19 Mar 2024

Four intriguing Loons in line for more playing time in U.S. Open Cup or St. Patrick’s friendly

by | posted in: News | 0

Minnesota United head coach Eric Ramsay is not treating Wednesday’s exhibition game against Irish club St. Patrick’s as just another friendly on Wednesday night at Allianz Field.

Ramsay is only in his second week on the job and is still learning about his team. He wants players to take advantage of the opportunity to be in a competitive context, which will, in turn, help him further assess his new squad.

“I think the opposition will be decent, so it’s a really good chance for us to approach it as though it’s a proper game,” Ramsay said.

Ramsay will not have a full roster at his disposal, with six players away on international duties: Teemu Pukki and Robin Lod (Finland), Michael Boxall (New Zealand), Dayne St. Clair (Canada), Joseph Rosales (Honduras) and Alejandro Bran (Costa Rica).

Plus, Loons star midfielder Emanuel Reynoso is currently away from the team while the Argentine works on his U.S. green card.

The friendly will be played at the exact same time, 7 p.m. Wednesday, as MNUFC2 will compete against Chicago House in the U.S. Open Cup first-round game in Elmhurst, Ill.

“This is a really messy week to deal with,” Ramsay said.

Ramsay, who arrived from Manchester United, wanted to “reserve comment” about MLS’ decision to limit the amount of first-team clubs in the Open Cup this year. Since joining MLS in 2017, this is the first time in non-pandemic seasons that MNUFC’s first team is not competing in the national tournament.

“I’m not familiar enough with the history and the ins and outs of it and I’m sure the club has a stance on how they see things planning out in the coming years, but I’m in a position where I want to value all competitions that the club plays in,” Ramsay said. “If the second team go and play in the U.S. Open Cup, we are going to play to win and support them how we can and how we can construct the squads. I think this week is an anomaly with two games. It’s a really difficult situation for everyone to deal with.”

For the Open Cup, the Loons will loan only one player to their second team: forward Jordan Adebayo-Smith.

Here’s are four players who might get an extended opportunity to play on Wednesday:

Victor Eriksson

The Loons signed the 23-year-old Swedish center back in January, but immigration paperwork issues and the starting duo of Boxall and Tapias limited his opportunities to play in the first four MLS games.

With Boxall gone, the 6-foot-4 Eriksson is in line for more playing time against St. Patrick’s.

“Very physically imposing, very aggressive,” Ramsay said. “It’s, again, difficult to evaluate properly without having seen him in a game and seeing him at a point where he has enough minutes under his belt. The oddities in coming from Sweden to here and the way in which the signing process worked means he hasn’t played for an awful long time. … To put it bluntly, I’m not expecting a great deal from him (Wednesday). But there is obvious promise there.”

Moses Nyeman

Ramsay had a few-minute post-training session chat with the 20-year-old central midfielder on Tuesday.

“I just wanted him to know he’s an important part of what we want to do here,” Ramsay said. “I really liked watching him in this session. He has a lot of qualities that he can bring to the table.”

Nyeman, who was born in Liberia, debuted for D.C. United at age 15 in 2019 and has also been a part of SK Beveren in Belgium and with Real Salt Lake and its second team, Real Monarchs.

“He has had a really interesting path to get to this point,” Ramsay said. “I know it hasn’t quite worked out for him at various stages in his career, but he is still incredibly young. He’s always been from what I gather, high potential. Hopefully there are some ingredients, if we knit them together, can be important player for the club.”

Jordan Adebayo-Smith

On draft day in January, the Loons traded with New England Revolution for the 22-year-old center forward. He has shown why MNUFC wanted him.

In MLS, Adebayo-Smith contributed a secondary assist on Bongi Hlongwane’s game-winning goal at Orlando City two weeks ago and scored the lone goal in MNUFC2’s 4-1 loss to LAFC2 on Sunday. Nyeman helped create the scoring chance.

“His movement was really good (on Sunday),” MNUFC2 head coach Jeremy Hall said Tuesday. “He will probably be a little bit disappointed with himself to not finish a couple more chances, but his movement is there and he’s going to continue to get chances. Then it’s about being clinical.”

Darius Randell

One of the academy players who will be in the mix against Chicago House is 16-year-old winger Darius Randell.

“He’s still a young player,” said Hall, who was a MNUFC2 assistant in 2022-23. “Last year, having him in the group with the second team, he showed glimpses of what he can do. He still needs some work. He’s still a bit raw, but we are excited about him.”

Randell is expected to have a bigger role within MNUFC2 this season.

Briefly

Incoming assistant coach Dennis Lawrence has visited the Trinidad and Tobago embassy in the U.K. and the hope is he can join MNUFC by Monday. The Loons are off from MLS play this weekend. …Goalkeeper Fred Emmings is sidelined with a concussion; he suffered the injury during training last week. The St. Paul goalkeeper has a history with concussions. … New MNUFC2 defender Finn McRobb, whose signing was announced last week, needs visa to be eligible to play. At least one more MNUFC2 signing has yet to be announced. … United’s Under-15 attacking midfielder Hector Cruz participated in the U.S. Soccer identification camp in Atlanta last week. … Left back Derek Dodson was injured in the MNUFC2 loss Sunday. He is out Wednesday. … Right back Jonah Gasho, a member of the U19 team, started vs. LAFC2 and will be a part of the MNUFC2 roster on Wednesday. The St. Paul native has signed to play college soccer at Nebraska Omaha.

19 Mar 2024

How the anti-vaccine movement pits parental rights against public health

by | posted in: Politics | 0

Amy Maxmen | (TNS) KFF Health News

Gayle Borne has fostered more than 300 children in Springfield, Tennessee. She’s cared for kids who have rarely seen a doctor — kids so neglected that they cannot speak. Such children are now even more vulnerable because of a law Tennessee passed last year that requires the direct consent of birth parents or legal guardians for every routine childhood vaccination. Foster parents, social workers, and other caregivers cannot provide permission.

In January, Borne took a foster baby, born extremely premature at just over 2 pounds, to her first doctor’s appointment. The health providers said that without the consent of the child’s mother, they couldn’t vaccinate her against diseases like pneumonia, hepatitis B, and polio. The mother hasn’t been located, so a social worker is now seeking a court order to permit immunizations. “We are just waiting,” Borne said. “Our hands are tied.”

Tennessee’s law has also stymied grandmothers and other caregivers who accompany children to routine appointments when parents are at work, in drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinics, or otherwise unavailable. The law claims to “give parents back the right to make medical decisions for their children.”

Framed in the rhetoric of choice and consent, it is one of more than a dozen recent and pending pieces of legislation nationwide that pit parental freedom against community and children’s health. In actuality, they create obstacles to vaccination, the foundation of pediatric care.

Such policies have another effect. They seed doubt about vaccine safety in a climate rife with medical misinformation. The trend has exploded as politicians and social media influencers make false claims about risks, despite studies showing otherwise.

Doctors traditionally give caregivers vaccine information and get their permission before delivering more than a dozen childhood immunizations that defend against measles, polio, and other debilitating diseases.

But now, Tennessee’s law demands that birth parents attend routine appointments and sign consent forms for every vaccine given over two or more years. “The forms could have a chilling effect,” said Jason Yaun, a Memphis pediatrician and past president of the Tennessee chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“People who promote parental rights on vaccines tend to downplay the rights of children,” said Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy researcher at the University of California Law-San Francisco.

Drop in Routine Vaccination Rates

Misinformation coupled with a parental rights movement that shifts decision-making away from public health expertise has contributed to the lowest childhood vaccine rates in a decade.

This year, legislators in Arizona, Iowa, and West Virginia have introduced related consent bills. A “Parents’ Bill of Rights” amendment in Oklahoma seeks to ensure that parents know they can exempt their children from school vaccine mandates along with lessons on sex education and AIDS. In Florida, the medical skeptic leading the state’s health department recently defied guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by telling parents they could send unvaccinated children to a school during a measles outbreak.

Last year, Mississippi began allowing exemptions from school vaccine requirements for religious reasons because of a lawsuit funded by the Informed Consent Action Network, which is listed as a leading source of anti-vaccine disinformation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. A post on ICAN’s website said it “could not be more proud” in Mississippi to “restore the right of every parent in this country to have his or her convictions respected and not trampled by the government.”

Even if some bills fail, Reiss fears, the revived parental rights movement may eventually abolish policies that require routine immunizations to attend school. At a recent campaign rally, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.”

The movement dates to the wake of the 1918 influenza pandemic, when some parents pushed back against progressive reforms that required school attendance and prohibited child labor. Since then, tensions between state measures and parental freedom have occasionally flared over a variety of issues. Vaccines became a prominent one in 2021, as the movement found common ground with people skeptical of COVID-19 vaccines.

“The parental rights movement didn’t start with vaccines,” Reiss said, “but the anti-vaccine movement has allied themselves with it and has expanded their reach by riding on its coattails.”

When Lawmakers Silence Health Experts

In Tennessee, anti-vaccine activists and libertarian-leaning organizations railed against the state’s health department in 2021 when it recommended COVID vaccines to minors, following CDC guidance. Gary Humble, executive director of the conservative group Tennessee Stands, asked legislators to blast the health department for advising masks and vaccination, suggesting the department “could be dissolved and reconstituted at your pleasure.”

Backlash also followed a notice sent to doctors from Michelle Fiscus, then the state’s immunization director. She reminded them that they didn’t need parental permission to vaccinate consenting adolescents 14 or older, according to a decades-old state rule called the Mature Minor Doctrine.

In the weeks that followed, state legislators threatened to defund the health department and pressured it into scaling back COVID vaccine promotion, as revealed by The Tennessean. Fiscus was abruptly fired.“Today I became the 25th of 64 state and territorial immunization program directors to leave their position during this pandemic,” she wrote in a statement. “That’s nearly 40% of us.” Tennessee’s COVID death rate climbed to one of the nation’s highest by mid-2022.

By the time two state legislators introduced a bill to reverse the Mature Minor Doctrine, the health department was silent on the proposal. Despite obstacles for foster children who would require a court order for routine immunizations, Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services was silent, too.

Notably, the legislator who introduced the bill, Republican Rep. John Ragan, was among those simultaneously overseeing a review of the agency that would determine its leadership and budget for the coming years. “Children belong to their families, not the state,” said Ragan as he presented the bill at a state hearing in April 2023.

Democratic Rep. Justin Pearson spoke out against the bill. It “doesn’t take into account people and children who are neglected,” he told Ragan. “We are legislating from a point of privilege and not recognizing the people who are not privileged in this way.”

Rather than address such concerns, Ragan referenced a Supreme Court ruling in favor of parental rights in 2000. Specifically, judges determined that a mother had legal authority to decide who could visit her daughters. Yet the Supreme Court has also done the opposite. For instance, it sided against a legal guardian who removed her child from school to proselytize for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Still, Ragan swiftly won the majority vote. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, signed the bill in May, making it effective immediately. Deborah Lowen, then the deputy commissioner of child health at the Department of Children’s Services, was flooded with calls from doctors who now face jailtime and fines for vaccinating minors without adequate consent. “I was and remain very disheartened,” she said.

A Right to Health

Yaun, the Memphis pediatrician, said he was shaken as he declined to administer a first series of vaccines to an infant accompanied by a social worker. “That child is going into a situation where they are around other children and adults,” he said, “where they could be exposed to something we failed to protect them from.”

“We have had numerous angry grandparents in our waiting room who take kids to appointments because the parents are at work or down on their luck,” said Hunter Butler, a pediatrician in Springfield, Tennessee. “I once called a rehabilitation facility to find a mom and get her on the phone to get verbal consent to vaccinate her baby,” he said. “And it’s unclear if that was OK.”

Childhood immunization rates have dropped for three consecutive years in Tennessee. Nationwide, downward trends in measles vaccination led the CDC to estimate that a quarter million kindergartners are at risk of the highly contagious disease.

Communities with low vaccination rates are vulnerable as measles surges internationally. Confirmed measles cases in 2023 were almost double those in 2022 — a year in which the World Health Organization estimates that more than 136,000 people died from the disease globally. When travelers infected abroad land in communities with low childhood vaccination rates, the highly contagious virus can spread swiftly among unvaccinated people, as well as babies too young to be vaccinated and people with weakened immune systems.

“There’s a freedom piece on the other side of this argument,” said Caitlin Gilmet, communications director at the vaccine advocacy group SAFE Communities Coalition and Action Fund. “You should have the right to protect your family from preventable diseases.”

In late January, Gilmet and other child health advocates gathered in a room at the Tennessee Statehouse in Nashville, offering a free breakfast of fried chicken biscuits. They handed out flyers as legislators and their aides drifted in to eat. One pamphlet described the toll of a 2018-19 measles outbreak in Washington state that sickened 72 people, most of whom were unvaccinated, costing $76,000 in medical care, $2.3 million for the public health response, and an estimated $1 million in economic losses due to illness, quarantine, and caregiving.

Barb Dentz, an advocate with the grassroots group Tennessee Families for Vaccines, repeated that most of the state’s constituents support strong policies in favor of immunizations. Indeed, seven in 10 U.S. adults maintained that public schools should require vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella, in a Pew Research Center poll last year. But numbers have been dropping.

“Protecting kids should be such a no-brainer,” Dentz told Republican Rep. Sam Whitson, later that morning in his office. Whitson agreed and reflected on an explosion of anti-vaccine misinformation. “Dr. Google and Facebook have been such a challenge,” he said. “Fighting ignorance has become a full-time job.”

Whitson was among a minority of Republicans who voted against Tennessee’s vaccine amendment last year. “The parental rights thing has really taken hold,” he said, “and it can be used for and against us.”

___

(KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

19 Mar 2024

What the big realtors settlement means for home buyers and sellers

by | posted in: News | 0

By Holden Lewis | NerdWallet

A landmark legal settlement between home sellers and the real estate industry could cause a shakeup in the way homes are bought and sold, beginning this summer.

The National Association of Realtors announced Friday that it had agreed to pay $418 million to settle more than a dozen antitrust lawsuits that accused NAR of imposing rules that inflated real estate commissions. NAR admitted to no wrongdoing, according to the news release.

Under the settlement’s terms, negotiations between buyers and sellers might become gnarlier. Home sellers would pay smaller commissions, allowing them to keep more of the proceeds from sales. And buyers, not sellers, would decide how much buyer’s agents are paid.

The settlement would mark a significant change for buyers, sellers and real estate agents. It’s uncertain how real estate markets will make the transition between now and mid-July, when the settlement is due to go into effect.

What the lawsuits are about

The settlement stems from a federal class-action antitrust lawsuit, Burnett v. National Association of Realtors et al., filed in Kansas City, Missouri. Last October, a jury sided with the plaintiffs, agreeing that NAR and large brokerages conspired to inflate commissions paid by sellers.

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It’s one of more than 20 similar cases filed in federal courts nationwide, not all of them involving NAR, and the only one that went to trial all the way to a verdict. NAR said the proposed settlement in the Burnett case would resolve all of the lawsuits against the association, and will go into effect in mid-July if the court approves it.

NAR is a trade association with more than 1.5 million members working in the real estate industry. The association said the revised rules would affect anyone who uses a multiple listing service — a database of properties for sale in a geographic area — regardless of whether they are licensed Realtors, which is the designation for real estate agents who are members of NAR.

The lawsuits challenge NAR’s cooperative compensation rule, which requires seller’s agents to make “blanket unilateral offers of compensation” to buyer’s agents. To list a home on an MLS, the seller must make this “blanket unilateral” offer to pay buyer’s agents, who influence which houses their clients consider.

Plaintiffs contend that the cooperative compensation rule extorts sellers into paying inflated commissions to buyer’s agents. “Home sellers have been compelled to set a high buyer broker commission to induce buyer brokers to show their homes to the buyer brokers’ clients,” according to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit in Chicago — Moehrl v. National Association of Realtors et al.

Buyers would set their agents’ pay

With the elimination of cooperative compensation, sellers would no longer have to specify the size of the commission they’ll pay buyer’s agents. In fact, sellers would be banned under the new agreement from setting commissions for buyer’s agents in MLS listings.

Instead, it would be up to buyers to set their own agents’ pay. Some buyer’s agents might charge flat fees, or an hourly rate, or they might charge a fee for each time they accompany a buyer to a showing. Those business models would exemplify the innovation in the industry that the Department of Justice wants to encourage, according to a filing in yet another court case — Nosalek v. MLS Property Information Network et al, in Boston.

Negotiations would be more complex

Some observers worry that the new rule would make it even more difficult for buyers who are short on cash.

“If home buyers have to pay their buyers agent outside of settlement, it will increase their financial burden,” said Victoria Ray Henderson via email. Henderson works exclusively as a buyer’s agent and owns HomeBuyer Brokerage, operating in Washington, D.C., and its suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. Settlement is another term for a real estate closing.

Buyers wouldn’t necessarily have to pay their agents out of pocket. The new rule would allow buyers to ask sellers to pay the buyer’s agents at closing. This means that agent compensation might become part of the negotiation.

“Hopefully they’d negotiate the buyer agent compensation and then that would just be included in the mortgage loan,” says Stephen Brobeck, senior fellow for the Consumer Federation of America.

What it means for buyers and sellers this spring

Sometime between now and when the settlement goes into effect in July, buyer’s agents might start asking buyers to sign contracts that spell out how much the agents will be paid and at what point in the process. Over the same period, home sellers should consult their listing agents to make sure they’re complying with the new rules. This settlement would likely apply to real estate agents whether or not they are members of NAR.

More From NerdWallet

How Much House Can I Afford?
Buying a House in 2024: What to Expect
Wait, What? Things Are Looking Up for Home Buyers?

 

Holden Lewis writes for NerdWallet. Email: hlewis@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @HoldenL.

The article What the Big Realtors Settlement Means for Home Buyers and Sellers originally appeared on NerdWallet.

19 Mar 2024

Right to Shelter Settlement Enforces Unequal System, Critics Say

by | posted in: Society | 0

While defenders see the preservation of shelter rights in the long term, opponents are raising implementation concerns. They say the agreement enforces a recent trend of unequal treatment based on when a person arrived, and from where.  

Adi Talwar

A shuttle bus bringing newly-arrived immigrants to the city’s tent shelter complex at Randall’s Island on Oct. 18, 2023. Under a new settlement agreement, most single adult migrants will be limited to just an initial 30 or 60-day shelter stay, unless they can prove an “extenuating circumstance.”

A new settlement between Mayor Eric Adams’ administration and a major homeless advocacy organization raises serious implementation concerns and enforces a recent trend of unequal treatment for shelter-seekers depending on when they arrived here, and from where, according to a chorus of critics.

On Friday, Coalition for the Homeless entered a 24-page agreement with the Adams administration, establishing an emergency addendum to the 1981 consent decree in Callahan v. Carey, a state lawsuit that established the right to shelter for single men.

A broader set of rules stemming from Callahan and subsequent court decisions has long obligated New York City to shelter anyone in need, at least temporarily.

But Friday’s settlement, the result of five months of closed-door negotiations, sets new limits on shelter eligibility for certain adults without children. Specifically, those who have arrived in New York City from another country since March 15, 2022—an ongoing period defined in the settlement as the “New Arrival Crisis.”

“The system was never built for people to come [from] anywhere on the globe, stay here for as long as they want, on taxpayers’ dollars,” Mayor Adams told reporters Tuesday. “We want to continue to seriously encourage people, you have to find your way in this city, like so many other immigrants have and are doing, right now as we speak.” 

Since last summer, City Hall has limited how long single adult migrants can stay in shelter. But Friday’s agreement goes further, eliminating their blanket right to reapply for a placement after 30 or 60 days. It also requires these new arrivals to cooperate with an initial eligibility screening, including a review of housing options outside the city. 

“To legally enshrine an unequal system is obviously deeply concerning to us,” said Marika Dias, managing director of the Safety Net Project at the Urban Justice Center. 

Under the agreement, migrant adults without children who wish to remain in shelter following a 30-day stint—or, in the case of young adults, 60 days—will have to apply for an “extenuating circumstance” exception, unless they are disabled. Prior to that, they will receive intensified casework, Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom said Tuesday. 

Currently, about 20 percent of single adults are seeking another shelter bed following their initial stay, according to City Hall. The administration is not systematically tracking where people go when they exit. 

Friday’s agreement does not impact parents and minor children, who currently make up more than three quarters of the city’s migrant population. Some families have been subject to 60-day shelter limits since January, albeit with an unqualified right to reapply. 

Mayor Adams initially sought to modify Callahan in May 2023, arguing that the city was not equipped to care for a large influx of asylum seekers, and renewed the request in October. Over 182,000 have arrived since Spring 2022, according to the city, and 64,500 are currently in city care, pushing the overall shelter population north of 120,000. 

“The city and state wanted to obliterate the right to shelter,” David Giffen, executive director of Coalition for the Homeless, told City Limits, defending Friday’s settlement. “This is a temporary overlay that will be lifted as soon as we’re past the crisis.” 

The Coalition drew praise from former City Council speaker Christine Quinn, CEO of the family shelter provider WIN. The organization declined to discuss criticisms of the settlement this week, but Quinn stated Friday that the Coalition “halted” attempts to further gut the right to shelter, which is “here to stay.” 

Steph Rudolph, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society who helped negotiate the settlement on the Coalition’s behalf, added that an adversarial litigation process would have had consequences. A lengthy appeals process would have inevitably ensued. 

Meanwhile, migrant adults have endured long wait times—days, even weeks—for a new placement, stuck in line outside the former St. Brigid School in Manhattan. “Even if we won everything, it would have taken a long time and a lot of people would have been on the street throughout really hot days and really cold days,” Rudolph said. 

Adi Talwar

About 340 migrants waiting in a line at Saint Brigid School in the East Village to reapply for shelter on Jan, 8, 2024.

By April 8, the city has agreed to stop using so-called “waiting areas,” which lack beds, and have served as a sort of way-station for single adults between placements. However, one or more will remain open as a fall-back option for people who decline a placement or arrive in the middle of the night. 

The city already has a precedent for shelter eligibility screenings, Rudolph noted, whether for families with children, runaway and homeless youth, or domestic violence survivors.  

Deb Berkman, supervising attorney of the Shelter Advocacy Initiative at New York Legal Assistance Group, agreed. But she did not find the comparison favorable. 

Berkman helps clients navigate the longstanding Department of Homeless Services intake process for families. Following a brief, conditional placement, they must provide substantial amounts of information to prove their eligibility for a longer-term stay. 

Screeners investigate a family’s housing options before granting shelter—a process similar to that laid out in the Callahan settlement. “We have seen, time and time again, families forced into street homelessness because they can purportedly stay with people who in actuality will not let them stay there,” Berkman said. 

Dias, of the Safety Net Project, added that while shelter screening is nothing new, she sees a “categorical difference” in the establishment of a system that sorts people based on their national origin and time of arrival in New York. 

“The concern is that there are requirements that are tied to your national origin and that there are restrictions on your ability to stay,” she said. 

Ingrid Lewis-Martin, chief advisor to the mayor, explicitly delineated between different shelter populations at Tuesday’s press conference. “It was also important for New Yorkers who support the right to shelter for our own indigenous population to know that we want to help our own indigenous population in the proper way,” she said. 

Attorneys are also scrutinizing the Callahan settlement’s language on shelter standards. 

According to the agreement, a person’s initial placement may be in a shelter or hotel in the city, elsewhere in New York, or even outside the state. The city “wanted to keep their options open,” said Josh Goldfein of Legal Aid, and at one point considered using hotels in New Jersey, but was deterred by the complexity of that sort of expansion. 

The settlement includes minimum standards for hotels outside New York City, including a food allowance, and transportation back to the city when a placement ends. But it drew sharp criticism from Lauren Desrosiers, a senior staff attorney at the Justice Center at Albany Law School. 

Desrosiers supports migrants who have been relocated to Albany since last spring, of whom she said there are currently over 900, coordinating with local government officials and offering immigration legal services. She noted that monitors’ hotel access under the settlement is confined to common areas, limiting inspection capabilities. 

“They are damning them to basically be shipped wherever New York City wants without a single safeguard,” she told City Limits. 

Some advocates also expressed doubt that the shelter extension process will play out smoothly. 

Diane Enobabor, founder of the Africa is Everywhere initiative, does mutual aid work and policy research to support African migrants. Black men became the “face” of New York City’s asylum seeking population this winter, she noted, standing in long lines outside St. Brigid. 

Enobabor summarized their treatment as “organized abandonment,” and said that structural racism fueled the “crisis” rhetoric in a city that has long prided itself as welcoming to immigrants. Inadequate translation services could exacerbate challenges for these migrants now facing assessments to merit a shelter extension, she added.

Jamie Powlovich, executive director of the Coalition for Homeless Youth, drilled down on some of the extenuating circumstances that could merit a shelter extension. For example, the city will have discretion to keep sheltering people who have made “significant efforts” to resettle outside shelter, such as looking for a job or housing. 

“We’re talking about young people that don’t have, for the most part, a lot of formal employment history,” she said. “How do you determine that someone is actively working toward housing?” 

Rudolph, of Legal Aid, said that their organization will be watching the city carefully and will intervene if the agreement is not being properly enforced. 

“The judge has been very clear that his door is open to us if we need it, and if we see people being denied who didn’t get case management at all or did make the efforts that they needed to make… we would enforce the agreement,” they said. 

Under Rudolph’s interpretation of the settlement, single migrants can reapply for a bed even if the city finds they lack an extenuating circumstance, or if a person’s housing falls through. Options for the latter are spelled out in the settlement. “At the end of the day, there’s nothing in the agreement that stops people from reapplying,” Rudolph added. 

Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.

Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom addressing reporters at a press briefing Tuesday.

But Williams-Isom told City Limits Tuesday that the city could reject a person who seeks to reapply during the emergency period. “I don’t think there’s probably a technical reason that someone couldn’t try to reapply, but based on the settlement… if there is no extenuating circumstances we will not be giving them an extension,” she said. 

Williams-Isom went on to praise Legal Aid, saying the administration is always open to further discussions about “things we can do better.” 

On Sunday, 1,901 single adult migrants were on an active waiting list for a new shelter bed. Under the settlement, City Hall must report weekly on the number of single adult migrants who seek an extension, the number granted, and the total denied. The first report is forthcoming. 

In the meantime, conflicting messaging on the bounds of the settlement is worrying, said Desrosiers of Albany Law School. 

“I’m concerned that this points to a critical missing piece that is going to end up with a bunch of people caught in a fight between Legal Aid and New York City,” she said.

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

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