city to be up to date with their payments is really important.
3:37:01
Thank you.