PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Mariela Costa, CUNY student and mutual aid volunteer, on NYC shelter limits for asylum seekers
5:00:39
·
159 sec
Mariela Costa, a CUNY student and mutual aid volunteer, strongly denounces the 30/60 day shelter limit policy for asylum seekers in New York City. She argues that the policy is unjust, destabilizing, and contradicts the city's claim of being a sanctuary for immigrants.
- Costa highlights the negative impacts of the policy, including disruption of education, job stability, and community formation for asylum seekers.
- She criticizes the Adams administration for vilifying immigrants and treating them as a financial burden.
- Costa points out that there are enough empty apartments in NYC to house those in need, calling for the liberation of these spaces to address the housing crisis.
UNKNOWN (on behalf of Mariela Costa)
5:00:39
I'm speaking on behalf of Mariela Costa.
5:00:41
So this is something she wrote.
5:00:43
My name is Mariela Costa, CUNY student, public school kid's mom, and a mutual aid volunteer and organizer supporting newly arrived migrants for the last year and a half.
5:00:52
I'm here today to denounce and stand against the unjust and unreasonable 30, 60 day shelter limit created by Molly Schaeffer that began to be implemented last summer at single adult shelters in January 2024 at family shelters and that more recently has expanded to DHS run migrant family shelters.
5:01:10
Evicting people, shifting them around after they've found some stability only so that city officials can eliminate them from the system or claim that they have moved on is not a laudable feat as Schaeffer and the mayor's chief of staff have touted in self congratulatory remarks.
5:01:25
For the last 2 years, the Adams administration has put forth 2 contradictory discourses.
5:01:31
On the one hand, the claim that New York is a sanctuary city and stands with migrants.
5:01:35
On the other, discourse that vilifies and criminalizes immigrants and portrays them as as a financial burden that have cost taxpayers 1,000,000,000 in who the city needs to get rid of.
5:01:46
The latter is exactly what the shelter limit policy does as a deterrence tactic that involves extra layers of unnecessary Kafkaesque bureaucracy that aims to get rid of people through this arbitrary rule without first supporting asylum seekers' transition to stable, permanent housing.
5:02:02
A number of families supported by our mutual aid network have been relocated to shelters in boroughs far away from jobs, schools, and the communities they started forming and becoming a part of.
5:02:12
I know families who have been transferred to shelters hours away from their kid's school, moved back to their old shelters with a second eviction and reapplication process, and then been moved away to a different borough yet again.
5:02:23
In this sense, it is unconscionable shelter limit this unconscionable shelter limit rule represents a blatant violation of the McKinney Vento Act.
5:02:32
This inhumane and destabilizing policy intersects mutual human rights issues.
5:02:37
The right to stable housing, access to education, to services, it disrupts formation of community and support networks and job stability.
5:02:46
One last thing that I wanna highlight is that there's no shortage of housing for anyone in New York.
5:02:50
As it was reported earlier this year, there are about 90,000 empty rent stabilized apartment apartments warehoused by landlords, and who knows how many thousands of empty NYCHA apartments.
5:03:01
There are more empty apartments than there are people that need housing.
5:03:04
Not to mention the gross mismanagement of city funds and no bid contracts for private companies to run shelters where immigrants and asylum seekers have been the least benefited from the 1,000,000 of doll 1,000,000,000 of dollars invested.
5:03:16
Liberate these apartments and house the people.
