PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Jamie Powlovich, Supervisor of Expediting New Arrivals Community Transition (ENACT) at Coalition for the Homeless
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7 min
Jamie Powlovich, representing the Coalition for the Homeless, testifies about the challenges faced by unaccompanied immigrant youth in New York City. She highlights the city's failures in addressing the needs of these young people and provides recommendations for improvement.
- Criticizes ACS for denying services to destitute minors, forcing them into inadequate adult shelters or onto the streets
- Highlights the lack of shelter options for youth under 16 and the overcapacity of existing youth shelters
- Recommends increased funding for youth shelters, staff training, improved identification of unaccompanied minors, and better language access services
- Calls for better tracking and reporting of data on unaccompanied immigrant youth across city agencies
Jamie Powlovich
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Good afternoon.
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My name is Jamie Palova, Jayushi, her pronouns, and I'm the supervisor of the expediting new arrivals community transition team, otherwise known as enact at coalition for the homeless.
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I was previously with coalition for homeless youth.
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Thank you to the chairs and the rest of the committee staff for holding this important hearing and providing the opportunity to testify about resources for immigrant youth who arrived in the United States as unaccompanied children.
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In addition to its advocacy and programming on behalf of homeless individuals and families, the coalition for the homeless is the plaintiff in the historic Callahan versus Carrie Case, which established the legal right to shelter in New York City.
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In March, the Callahan in sorry.
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In March, the coalition in New York City entered into a settlement agreement in the Callahan case that among other things extends the Coalition's monitoring role to cite serving single new adult arrivals who entered the country on or after March 15 2022 and are afraid to return to their home country.
0:19:14
The enact team oversees the city's compliance with this settlement.
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According to the controller's office as of September 15th, the city had approximately 62,000 people seeking asylum and city funded shelters.
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And as of last week, city hall reported there are roughly 650 unaccompanied youth ages 18 to 20 in the new arrival shelters.
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However, the city does not track or report data on the number of unaccompanied minors that they are seeing across systems.
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Over the past 2 years, I have personally witnessed city fail to not only meet the needs of unaccompanied youth new arrivals, but also fail to even acknowledge their existence in any meaningful way.
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A primary failure is ACS's persistent denying Destitute minors, the care, and services They are entitled to, which has forced them to survive on the streets and to reside in single adult new arrival shelters, which are not only authorized to serve single which are only authorized to serve single adults and adult families, and are woefully inadequate to meet the young people's needs.
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This is especially given the case due to what councilwoman Stevens already highlighted with the dy CD runaway and homeless youth programs reaching historic capacity on a nightly basis and youth being turned away.
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Another alarming situation is that youth under the age of sixteen are precluded from the runaway and homeless youth shelter programs due to restrictions imposed by contractual obligations by NYPD.
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This leaves younger unaccompanied minors, particularly vulnerable to the adult new arrival shelters or left to fend for themselves.
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And although, aycd has, for the most part, continued to hold uphold priority placement for minors that was established by a now expired legal aid settlement in practice, aycd is ensuring that sixteen seventeen year olds are pro prioritized for beds by asking programs to discharge youth over 18 to make room for the minors even if they have nowhere else to go.
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All of these unfortunate realities were created by the city and the city has the power to address them if they wanted to.
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The experience of new arrival youth highlight the need for written policies that need to be accessible to advocates and the public to ensure the protection and safety of unaccompanied youth arriving alone here in New York City.
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In addition to policy recommendations, the coalition and legal aid society outline in our testimonies that there are not that our recommendations are not exhaustive of all of that should be done to adequate support this population and that the city needs to establish a working group to do a deeper dive into what is needed and address those needs accordingly.
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I'm going to outline 4 recommendations The first is that New York City must allocate appropriate resources to support and protect immigrant youth.
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This includes the city allocating more funding to Dubai City to increase the number of beds available in their runaway and homeless youth programs.
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So all sixteen seventeen year olds seeking placement can be placed even if it is just while they're waiting a transition into ACS's care.
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And then in addition, aycd needs to ensure that all new programming that is bought online to serve runaway and homeless youth does not have a minimum age requirement of sixteen years old.
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And we ask the city council to introduce local legislation to mandate that any new DUI city runaway and homeless youth contracts eliminate lower age restrictions in line with state law.
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Number 2 is regarding training.
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It is imperative that the city implement programming for staff of all city agencies that might interact with immigrant youth geared towards supporting this population.
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Such programming must include implicit bias training, particularly with regard to the adultification of black children, as well as ensuring specifically that ACS take a consistent approach to request for documentations.
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Documentation when they are referred young people are referred as destitute children.
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The 3rd recommendation is that we needed to ensure that shelters are appropriately identifying young people.
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We ask that city council take the shelter case management system to task by ensuring they include a number of steps to ensure that unaccompanied minors are identified when they present at the new arrival center or reticketing or staying in new arrival shelters It is crucial that case managers understand that trust must be fostered with young people to ensure accurate reporting of their ages.
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And then the last recommendation is regarding
UNKNOWN (via French Interpreter)
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language acts
Jamie Powlovich
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success.
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The city must ensure that there is meaningful language access provided to new arrival youth.
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Youth are quite often forced to attempt communication in a dialect that is not their own.
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Creating confusion and misunderstanding regarding their needs and wishes, including any desire to go into ACS Care.
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This is particularly the case for youth from West Africa when, for example, youth who speak Guineon Pilar are provided only a Senegalese Pilar interpreter.
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In addition to all of those recommendations, the city overall must to begin to track and report the number of youth identified as being Destitute minors In order to better assess the demand for services to this population, ACS must specifically begin tracking and reporting the number of destitute child referrals, including data regarding the referral source the number of referred children who are unaccompanied migrant children, the count sorry, countries of origin or referred children in of referred children in youth.
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The languages spoken by each referred children in youth the ages of referred children and youth, and the number of destitute children accepted into care by ACS.
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In conclusion, I wanna thank the counsel again, and for holding this important hearing and your long standing commitment to this work, the legal aid society and the coalition for the homeless will be submitting joint written testimony, and I'm happy to answer any questions relating to my testimony or my previous role.