With 64,000 migrants moving through the warren of shelters in New York City, one of the city’s more difficult challenges is one of its more unpredictable: delivering the mail.
The influx of migrants from the southern border has brought a barrage of mail to the city’s more than 200 migrant shelters, which have overwhelmed makeshift mail rooms in reclaimed hotels and office buildings where the new arrivals are staying.
Some correspondence is important: social security numbers and immigration notices or documents to apply for work authorization, documents that, if lost or delayed, could hinder an immigrant’s ability to work legally in the United States.
But problems have arisen. Mail sometimes gets lost. According to immigration lawyers, the Postal Service has, at times, determined that mail is undeliverable at some shelters, such as tent dormitories on Randall’s Island.
And the city adopts a strict policy that forces migrants to reapply for asylum, sometimes Every 30 daysMigrants said they were struggling to find their mail.
Since New York City was founded Multibillion-dollar emergency response In order to shelter and feed thousands of migrants two summers ago, officials insisted that the way out of the crisis was to make the migrants self-sufficient.
Helping them apply for asylum and work permits, enrolling children in schools and helping adults obtain municipal ID cards—all these, they argued, would help recent migrants become financially independent and ease the strain on city government. will get
But for migrants living in the city’s shelters, the cascade effect that stems from missing a piece of mail — such as a notice to appear in immigration court — can have devastating consequences.
“They’re missing important deadlines and missing important appointments,” said Alison Cutler, a supervising attorney in the Immigration Protection Unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group. “If it’s a court appointment, you can actually be ordered deported in your absence, which is what we’re also seeing: people who are living in shelters and they’re not getting a hearing notice from the court.”
The city faces an enormous challenge: handling mail for more than 210,000 migrants entering its shelter system by 2022, most of whom have left shelters or even the city but can still receive mail. It’s one of the services the city provides free to migrants, including a bed, meals, legal help and laundry at some shelters.
From Amazon packages to letters and gifts sent by family members in distant lands, mail reaches many migrants. But in recent interviews with 20 migrants, delayed deliveries emerged as a common complaint, and some said they had missed important immigration appointments because of it.
City officials said asylum officials are holding on to “high-priority” mail for migrants, including mail from the federal government, even after they are released. And they said they’ve created a centralized database to alert evacuees when there’s mail to pick up.
City Hall did not address questions about delays in retrieving mail. A City comptroller report from May found that the city “does not have policies and procedures or training materials regarding mail retention or address changes.”
Some legal service providers and immigration advocates said the mail system was so unreliable that they often advised migrants to find other addresses where their mail could be sent. Some groups have begun accepting mail at their headquarters and community centers. And some volunteers have offered migrants their own home addresses to receive government mail.
The mail problems have been compounded since the city began imposing 30- and 60-day limits on sheltering immigrants. Migrants are often transferred to other shelters when their time is up, forcing them to visit their previous shelters to retrieve mail. But they are often not allowed entry — despite city policy allowing re-entry — or are told by shelter staff that they have no mail, even though delivery confirmation receipts indicate otherwise.
Amadou Sadjo Berri, 28, of Guinea, described the difficulty of trying to retrieve a crucial letter detailing his asylum appointment to provide the federal government with his fingerprints — an episode so frustrating that he cannot remember the exact dates. happened
On May 1, he received an email notifying him that the letter had arrived at his shelter on Hall Street near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He showed up at the mail room that day, and waited every day for more than a month, sometimes for hours, only to get one answer: They couldn’t find his letter.
“Every time, I go back because my phone tells me I have mail to pick up, and I know that mail is important,” he said. “I come to inform them, and they tell me ‘No, you don’t have one, you have to go.'”
He was reassigned to a migrant shelter on Randall’s Island, forced to commute two hours to Brooklyn every day until the letter finally surfaced on June 7. When he opened it, he was upset: he had missed his scheduled appointment. May 5
A lawyer at New York Legal Assistance Group, Ms. Cutler said a similar situation arose with a client from Venezuela, whose work permit appeared to have been delivered to her shelter, but shelter staff could not locate it.
“We have a USPS tracking number and confirmation that it was delivered to the receptionist at the front desk,” she said. “We’re still trying to track it down, but we’re now concluding that, in all likelihood, we’ll have to file again for a replacement.“
The process of replacing a lost work permit can take months, she said.
And immigrants are sometimes caught in a Catch-22: Even to change their mailing address with US Citizenship and Immigration Services, they typically need an application receipt number that must be delivered by physical mail.
Volunteers and organizations that provide services to migrants have repeatedly raised their concerns with city officials, urging them to address what they see as a systemic problem that could derail immigration cases. City officials have acknowledged the problem, sometimes intervening to help resolve individual cases of lost mail, but have not appeared to make any sweeping changes.
On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a mutual aid group partnered with a bookstore whose address migrants could use to receive mail. Volunteers sort through the mail and notify people whenever they receive required papers.
“We work with a lot of people who come from places where the concept of mail is not top of mind or obvious,” said Charlotte Soehner, one of the volunteers. “People aren’t really aware of the importance of mail and think that shelters can be a static place, and then, you know, they get a letter six months ago that the shelter never told them about.”
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