TESTIMONY
Oriana Shulevitz Rosado on Funding for Long-Term Immigration Legal Services in NYC
4:37:42
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3 min
Oriana Shulevitz Rosado advocates for increased funding for long-term immigration legal services in New York City.
- Represents Immigrant ARC, a coalition of 80 member organizations providing legal services across New York.
- Stresses the need to build long-term immigration legal infrastructure to benefit both new and existing immigrant communities.
- Calls for a break from emergency states caused by cyclical increases in new arrivals through funding and strategic planning.
- Proposes a detailed funding plan including $58 million for citywide initiatives and additional funding for supporting immigration legal services and a pilot program.
- Emphasizes that the current crisis stems from administrative decisions and highlights the importance of New York City as a home for immigrants.
Oriana Shulevitz Rosado
4:37:42
Members of New York City Council.
4:37:44
My name is Orianna Scholwitz Rossello.
4:37:46
I am the policy and advocacy strategist at immigrant mark.
4:37:50
Imigrant Arc is a coalition of over 80 member organizations that provide legal services across the state of New York.
4:37:58
I am here to advocate for the urgent and crucial need for our city to fund long term immigration legal services.
4:38:05
And get us out of this cyclical emergency state.
4:38:08
The arrival of our new neighbors is an opportunity to build long term immigration, legal infrastructure, that would benefit both new immigrants and existing immigrant communities.
4:38:19
The way our city's administration is currently handling handling the cyclical increase in new arrivals, legal service providers are forced into states of emergency.
4:38:29
Legal service providers across the Five boroughs have attempted to rise to this challenge, making herculean efforts to come together to provide rapid response services.
4:38:38
Our members, other legal service organizations, and the city are hosting many small temporary rapid response clinics across the city.
4:38:47
These clinics meet an important need, but they do not provide migrants with long term representation, which can be a huge issue since but majority of asylum applications require follow-up.
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Pairing rapid response efforts with long term legal representations and wrap around Services is the only viable solution to ensure migrants do not fall through the cracks in our immigration process.
4:39:10
Immigrant Ark recommends that what is needed to meet this moment is greater transparency from city agencies, strategic coordination from the city and state governments with legal service providers and community based organizations and funding for long term immigration legal services, which includes the following.
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Investing 58,000,000 for immigration legal services, which goes to the following city wide initiatives.
4:39:34
31,000,000 from the mayor's immigrant opportunities initiative, which have been threatened by budget cuts, including such crucial programs like the Action NYC and the rapid response legal collaborative, 6,600,000 to NIFA, a 1st in the nation program that provides free immigration legal services to low income new workers, 4,900,000 for eye care, which provides representation to unaccompanied Myers and families and removal proceedings.
4:40:02
3,300,000 for 2 day citizenship now, which provides legal services to people on their path to citizenship, and 2,600,000 for city council's immigration opportunity initiatives.
4:40:14
Separately, there's a need in investing 20,000,000 to support immigration legal services.
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And another 1,000,000 in a pilot program to provide immigration legal service clients with wraparound and holistic case management services.
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This situation is only a crisis because our city's administration makes it 1.
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New York City will always be a home to immigrants.
4:40:37
If we work with our legal service providers and probably fund immigration services, we can ensure that our city continues to focus on.
4:40:45
It's immigrant communities.
4:40:47
Thank you.