New York Times
By Liz Robbins
May 13, 2015
New York City’s melting pot has been boiling over in the larger metropolitan area.
Long
Island, the lower Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey, home to
thousands of recently arrived unaccompanied minors and older immigrants,
have nearly as many people
eligible for legal services as does the city. But outside the city,
there has been a shortage of lawyers to serve those potential clients.
Enter
the second class of the Immigrant Justice Corps, an ambitious,
still-developing fellowship program begun in New York City last year by
Robert A. Katzmann, the chief
judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Starting this fall, the Justice Corps will place 11 recent law school
graduates and two college graduates out of 35 new fellows in surrounding
counties.
And
so, administrative relief is on its way to the sixth-floor offices of
the American Friends Service Committee in Newark. Relief is also coming
to the second-floor hallway
of the Newburgh Armory, where crowds have gathered daily over the last
year outside the offices of Catholic Charities.
And relief may be coming for cities in other areas.
“We
created this model with the idea that what we’re testing here in the
city is going to be a blueprint for the rest of the country,” said
Rachel B. Tiven, the executive
director of the Immigrant Justice Corps. “If it works here, we don’t
want to keep it to ourselves.”
For
now, Charlotte and Chicago will have to wait for Yonkers and Brentwood.
“We pushed ourselves to go faster as the need in the region was so
intense,” Ms. Tiven said.
The
city is where most of the funding for legal assistance has been
concentrated before this year. In response to the surge in unaccompanied
minors, the New York City
Council contributed $1 million for legal representation, with a boost
of an additional $900,000 from the Robin Hood Foundation and New York
Community Trust. (The Robin Hood Foundation was one of the major donors
that helped establish the corps with $1.3 million
in seed money, in addition to $2 million from the JPB Foundation.)
But
only a smaller amount of state and private funding for services and
lawyers has gone to nonprofit organizations outside the city, mostly to
Long Island.
“The
lower Hudson Valley, like Long Island, is critical to New York life,
and there’s this swath of human beings who support those structures, and
yet there is really
nothing to support them,” said Mario Russell, the director of immigrant
and refugee services for Catholic Charities Community Services.
The
organization, under the auspices of the New York Archdiocese, oversees
part of New York City, and Westchester, Orange, Rockland, Putnam,
Sullivan, Ulster and Dutchess
Counties. For decades, those counties have had only paralegals
processing requests, such as green card applications, deferred action for childhood arrivals and adjudication of unaccompanied minors’
deportation claims.
Victor
Cueva, a 25-year-old Justice Corps fellow and soon-to-be graduate of
the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, is eager to give new immigrants
in the Hudson Valley
the help his family did not receive when it arrived there.
He
was 11 when his family came from Lima, Peru, on tourist visas, settling
near his mother’s relatives in Kingston, N.Y. Having attended private
school in Lima, he was
the only one in his family proficient in English, so he served as the
interpreter.
In
an interview this week, Mr. Cueva recounted how his father sought a
green card after letting his tourist visa expire. He paid a lawyer
$1,000 in cash, in a plastic
bag, with Mr. Cueva translating the transaction. Six months later,
having heard nothing, they returned to the lawyer’s office in New Paltz
and she was gone. So was the money.
“We
couldn’t call the cops,” Mr. Cueva said, referring to their fear of
being deported. “I remember my dad had this feeling of ‘impotencia,’ or
powerlessness. I couldn’t
do anything to make my dad feel good.”
Mr.
Cueva, who graduated summa cum laude from the State University of New
York at Albany, spent his undergraduate years undocumented. He has since
married his high school
sweetheart, an American citizen, helping ease his green card
application. He and another Justice Corps fellow, John Travis, will work
in Catholic Charities’ Poughkeepsie and Newburgh offices part of the
week, and the other days in Manhattan at 26 Federal Plaza,
New York’s immigration court, serving clients from the lower Hudson
Valley region.
It
is too early to tell the impact the first class of fellows has had,
because the two-year program has not yet passed its first anniversary.
But Ms. Tiven says she and
her staff receive frequent inquiries asking how to emulate their
program, which draws from top law schools across the country.
“I want to export our model when we have some really good data to show,” she said.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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