TESTIMONY
Rex Chen, Immigration Director at Legal Services NYC, on Comprehensive Support for Asylum Seekers
4:31:06
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178 sec
Rex Chen addresses the multifaceted support provided to asylum seekers by Legal Services NYC, which includes a broad range of services beyond legal assistance.
- Legal Services NYC assists asylum seekers not only with legal challenges but also with education, public benefits, and housing issues.
- In 2020, 25,000 individuals in the households benefited from their immigration services.
- The organization actively tackles complex immigration issues, including filing lawsuits to expedite asylum interviews and addressing anti-black bias in court.
- Training programs for immigration lawyers and other initiatives are hosted to share strategies on combating bias and winning immigration appeals.
- Rex Chen emphasizes the urgency of expanding long-term legal representation to avoid potential future costs to the city.
Rex Chen
4:31:06
My name is Rex Chan.
4:31:07
My pronouns are he, him.
4:31:09
I'm the immigration director at Legal Services NYC, and I'm gonna cover three points.
4:31:15
My first point is that we're doing immigration services, but much more than just immigration services.
4:31:21
With critical help from our social workers, Our team meets asylum seekers and helps them on a wide range of issues.
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It could be education enrollment.
4:31:29
We're doing things with public benefits.
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We also have a lot of housing lawyers working on issues.
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Asylum seekers have many needs to be able to win the legal protections that they qualify for.
4:31:41
Disruptions such as the 30, 60 day rule for the shelters makes things much harder for them, also makes it harder for us, those trying to help them on their cases.
4:31:50
My second point is that LSNYC, if we just focus on our immigration work, we're helping many people.
4:31:57
We help thousands of New Yorkers every year.
4:32:00
In 2020, there were 25,000 people in the households that received their immigration help.
4:32:07
And my third thing is that I wanna point out that we are actually trying to tackle some of the new complex immigration issues.
4:32:14
And develop resources for our staff and others in the field.
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Last year, we filed lawsuits to try to help asylum seekers who've been stuck in an infinite wait to get an asylum interview.
4:32:26
The government agreed to set asylum interviews for more than 20 of our clients who were stuck in that backlog.
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In a few weeks, we're actually giving a training to try to address how immigration judges have an anti black bias when they make their rulings, including in asylum cases.
4:32:44
We're gonna train immigration lawyers to say something in court to immigration judges to interrupt their unconscious bias before they make their ruling.
4:32:53
And we plan to share our materials with immigration lawyers around the country.
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We're also giving trainings over Zoom to hundreds of people on different immigration issues.
4:33:02
So for this year, I'll mention 2 trainings we've already done.
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My teammates gave a training on preparing for asylum interviews.
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About a 150 people came.
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And with the help of Uncle Kal, one of my coworkers, gave a training on winning immigration appeals, and around a hundred people came to that.
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So those are my 3 main points, which are that We're helping with much more than just immigration when we do our immigration work.
4:33:27
We help so many people every year, and we're working on very ambitious projects.
4:33:32
If I in closing, I'll just mention that one issue we've heard today is the need to be strategic.
4:33:39
And we can see that there's a need to ramp up legal services for long term representation beyond quick prosay services.
4:33:47
And I think that's very important.
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That ship needs to start now.
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Because if it doesn't start now, it actually could cost a premium to the city if it's not prepared and it sees the need and then suddenly has to quickly hire many people.
4:34:03
TO WORK ON THE NEED.
