Back in her hometown in the state of Portuguesa, Venezuela, Magnaly Márquez had to make a choice: Buy her 3-year-old son a pair of shoes, or pizza. She didn’t have enough money for both—despite having studied business administration, working in a bank, and juggling side gigs for extra cash. Now, sitting in a charity hospital-turned-migrant shelter in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Márquez’s eyes welled with tears as she recounted her story. 

In November, the 30-year-old single mother decided to leave for the United States with her son, Milands, in tow. They trekked across the Darién Gap, a treacherous stretch of jungle at the Panama-Colombia border. The Gap lacks roads and cell service. Criminal groups run amok. Migrants frequently run out of food and water, relying on untreated streams at the risk of illness or severe dehydration. 

When I met her in mid-June, Márquez had been waiting in northern Mexico, just across the river from Brownsville, since February. She hopes to seek asylum, which will ultimately require her to prove she faced a form of persecution beyond financial deprivation. Her home country is engulfed in a long-running crisis that is both political and economic.

“Above all else, one asks for humanity,” Márquez said, sitting on a metal bench in the sweltering summer heat. “We are people too. We are warriors who just want a better life—to work—for our children.”

Márquez is one of thousands of migrants in limbo south of the Rio Grande, awaiting their fate. During Joe Biden’s presidency, seeking asylum has been a fraught and ever-changing process. For much of Biden’s term, ports of entry were effectively closed to most asylum-seekers under an archaic public health measure, Title 42. The administration has opened special pathways for immigrants from certain countries including Venezuela, Haiti, and Cuba. At the same time, Biden has limited the means of requesting asylum by pushing migrants to request lottery-style appointments through an app called CBPOne and clamping down on the well-established right to request asylum even after crossing the border illegally.

In his most dramatic action yet, Biden issued an executive order earlier this month that suspends asylum access between ports of entry when daily crossings exceed a certain threshold. Traditionally, as codified in U.S. law, migrants may request asylum “whether or not at a designated port of arrival.” This order, already challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union, could upend that status quo.

(Francesca D’Annunzio)

In each country she passed through, Márquez said, she and her toddler-aged son stopped so she could work. They needed more money to continue their journey north. Along the way, she sold arepas and worked in a grocery store and at a printing press. But in Tamaulipas, the state that borders South Texas from Brownsville to Laredo, she said she can’t work. It’s dangerous to leave the shelter. 

She said she knows from personal experience: Márquez told me she and her son were grabbed on a bus earlier this year and kidnapped by cartel members in Reynosa for extortion. Such incidents are commonplace in northern Mexico border towns.

Late last year, armed men kidnapped 32 migrants from a commercial bus before abandoning them in a Reynosa parking lot. During former President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, asylum-seekers were repeatedly unable to attend their U.S. court hearings because they were being kidnapped. On June 14, the U.S. Consulate General in Matamoros sent out a travel advisory, cautioning against travel in nearby Reynosa, across from the McAllen area, due to kidnappings on intercity buses. That advisory was directed at U.S. citizens and residents, but asylum-seekers are specifically targeted for extortion. 

As of mid-June, there are around 2,000 asylum-seekers stuck in Reynosa waiting to cross into Texas and an additional 2,000 in Matamoros, according to an estimate from the Sidewalk School, a humanitarian nonprofit that works with asylum-seekers in both cities. I requested estimates from Customs and Border Protection and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Migración but have not received responses. 

In the Matamoros hospital-turned-refuge, known as the Pumarejo shelter, asylum-seekers wait in limbo for their CBPOne appointments—wait times average several months—spending the day helping run the facility or lying in their tents. Children have the option of attending English, Spanish, and art classes held by the Sidewalk School, but they do not attend local government schools. The adults are often unable to get jobs off-site to earn money; the cartel kidnappings have made it dangerous for migrants to leave the shelter.

Some asylum-seekers in Matamoros find refuge in an impromptu tent camp abutting the Rio Grande, with a clear view of the U.S. border, lined with concertina wire as far as the eye can see. In the encampment, asylum-seekers sleep in makeshift hammocks tied to mesquite trees or tents covered with black and blue tarps. As of mid-June, the area was mostly cleared out. After the Pumarejo shelter opened last August, asylum-seekers sought safety there instead, but around a couple dozen migrants remain in the camp.

The Kaleo International Shelter, a partnership between a Christian missionary organization and the Sidewalk School, is accessible by an unpaved dirt path, tucked away in a sparsely populated Reynosa neighborhood beside a park that’s home to mesquite, nopales, and wild pigs. The property is surrounded by concrete walls and enclosed behind a corrugated metal door. 

When I visited, 39-year-old Jorel Bien Aimé was sitting inside waiting to see a doctor. He was suffering from chronic neck and back pain, he said in Spanish. He’d traveled a long road to Reynosa from his hometown in Haiti, spending a few years in Chile, working various jobs to send remittances back to his family. He cleaned streets and plazas and picked blueberries and apples, but his wages often weren’t enough to actually send money home. Now, not having seen his family in six years, he felt depression setting in too.

“I feel very weak—physically, mentally, economically,” he said, covering his face as his hands began to tremble. He said he’s been waiting on his CBPOne appointment, where he will make his case for asylum, for seven months. The Kaleo Shelter mostly houses Haitian migrants.

(Francesca D’Annunzio)

Wadely Ostin, a former police officer in the Legislative Palace in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, spent months in Reynosa but did not stay at Kaleo. He told me he never wanted to leave his home country. But, in October 2022, he said he started receiving threats to his family. His wife and son fled to the Dominican Republic, where Haitians face widespread discrimination and deportation. One evening as he was leaving work in Haiti, Ostin said members of a criminal gang tried to kill him, shooting at his car as he sped away.

Ostin said he waited close to a year for a CBPOne appointment. Each day, he checked his phone to see if he was selected. Last week, he finally had his appointment and was allowed to enter the United States, where he’ll pursue an asylum claim. After crossing, he sent me a picture of himself inside a car, grinning with his family, in Hidalgo, Texas.

In a phone call earlier this week, Ostin said he was enjoying the most peace he had felt in his life. As we chatted, I could hear his toddler son watching cartoons on a tablet. Now in a small, sleepy city on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border, he sees neighbors chatting and kids playing soccer outside well into the evening—simple pleasures that aren’t safe when it’s dark out in Port-au-Prince or Reynosa. 

Here, he said, “I’m not afraid of anything.”

Days before New York City’s final budget for the next fiscal year is due, both advocates and City Council members are urging that funding be maintained to reach a similar number of students served in the fiscal year that is about to end on July 1.

For New Yorkers over the age of 16 who are not enrolled in school and who can’t speak, read, and/or write English well enough to participate in an English-language education or training program, adult literacy classes are a key option.

Students who participated in the Chinese-American Planning Council’s adult literacy programs shared in a survey that their lives changed after these classes. “Of course it improved my life,” reads one of the responses in Spanish, shared with City Limits from an internal survey of students who recently completed the organization’s programs.

“Now I can write a little bit of English, read, or go out on the street and read words, know what they say when someone speaks, and be able to understand a little bit. I felt like I was going out blind or deaf,” the respondent said. Now, it “is like not going out blind and deaf anymore,” they added.

For years, the city’ Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) has been working with community organizations to develop an adult literacy system that provides reading, writing, English, and math classes.  

Now, just days before New York City’s final budget for the next fiscal year is due, both advocates and City Council members are urging that funding be maintained to reach a similar number of students served in the fiscal year that is about to end on July 1.

The city budgeted $16.8 million for DYCD to bid on adult literacy programs through requests for proposals (RFPs) during the current fiscal year 2024. In the upcoming fiscal year, the Literacy Services RFP is baselined at $11.8 million, a $6 million reduction from previous years, or a cut of nearly 30 percent.

“Programs already only serve a very small fraction of students who need adult literacy skills,” Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC) Chief Policy and Public Affairs Officer Carlyn Cowen said.

”There are 2.2 million adults with limited English proficiency or who do not have a high school diploma. Last year, DYCD was only able to serve about 1 percent of these adults,” Cowen added. “With such a low percentage of need being served, with programs already critically underfunded, it is difficult to understand how DYCD and the city are able to make such draconian cuts to essential community programs.”

In addition to less funding overall, after years of advocating for a new price per participant (PPP) rate, the city agreed to change the per student per year rate from $900 to $1,300—which in turn would also reduce the number of students who can take part.

The New York City Coalition for Adult Literacy (NYCCAL) anticipates serving approximately 17,722 students this year. With the possible reduction in the budget, and considering the new PPP rate, they expect to reach just 9,118 students in the year ahead, a 48.5 percent reduction.

This cut would come at a time when providers of these programs have seen increased demand for classes, as more than 200,000 migrants and asylum seekers have arrived in the city in the last two years, tens of thousands of whom remain in the shelter system.

“This is coming at a time when the waitlist and demand for adult literacy programs has significantly increased citywide,” Cowen said, adding that there are hundreds of people on a waiting list for these classes, and many of them have recently arrived in the city.

To cover a population similar to what community-based organizations (CBOs) served this year, NYCCAL is asking for an additional $11 million: $6 million to cover what was previously allocated and $5 million to reach a similar number of students under the new per-student rate that will take effect in fiscal year 2025.

“Adult literacy is foundational programming for immigrants in our city. You can’t find a job, housing, education, health care, the list goes on, if you can’t fill out, read, or access the required documents,” said Councilmember Alexa Avilés, chair of the City Council’s Committee on Immigration. The Council is asking for an additional $10 million for DYCD programs. 

“$10 million is a drop in the bucket, and it has never been a question of if we have the money. We have it and then some. It’s entirely up to Mayor Adams and his administration to recognize that literacy is a lifeline for newly arrived New Yorkers, and must be a priority for this city,” Avilés said.

DYCD said that the city is working closely with the Council to support the priorities of both parties and will have more to say soon, adding that If additional funding is provided, they will increase the number of slots served.

“The Adams administration is committed to bringing equity to all New Yorkers, which is why DYCD developed a new RFP funding formula that incorporated poverty rates and expanded newly funded Adult Basic Education programs to communities such as East Harlem, Concourse Village, and Soundview,” DYCD Commissioner Keith Howard said in a statement. 

“DYCD continues to make sure communities previously without literacy programs are getting the services they need, and our administration is working with the Council to support our mutual priorities in the adopted budget.”

While the CBOs say the RFP reformulation looks good on paper—it used data from the 2020 American Community Survey to identify areas with higher rates of poverty, lower educational attainment, and limited English proficiency, which are called “Neighborhood Tabulation Areas”—in practice, the reality is more complicated.

According to NYCCAL, many Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTA) have no existing DYCD-funded literacy, and while organizations can apply for funding even when they’re outside these areas, they fear they will only be considered if there are no viable proposals from programs within the zone. 

“While the RFP was amended after a huge outcry to allow CBOs outside of the NTA to apply, it was also set up to prioritize organizations within the NTA, de facto creating barriers for organizations that have been doing this work in communities for decades,” Cowen said.

DYCD has been notifying CBOs since Friday on whether they won funding under the new RFP, but did not specify how many programs are expected to operate in fiscal year 2025 and how it compares to previous years, saying the number of programs will be available after all RFP awards are finalized. 

“The recent RFP has been difficult on providers,” J.T. Falcone, United Neighborhood Houses’ communications director, wrote via email. “Some awards have been made at this point, but a lack of clear communication from DYCD has created a destabilizing environment where contracts are set to end at the end of the month, but we don’t know where the new ones will be going forward.”

Program providers who spoke to City Limits fear that between budget cuts and the new formula for awarding contracts, the city’s adult literacy program system will undergo a multi-level restructuring that will ultimately affect those who need these classes. 

“We anticipate some providers who aren’t awarded new contracts will have to do layoffs, but we still don’t have clear guidance from the City on how to handle those, which has been difficult,” Falcone added.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Daniel@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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