PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Kimberly Schertz, Staff Attorney at Legal Aid Society
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8 min
Kimberly Schertz, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, testified about the challenges faced by unaccompanied immigrant youth in New York City. She highlighted issues with age determination, access to services, and the need for improved processes within the Administration for Children's Services (ACS).
- Schertz presented policy recommendations to streamline referrals of immigrant youth to ACS and improve age determination processes.
- She emphasized the need for additional funding for immigration legal service providers to assist vulnerable immigrant youth.
- The testimony also touched on concerns regarding immigrant families being unnecessarily involved with the family policing system.
Kimberly Schertz
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Good afternoon.
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My name is Kimberly Shirts, and I am a staff attorney in the special litigation and law reform unit at the juvenile rights practice of the legal aid society.
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Thank you for this opportunity to testify.
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Imagine you are a teenage boy.
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You should be in school, and you should be plotting the next time you get to hang out and laugh with your friends.
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Instead, your community is in shambles.
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You've arrived home to find that your house with your family in it has been bombed.
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I trusted it all, hands you some documents with a birth date that's not yours, making you over 18 and tells you to get out of here and save yourself.
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So you embark on a harrowing journey spanning months in more countries than you can count on one hand.
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You've seen and experienced things that you shouldn't have seen at your age, then you finally make it.
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You're in the United States where you think you're finally safe and free, able to start a new life and get the education you always wanted.
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Instead, you're forced to remain in a cage bouncing between different immigration detention centers for several more months before being sent to New York City.
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You think this is finally it, you will finally be safe.
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But you find that some people don't believe that you're the age that you say you are because those papers you had no choice but to use in order to survive.
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Those that do believe you say they've done all that they can.
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Your only refuge is a caught surrounded by adult men you don't know.
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You continue to be treated like an adult when really you're just a kid in need of a loving and supportive home.
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This story and those similar to it reflect the experiences of so many immigrant youth who land in our city.
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Although the legal aid society lots efforts to reduce the number of poor black and Latin youth in foster care, such efforts should not be at the expense of those youth who have nowhere else to turn.
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Over the last several months, the legal aid society has received an uptick in referrals for unaccompanied minors being refused care from the administration for children services.
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Many of these youth are newly arrived children from West Africa.
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Some of whom used documents falsified to make them over the age of eighteen so that they could escape the dangerous conditions of their home countries and travel to the United States on their own.
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In such cases, ACS has initially failed to credit the used own statements regarding their age, including reasonable explanations provided regarding the use of falsified documents.
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And ACS has improperly contacted the United States Department of State for verification despite the fact that the state department relies on documents used to enter the country and therefore cannot actually verify and individual's age.
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Although the legal aid society has generally been successful in advocating with them with ACS to properly determine that these youth are destitute children, The city's failure to put a system in place to address the needs of children like them created unnecessary opt obstacles and undue delay to the detriment of these children.
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As we will lay out layout in our written testimony, New York has implemented a statutory scheme authorizing the care of destitute children.
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Today, I will present but a number of policy recommendations and resource recommendations And as Miss Polovich stated, these do not encompass all that can be done to serve this population.
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As it stands, ACS refuses to investigate referrals of destitute children unless a report is made to the State Central Registry.
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This is despite the fact that neither statute nor regulation mandates a call to the SCR before the commissioner can take action to meet his obligation to destitute children.
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It is also worth highlighting that multiple reports have to be made to the SCR before a case is finally accepted for investigation.
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Such a practice creates an unnecessary burden on those assisting immigrant youth, including other city agency staff, and contributes to significant delays in getting these children into ACS's care and custody.
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Accordingly, to streamline referrals of minor immigrant youth into ACS, ACS must create a designated team for destitute child referrals and make the contact information for that team available to shelter staff staff of other city agencies, community organizations, and advocates.
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It is crucial that city council also hold ACS accountable for taking a child center approach whenever there exist conflicting documents regarding a youth age.
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Importantly, the reality is that many migrant children present travel documents with false birthdays when they flee dangerous conditions in their home countries and travel unaccompanied by an adult.
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Therefore, ACS must give these documents the appropriate weight, but they should heavily credit the youth's own statements, particularly when such an explanation is offered.
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Additionally, because ACS is obligated to act in the best interest the child, not only should ACS refrain from requiring the youth to submit to an invasive bone density testing as we've seen requested in cases in the past, but ACS must absolutely cease its practice of contacting the US Department of State in an effort to verify children's birth dates.
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As I stated before, the state department often relies on false documentation that was procured as a means of survival so that the youth could escape the dangerous conditions of their home country.
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And so the communication of the state department ultimately fails to provide any meaningful verification of the young person's true age.
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Of graver concern is the risk of danger that such a practice poses to the young person's family remaining back home.
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And on the young person, him or herself, should he be forced he or she be forced to return.
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Further, ACS must provide appropriate language assistant services to those youth with limited English proficiency, and those services must be in the use native dialect.
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With regard to services, I reiterate Ms.
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Polovich's recommendation that the city and ACS specifically begin tracking and reporting the number of youth identified as minors without adult caretakers.
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And in addition to those recommendations, while the mayor's office has allocated funding to legal clinics assisting asylum seekers in preparing their asylum applications in order to meet filing deadlines, imposed by the US government.
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Many of them remain unrepresented and are forced to navigate an incredibly complex system of laws and regulations and leaving them unable to meaningfully defend themselves against possible orders or threats of deportation.
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Therefore, particularly given the special vulnerability, immigrant use base and removal, also known as deportation proceedings, and the potential for rapidly approaching deadlines for immigration applications such as asylum, could be 1 year and special immigrant juvenile status, which is up till the age of twenty one.
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It is imperative that the city allocate additional funding to immigration legal service providers so that they can provide meaningful and ongoing representation to this vulnerable population, including designated funding for youth in the foster care system.
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While older youth are being left to the wayside poor immigrant families are also being needlessly ensnared by the family policing system.
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So the Legal Aid Society urges the New York City Council to call a separate hearing to also delve more deeply into the plight of recently arrived immigrant families.
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So in our I'm
Althea Stevens
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sorry.
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I really If you can summarize a little bit because we have a panel spill to golf police.
Kimberly Schertz
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Yes.
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I was just about to wrap
Stephanie Gendell
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up.
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Thank
Kimberly Schertz
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you.
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Our recommendations therein are in our written testimony, but we just wanted to direct your attention to that portion.
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Our testimony as well, where we will be sharing some of our significant concerns regarding this population.
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Thank you for this opportunity to testify today.