Immigrant-ARC, Council Member Shahana Hanif Urge City to Fully Fund Legal Services for Immigrant New Yorkers

NEW YORK, NY (04/19/2022) (readMedia)-- On Wednesday, Immigrant-ARC and NYC Council Immigration Chair Shahana Hanif will urge New York City lawmakers to fully fund legal services for immigrant New Yorkers. Joined by Cartholic Charities, Legal Aid Society, Urban Justice Center and CALA, the legal service providers will call on lawmakers to increase funding in order to address the growing migration crisis.

Immigrant-ARC recently polled its over 80 statewide members, all of whom are legal service providers, and the reality is that no one has capacity to meet the pressing needs of the latest crisis driven by families fleeing Ukraine.

While the war in Ukraine has turned the attention of lawmakers back to the state of our nation's immigration systems, there are already Afghan, Cameroonian and Haitian communities in New York who hope receive the help they were promised by the Biden administration – and that's on top of the backlog in immigration courts created by closures during the pandemic, increased enforcement during the Trump presidency.

Immigrant-ARC, or I-ARC, is a coalition of 80 organizations and professional associations providing legal services to New York's immigrant communities throughout the State, organized out of the response to the Muslim travel ban at JFK Airport in 2017.