Usanewsonline.com desk: Immigration Committee Chair, Council Member Shahana Hanif, released the following statement in response to testimony from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA) at the Council's Executive Budget hearing for the Immigration Committee.

“It has been over a year since the first buses started arriving in Port Authority and yet our City is still scrambling to meet the needs of asylum seekers. I wholeheartedly agree with the points made by Commissioner Castro today that the root of this crisis is a failure in leadership from the federal government. Washington has stood by and let callous Republican governors bus tens of thousands of asylum seekers to New York City and had the audacity to award us less than 1/10th of FEMA funding to address this massive population. Washington has stood by while over 37,500 people have languished in our shelter system, unable to work and stuck in legal limbo without work authorization. We need federal help and every day we go without it is a shameful abdication of duty on the part of the federal government.

However, a lack of federal support does not excuse some of the ways in which the City is failing to meet the needs of asylum seekers. At the hearing, the Administration shared that zero dollars of new funding for asylum seeker legal services have been disbursed so far this year. Earlier this morning, Comptroller Lander and I sent a letter to the Mayor calling on a new investment of at least $70 million in immigration legal services. By facilitating asylum applications and work authorization, this funding would help the City significantly reduce the shelter length of stay, redeploy existing shelter space for people newly in need or newly arrived, reduce the number of people otherwise in the shelter system, and save significantly on the costs of operating shelters.

Additionally, I am deeply concerned by the Administration’s projection that we could see thousands of people arrive in the coming days, and yet we still don’t seem to have a long-term plan. The recent use of the NYPD Gramercy facility to house families overnight speaks to what seems like a lack of coordination and lack of planning on the part of this administration. I understand the herculean feat this City has undertaken, contracting over 120 hotels as shelters in a year; but housing young children in a congregate setting with adults overnight is wholly unacceptable.

As we prepare for even more asylum seekers to enter our City, I implore the Council to take up my bill, Intro 942, to mandate right-to-shelter to every form of emergency housing used to serve people in our City to ensure asylum seekers are housed with dignity. I implore the administration to work with our Council to help come up with a real plan to move us out of a perpetual emergency and into a state where we can adequately serve the needs of our newest neighbors. Finally, I implore the federal government to take up the mantle of responsibility and help our City past where our legal limits lie. (Press Release)