Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.
Q&A
Discussion on managing demand and capacity for legal services
4:08:13
·
4 min
Alexa Avilés inquires about waiting lists and capacity management for legal service providers. Panelists explain their intake systems and challenges.
- Karla Ostolaza describes their dual intake system for court-based and referral cases.
- Deborah Lee emphasizes the need for flexibility in services due to unpredictable demands and client transfers.
- Panelists discuss the importance of legal education and technical assistance for other service providers.
Alexa Avilés
4:08:13
Thank you.
4:08:13
I actually wanted to ask if for the life of providers at the table, is there a waiting list?
4:08:22
Or how do you manage more demand than capacity?
Aracelis Lucero
4:08:28
Yeah, I can speak
Karla Ostolaza
4:08:29
to that.
4:08:29
We don't have a wait list.
4:08:31
We have a dual system for intake.
4:08:36
One is a court based intake, so whoever we have a calendar shared.
4:08:40
And actually, Barracksburg immigration court went up from two days a week to four days a week a couple of weeks ago.
4:08:49
We staff every single day anyone who's there who isn't represented.
4:08:53
We take down their A number, and we go find them in detention because the administration doesn't cooperate with us to make it any easier than that.
4:09:01
And then we have another system where we get referrals for people who are not appearing at Varick through immigration court.
4:09:07
They're appearing at Elizabeth, but they're New York City residents.
4:09:09
And they need our help.
4:09:11
So we get the cases, we coordinate with each other and we assign them.
4:09:17
But I fear that how things are evolving, work capacity will be very, very strained more than it actually is right now.
Deborah Lee
4:09:28
And I think in terms of we're seeing lots of transfers, people who are moving, there just needs to be, I think, more flexibility.
4:09:36
I think we don't know what the onslaught is going to be, say, in six months from now.
4:09:41
We don't know what that's going to be.
4:09:43
But we have a sense already of what we're already seeing.
4:09:47
The people being transferred, say, from the Orange County Jail.
4:09:50
They're going to Batavia.
4:09:51
They're going down to Texas.
4:09:53
They're just being moved around.
4:09:55
Those are New Yorkers.
4:09:56
Those are the New Yorkers that we want to help protect.
4:10:01
But I think we just need to have some flexibility to be able to deal with that.
4:10:04
I think from legal aid's perspective, we are seeing criminal defense practice clients who are being detained.
4:10:11
And we want to follow those clients and protect those.
4:10:13
We're already representing those people.
4:10:16
We want to provide those holistic services.
4:10:17
But I think we just need flexibility just to be built in, to be baked in essentially, I think, into the work that we do.
4:10:27
I think we're sometimes maybe a little bit constrained by sort of the exact parameters in terms of who's eligible, who's not eligible.
4:10:34
I think we just want to be able to serve as many as we can, responsibly can, but also sort of have that flexibility sort of built in.
4:10:43
Going to your question before, I do also just want to add that I think sometimes there's a misperception about who NYFIP clients are and who we serve.
4:10:57
I think especially with recent events such as the passage of the Lincoln Riley Act and the just intense pressure on ICE to detain and round up as many as possible, detention is going to hit everyone.
4:11:12
All the people who are providing immigration services, they're going to have a client, they're going to have a family, somebody who is going to be impacted by detention.
4:11:20
So I do think also in addition to the funding need, which is tremendous, I think that also involves legal education for other legal service providers who just may not have had that sort of experience yet with their client base.
4:11:37
But it is going to touch them.
4:11:39
I think also technical assistance.
4:11:41
Technical assistance for these other legal service providers, other advocates, just to understand what are the processes, what is going on with a bond hearing, is the person even eligible for a bond.
4:11:53
And to be able to sort of help others increase their own expertise, I think that is also something that we need to think about with the knife of funding and sort of just how we meet the moment.
Alexa Avilés
4:12:08
I could
Sophia Gurulé
4:12:08
just add one thing as well.
4:12:10
I think it's also important for that funding to include people who can also advocate more more broadly on a structural level for policies that are pro immigrant, that support immigrant communities.
4:12:23
A lot of our work and a lot of the knife up workers in the UAW not only are doing legal defense, which is highly technical, very onerous, the burden is on us unlike in criminal defense, we have to prove everything throughout a person's entire life, but also in our free time because we are so dedicated to the work that we do.
4:12:41
We're doing Know Your Rights trainings.
4:12:43
We're going to community events, and we're going to city council to testify about this need, not just for funding, but just to allow workers to do this work in a sustainable way and consistent way so that the community has consistent legal resources.
4:12:56
So also including funding for people to do that kind of advocacy.