Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.
PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Margaret Martin, Co-Director of the Immigrant and Refugee Services Division at Catholic Charities Community Services
5:17:31
·
3 min
Margaret Martin, Co-Director of the Immigrant and Refugee Services Division at Catholic Charities Community Services, testifies about the challenges faced by immigrant services providers and the need for increased, stable funding from New York City. She highlights the importance of multi-year contracts, timely notifications of awards, and cost of living increases in contracts.
- Expresses concern about the proposed budget cut to the MOIA immigration legal support hotline
- Argues for increased funding to extend hotline hours and provide individual mini Know Your Rights sessions
- Reports that call numbers to the hotline have increased again in January and February, rivaling previous record numbers
Margaret Martin
5:17:31
Council chair Abelis and members of the immigrant committee.
5:17:39
Sorry, it's been a long day.
5:17:40
I know it's been a longer day for you.
5:17:42
But thank you so much for your leadership and the opportunity to testify here today.
5:17:47
My name is Margaret Martin.
5:17:48
I am a co director of the Immigrant and Refugee Services Division at Catholic Charities Community Services.
5:17:53
I'm joined today by my fellow co director, Kelly Agnew Barajas, who will speak after me.
5:17:59
Catholic Charities through our division welcomes more than 15,000 immigrants and refugees each year, many of them through programs that are funded wholly or in part by New York City.
5:18:10
So I'll talk about some of those today.
5:18:12
But first, as many people have said, we are in unprecedented times.
5:18:17
Those of us who went through a previous Trump administration thought we knew what we were in for.
5:18:21
Some of us, I was wrong.
5:18:23
And so at this time, with immigrant New Yorkers rightfully fearful of what their future may hold, more of them returning to organizations like us for help.
5:18:33
At the same time, as Sarah talked about, providers like Catholic Charities face loss of federal funding such as the Immigration Court Help Desk, the unaccompanied children's program and other funding streams.
5:18:47
So in this moment, more stable and well funded services from New York City are critical.
5:18:53
This includes, for example, more baseline contracts.
5:18:56
You talked about that earlier today.
5:18:58
Multi year contracts so that we and other providers can plan for longer term programming and for quality staffing rather than revisit funding for vital programs each year.
5:19:08
It is difficult to plan programs and retain staff based on year to year funding.
5:19:13
For example, it is extraordinarily difficult to commit to legal representation in one year contracts given that immigration legal cases generally go on for much longer than a year.
5:19:24
We also ask you to urge timely notification of awards including renewals so that we can plan staffing and programming to ensure the most effective services for our communities, advocate for timely payment of invoices, and build in, as other folks have mentioned, actual cost of living increases into multi year contracts.
5:19:46
I'm not going to talk about individual programs, but if I could just address a couple of the points about the immigration hotline.
5:19:51
I was very surprised to learn today that in the proposed budget, the hotline, the Moya immigration legal support hotline proposal has been cut to, I think you said, something under $300,000 Cut a million million dollars, right?
5:20:07
1.3 to two something.
Alexa Avilés
5:20:09
$2.80 ish.
5:20:09
Yeah.
Margaret Martin
5:20:10
So that was news to me.
5:20:12
We obviously would not be able to continue the level of services that we have been doing.
Alexa Avilés
5:20:15
They were confused by that.
5:20:17
Mean, You don't have to respond.
Margaret Martin
5:20:20
I wasn't confused.
5:20:21
Got the math on that one.
5:20:23
I understand that's preliminary.
5:20:25
I hope that it's increased.
5:20:26
We would actually argue for an increase in funding partly just to keep up with our increased cost but also because if we are welcome the idea of staying open later than 06:00, we would need more money to do that.
5:20:42
We welcome the idea of providing individual mini Know Your Rights sessions and that would extremely valuable.
5:20:49
We would need more funding to do that.
5:20:51
And I also just want to respond to your point about the numbers going down.
5:20:56
They did go down in November and December.
5:20:58
I was scrolling through my phone while you were talking, but in January we saw a number of calls to that hotline that rivals the record number of calls we've seen before in February.
5:21:08
The numbers were on pace with that.