NYC ramped up legal assistance for asylum-seekers, and it's starting to pay off

Immigration advocates and members of the New York City Council have long pushed Mayor Eric Adams' administration to ramp up its efforts to help newly arrived migrants apply for asylum and work permits — and it finally has.

The city has filed more than 5,600 asylum applications, or about 75 per day, through its Asylum Application Help Center, which launched in July at the Red Cross headquarters in Midtown, officials said at a Council oversight hearing on Wednesday.

New arrivals become eligible to apply for a permit to legally work in the United States 150 days after filing an asylum application in immigration court. In part because of this, many newcomers have struggled to find steady jobs, restricting their ability to support themselves and move out of the city’s strained shelter system, as many are keen to do.

More than 60,000 migrants are currently staying in city-run shelters.

I've been encouraged that in recent months, the tides have started to turn.

Shahana Hanif, City Council Immigration Committee chair

“Mayor Adams has left no stone unturned to ensure that these new New Yorkers get the legal support necessary to thrive,” said Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Manuel Castro.

Councilmember Shahana Hanif, who chairs the immigration committee and has long criticized the administration for failing to help new migrants apply for asylum and work permits in large numbers, applauded the city’s latest efforts.

“For about a year, this plea had gone largely unanswered, with no new city funding dedicated to this issue in [fiscal years 2023 and 2024], and little operational support put in place,” Hanif said.

“I've been encouraged that in recent months, the tides have started to turn," she added.

But the city has been slower to help new arrivals take advantage of the recently expanded Temporary Protected Status program, or TPS, which officials say could benefit 15,000 Venezuelans in the city’s care. TPS allows migrants whose home countries are deemed unsafe to stay and work in the United States temporarily.

The Biden administration expanded TPS to include Venezuelans last month after the Adams administration repeatedly called on the White House to extend the program or otherwise help new arrivals find legal jobs.

The help center has scheduled 600 appointments for migrants to apply for TPS — the maximum number of slots available this month, since all other openings had been booked before the program was expanded, said Masha Gindler, the center’s director. TPS applications have only been filed for about 300 people so far, owing to the extra paperwork required, Gindler noted.

“Our goal is to identify, screen and schedule appointments for all Venezuelans that are eligible in our care by the end of the year,” she said.

As of the end of July, about 40% of the more than 100,000 migrants who had gone through the city’s separate intake center since the spring of 2022 had come from Venezuela, according to City Hall.

At Wednesday's hearing, councilmembers also questioned if the administration’s policy of requiring migrants to reapply for shelter — after 30 days for single adults and after 60 days for families — would hamper efforts to help migrants stabilize. Adams recently shortened the time limit for single adults, and then expanded the policy to include families, saying the city had run out of shelter space. In July, hundreds of the newest arrivals were forced to sleep outside the intake center in Midtown.

“Do you acknowledge that the policy of evicting people from shelter makes asylum, TPS, work permit filings more difficult?” Hanif asked.

“We're working through the challenges,” Castro responded. He added that about half of migrants forced to vacate their shelter after 30 or 60 days exit the shelter system entirely.

Gindler said the time limits would not affect the help center’s processing times.

At the hearing, it became clear that migrants who change shelter locations would have to complete a form to change their address in their immigration cases and receive their paperwork. On that topic, Hanif asked whether anything "physical is being distributed to inform applicants of the procedural impacts of precarious address changes.”

Gindler replied that the center helps migrants change their address, including by providing them with the requisite form and guidance documents for filling it out.

Meanwhile, the city has submitted work permit applications for some 1,700 humanitarian parolees, a small portion of migrants who are immediately eligible to apply for work authorization, officials said at the hearing.

They said the Adams administration pumped $5 million this year into community groups offering legal clinics across the five boroughs, and that the city’s legal hotline has expanded to handle more call volume.