While migrants can receive mail at the city’s shelters, many have struggled to track down important correspondence, according to legal service providers and advocates—especially after the city restricted the length of stays for both adults and families with children.

In June, when Naykelis and her son had to move out of the Brownsville hotel shelter where they’d been staying for eight months, she was told her mail would be held there for two weeks.

She’d been waiting several weeks already for information about her biometrics appointment to arrive by mail—required as part of her affirmative asylum application, in which she’d provide fingerprints, photographs, and signatures to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

However, after two visits over the next two weeks to the Brownsville site—which she left following a dispute with staff there, transferring to another shelter in Greenwood Heights—she was told there was nothing for her, and that she should change her mailing address as soon as possible.

So she returned to the organization that had helped her apply for asylum, Central American Legal Assistance (CALA), and they called USCIS and confirmed that her appointment information had been sent to the Brownsville shelter. 

“I had no trouble with mail before,” said Naykelis, who asked to withhold her last name because she feared harming her immigration case. “The medical card I requested arrived. I received medical bills.”

While migrants can receive mail at the city’s shelters, legal service providers and advocates say many are missing important correspondence, especially after City Hall began restricting the length of their stays.

Families with children are subject to 60-day time limits in shelter, after which they have to reapply for another placement. Adults and couples without kids can remain for either 30 or 60 days, depending on their age, after which they must prove they meet a set of specific criteria to earn more time.

When asked, City Hall did not specify how long migrants’ mail is kept at a shelter after they move out. But both migrants and legal service providers explained that it’s usually held for two weeks after the transfer.

The city says it holds onto what it calls “high-priority mail,” which is basically correspondence from governmental entities (such as court documents, social benefits, or legal correspondence) at its migrant shelters, as well as at the American Red Cross’ New York headquarters, where the city runs its Asylum Application Help Center.

However, organizations that with with newly arrived immigrants—including those that are part of the Asylum Seeker Legal Assistance Network (ASLAN), which provides legal help—have been sounding the alarm about problems with mail in the city’s emergency shelters, more than 200 of which have opened over the last two years as tens of thousands of new immigrants arrived in New York.

UnLocal, which is part of a coalition of immigration legal organizations called the Pro Se Plus Project (PSPP), reported that more than 100 people have knocked on their doors reporting that they don’t get their mail, or don’t know where or how to find it.

Tania Mattos, UnLocal’s interim executive director, said the organization has worked with more than 600 migrants so far this year. “Half of them are in shelters. And then, out of that, about 80 percent of them are impacted by not getting their mail,” she said. “And that’s just us.” 

Other organizations that assist with asylum applications and immigration cases that are not part of ASLAN (which receives funding from the city) also reported that many who come seeking help are doing so because they aren’t receiving mail at their shelters.

“People come in and say: ‘Yes, I’ve applied to the immigration authorities, but I haven’t received anything,’” said Jairo Guzman, executive director of the Mexican Coalition. “When we call immigration, they say they sent it. And it’s the resident’s word against the shelter worker.”

In Naykelis’ case, after being told twice at the shelter that they had no mail for her, she decided to go directly to the USCIS Manhattan Application Support Center on June 25 and explain what happened.

“And they accepted me,” Naykelis said with joy. “When I got to the office, they told me that my appointment was for the 20th—I had gone on the 25th—but that my case was still open, so they took my information.”

Delays and deadlines

On July 9, city officials reported that the number of new immigrant arrivals had decreased since President Joe Biden’s executive action barring migrants who cross the southern border illegally from receiving asylum. But there are still currently 64,000 migrants in the city’s shelters, out of the more than 200,000 who have arrived in the last two years. 

Most of the organizations City Limits spoke with identified more mail-related problems since the city began changing the rules around length of migrants’ shelter stays earlier this year, and after the legal settlement reached in March that redefined New York’s right-to-shelter policy for adult immigrants without kids, who for the most part are now subject to a 30-day limit.

And a single piece of mail can be essential to being able to move on to the next steps in an immigration proceeding.

An attorney who works with one of the ASLAN member organizations is now fighting the deportation order of a West African migrant who was sent a Notice to Hearing—used by the government to inform those it seeks to deport of an upcoming immigration proceeding—  which was mailed to the city’s 30th Street Men’s Intake Shelter in January.

But he never received it. The notice was then returned to the U.S. Postal Service in February, and when the migrant failed to appear in court, the court ordered him removed in absentia in April. The asylum seeker is currently in a detention center in New Jersey.

“In terms of why he was put in detention, I can’t say whether the mail was the reason behind that,” said the non-profit attorney representing the man, who preferred not to be named for fear of prejudicing the case. “But in terms of him definitely being at risk of deportation, and potentially not being able to get asylum relief—yeah, the mail.”

Immigration cases often have time-sensitive deadlines that can be thwarted by lost mail. For example, those who want to apply for affirmative asylum—as opposed to defensive asylum, filed when someone is already facing removal proceedings—must do so within one year after they arrive in the country, a deadline made more difficult to meet by current court backlogs.

Once migrants submit their application, USCIS sends a notice in the physical mail that contains a receipt number—but if it’s not received, this can trigger a domino effect.

“If people are having to move from the shelter within 30 days or 60 days, they obviously are not going to get a receipt notice by the time that they no longer live at that address,” said Lauren Wyatt, managing attorney at Catholic Charities Community Services. 

Without the receipt number, Wyatt explained, there’s no way for the person to notify USCIS of a new address. “It’s going to be sent to an address that [they] don’t have anymore,” Wyatt said.

Next steps, such as applying for an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) card, are also dependent on that receipt number, Wyatt emphasized. Asylum seekers can only apply for employment authorization 150 days after they file for asylum, and approval can only be authorized after the clock reaches 180 days. Any delays caused by the applicant will pause that clock, attorneys explained.

“So now I can’t prove to USCIS that I’ve applied for asylum because I don’t have my receipt notice. I can’t let USCIS know that I’ve moved because I don’t have my receipt notice. I can’t get a work permit to support my family, because I can’t prove that I applied for asylum,” she said, reflecting on the possible outcomes. “So it’s a whole mess, is the short answer.”

After the USCIS sends the receipt number, the next step is fingerprints, which are required for both USCIS applications and applications filed with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “If the person does not get fingerprinted before the final decision of their case, whether it’s with USCIS or with the court, they cannot be granted asylum,” Wyatt added.

To avoid potential issues, many of ASLAN’s member and non-member groups allow asylum seekers to use their organization’s addresses to receive mail. But mix ups still happen. 

Hasan Shafiqullah, an immigration attorney with Legal Aid Society, described a recent case where he had to put Legal Aid Society’s address as the mailing address for his client, but the shelter address as the residence, because they had to stipulate where the asylum seeker was actually living. 

Shafiqullah thinks his client’s work authorization card was mistakenly mailed to the shelter. “The shelter says they never got it,” he said. “They didn’t know what happened to it; it was like a whole back and forth.”

Shafiqullah had the client come back in to work on a new EAD Card request, and in the process, he decided to pull up the receipt notice on the USCIS website, and found out that the agency was already producing a new card to mail out to his client again.

“It makes me think that the shelter had the card sent back to USCIS because they didn’t know how to find the client because she had been moved to a different shelter back then. And thankfully, USCIS got it because they will only reissue the card if the original one was returned to them,” Shafiqullah explained. “So that was a happy ending for her. Although we never got the social security card, and I imagine that got sent to the shelter.”

Undeliverables, return to sender

In January, the New York Legal Assistance Group, one of the organizations in the Pro Se Plus Project—which provides assistance in applying for asylum, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and work permits—started to receive the first batch of returned mail.

Whether it is an application to DHS or USCIS, NYLAG sends applicants copies of their documents as proof that the application was filed. However, the copies weren’t delivered.

“We mail them [asylum seekers] this application usually within a week or two after they’re done,” said Allison Cutler, a supervising attorney in NYLAG’s Immigrant Protection Unit, who also runs its Pro Se Plus Project clinics. It was through these returned mailings that they realized that their packages were not reaching people.

Moreover, “we’re seeing that the shelter is actually writing on some of them,” Cutler said. “We have an envelope that actually says ‘discharged.’ And it lists the room number that the resident was in.”

In that particular instance, just the front of the envelope was returned to the organization. “I’m shocked that [the U.S. Postal Service] processed that return. I have no idea where this asylum application is. I have no idea who opened it. I can only presume it was the shelter. And of course, that’s violating confidentiality,” she added.

The mayor’s office said it does not open mail and, in a limited number of cases, returns mail to the sender when recipients cannot be located for an extended period—although they didn’t specify how many days they hold onto it.

In addition, NYLAG has had trouble sending mail to the city’s massive tent shelter complex at Randall’s Island, saying four envelopes have been returned as “undeliverable.” NYLAG alone has about five people who have not received a copy of their records who they have been unable to contact recently.

“His [the asylum seeker] envelope was actually returned to us as undeliverable because he was a Randall’s Island resident,” Cutler explained. “Thankfully, at that point, we were connected with them [the client] via email, and we were able to mail that individual his copy of his asylum application.”

A City Hall spokesperson said that its HERRCs, such as the one at Randall’s, provide address line guidance to shelter residents, store mail within the facilities themselves, and do not discard or destroy mail, including magazines or spam letters.

The city said it has a centralized database that indicates whether migrants have mail to pick up and alerts them if they have outstanding mail after being transferred to another shelter, but did not elaborate on how the process works.

“Every time a person or family must move out of shelter, they risk losing these essential documents. Missing critical documents can mean missed appointments, court dates, and interviews that severely undermine our efforts to help new arrivals get work authorization and navigate toward safety and stability,” Comptroller Brad Lander told City Limits in an emailed statement.

“As my office found in our investigation of the 60-day rule, the Administration failed to create policies around mail retention and provide families with sufficient information on how to change their address,” Lander added.

Cutler describes that what started as a rarity in January, with a few returned packages a month, has only grown.

“This is affecting people’s work authorization, their ability to obtain safety and stability and economic independence and ultimately, permanent status and protection in the United States,” Cutler noted. “And if they miss an immigration court hearing, they’re risking being ordered deported in their absence. And of course, having their asylum application denied if they had already applied and it was pending.”

‘All types of mail’

Community groups, legal service providers, and volunteers who spoke with City Limits said they have allowed clients to use their organization’s address to receive mail, but only for legal processes. For everything else, like personal letters, migrants and asylum seekers in shelter have limited options. 

In August 2023, Afrikana set up space in its Harlem community center to fill this gap, in anticipation of address changes after the city announced it would be limiting the length of people’s shelter stays. What started out as a few boxes for incoming packages quickly grew into a 16-by-9 foot dedicated mailroom, explained Adama Bah, Afrikana’s founder. 

“We receive all types of mail,” Bah said, showing a reporter how each column of boxes held specific types of correspondence: personal letters, health care bills, and mail from schools, police departments, border patrol, the DMV (for driver’s licenses), among others. This does not include immigration correspondence, which is kept safely in a locked office inside a locked drawer.

Afrikana is open Monday through Friday, and every day, 100 people receive mail by appointment, and an asylum seeker who volunteers for the organization is in charge of the mail room. He has a hard copy listing the names of those who have scheduled an appointment to pick up their mail. 

Candice Braun, director of programming for Artists Athletes Activists, another organization helping new immigrants, argued that the city should work directly with non-profit organizations like Afrikana to handle mailings for immigrants. 

“Just like a mini post office,” Braun said. “They could grant that [money], and there are many nonprofits who would do that.”

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

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

Ernie Suggs | (TNS) The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

ATLANTA — When President Joe Biden was in Atlanta for the May commencement ceremonies for Morehouse College, he praised and teased the graduates of the all-male school telling them that he did not doubt that “a Morehouse Man will be president one day.”

The president let the applause build and die down a bit before delivering the punchline.

“Just after an AKA from Howard,” he quipped.

On Sunday, Biden laid the path for that member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority from Howard University when he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him atop the Democratic Party’s ticket for the November presidential election.

In a statement, Harris thanked Biden for the endorsement and vowed to “earn and win this nomination.”

“We have 107 days until Election Day,” Harris wrote. “Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”

‘The only decision’

If she is ultimately chosen, Harris would be the first African American woman, first Asian American woman, and first graduate of a historically Black college to lead a party’s ticket.

“Which is not unimportant,” said Kerry Haynie, a professor of political science at Duke University and dean of the school’s department of social sciences. “Having a woman of color at the top of the ticket sends a significant message when the other side has traded in race bating and xenophobia.”

In the weeks following President Biden’s Atlanta visit and his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, the loud whispers for Harris to replace him on the ticket grew, even as she downplayed it, refusing to engage in commentary about anything other than running alongside him.

But with Biden dropping out and strongly endorsing her, she now has no choice.

Neither did the list of prominent Democrats who are lining up to support her.

“It is the right decision, the only decision the Democrats could have made and have a chance of winning,” said Haynie, the co-author of “Race, Gender, and Political Representation: Toward a More Intersectional Approach. “It would have been too disruptive to not place Harris at the top of the ticket. A Black woman. A woman of color who is currently the vice president. They would have lost their base if it was someone other than Kamala Harris.”

Courting Black women

That base is Black women. Long considered the backbone of the Democratic Party, Black women will again play a major role in the November election.

In 2020, more than 91% of Black women who voted, supported the Biden-Harris ticket. And while some polls suggested that Biden was losing Black male voters, those same polls show that Black women were still fully behind him.

Silva Howard, who is visiting Atlanta from the battleground state of Michigan, said Harris has her full support.

“ (Black women) are the smartest people on the planet. For us to run the country would be amazing because we know what it takes to not only run a country but to run a family,” said Howard, before walking into the Janet Jackson concert Sunday night at State Farm Arena. “We are the backbone. The Black woman is the backbone of the United States.”

Haynie said with Harris now serving as the party’s presumptive nominee, the Democrats can move forward against the Republicans, rather than having been mired in the intraparty turmoil that has dominated the conversation over the last three weeks about whether Biden should step aside.

“Biden endorsing her was very important,” Haynie said. “They will get the party behind her. Now they must take advantage of the strong infrastructure they have put together to turn it into a Harris-led machine.”

Endorsements rolling in

Harris sought the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020, but dropped out before a single primary vote had been cast because her campaign lacked money, a message and a cohesive strategy. Even after Biden picked her to run as his vice president, her first two years of office were marked by missteps.

But after the Supreme Court decision overturning the right to abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade, she became one of the most vocal and prominent advocates for abortion rights and women’s rights.

She was also Biden’s most ardent defender after his debate debacle, rallying around him when other high-profile Democrats called for him to step aside.

On Sunday, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, issued a statement on social media Sunday endorsing Harris.

So did Georgia Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who were joined by Congresswoman Lucy McBath and former Atlanta Mayor and Biden adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms in endorsing Harris.

“They recognize the risks the party would undertake if they passed over Harris. Changing candidates will not erase Democrats’ current disadvantage relative to Donald Trump, and if it looked like Harris was passed over against her will, that would almost certainly depress Black voter turnout and guarantee that Democrats would lose the presidency,” said Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie.

“We’ll have to wait to see if others submit their name for consideration in the next few days. In the meantime, the hard work begins of working through the DNC’s procedures to ensure a legal and optically sound transfer of the nomination.”

Moving with caution

Emory University law professor Alicia Hughes agrees that — with recent Supreme Court rulings, ballot certification deadlines, and the upcoming Democratic National Convention — the naming of Harris was the “most strategic and intelligent decision” that could have been made.

“It puts [the Democratic Party] in a position where they are able to ensure that they stay out of the courts,” Hughes said. “It ensures a modicum of consistency.”

But that is just the beginning.

Hughes said while the “path of least resistance,” is to have Harris at the top of the ticket, conversations are going on about who would be on the ticket with her or even if someone else should carry the party’s banner.

“The concern is who is in a position to beat the Republicans,” Hughes said. “Some people don’t think it is the vice president. Some think it could be (Michigan Gov.) Gretchen Whitmer or (California Gov.) Gavin Newsom. All of these are conversations going on in the background. There are many ways this can go. We are still in a bit of a conundrum right now. But this is politics.”

Kelly Green, a 1991 graduate of Howard, said she is supporting Harris, who she thinks is ably qualified to run for president.

But she is fearful that America might not be ready to embrace a woman, even one who could prevent former President Donald Trump — whom Democrats have branded as a threat to democracy because of his positions on guns, abortion, immigration, taxes, education and trade — from returning to the Oval Office.

“America is not ready to vote for a woman, let alone a Black woman,” said Green, who lives in Marietta. “We have been indoctrinated with too much self-hate into thinking that Black women can’t do the job when over and over again, it has been shown that Black women carry this democratic process. I am ready for the fight and willing to do whatever I need to do, but I think it is going to be very hard. I am very scared.”

Harris no stranger to Atlanta

During the campaign season, Harris visited Atlanta five times, including twice in one week earlier this month. And with Georgia positioned as a prime battleground state, she is likely to return. That can’t be soon enough for Elyce Strong Mann.

Like millions of travelers this weekend, Mann was having a rough day Sunday trying to secure a flight home to Atlanta. When she finally landed and opened her phone to call her husband, she was greeted with a text message from him letting her know that Biden had dropped out and endorsed Harris.

“All I could say was hallelujah,” said Mann, who teaches screenwriting at Emory University. “I am excited because she is smart, capable and mentally sound. I think she can, and I think she will win. We are talking about the state of our democracy. It is more than politics now. People will rally behind her.”

Mann, a 1993 graduate of Spelman College, is also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., the oldest Black Greek letter sorority in the world with more than 360,000 initiated members in all 50 states and 11 nations.

A movement

Shondria Covington, who is also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha and the former president of the Greater Atlanta Chapter of Jack and Jill, said no sooner than a half hour after Biden’s announcement an unofficial mobilization began.

“I am excited and proud of Soror Vice President and of Biden for being forward-thinking,” Covington said. “Us being part of an organization of over [360,000] Black women, this will become a movement. It is uniting us.”

Covington said that members of the sorority, through group chats and messages, have already started fundraising giving at least the symbolic amount of $19.08, signifying the date that the sorority was founded in 1908 at Howard University.

Harris joined the sorority during her senior year at Howard University in the spring of 1986. She has remained committed to the sorority, whose political members have included Hazel O’Leary, Sharon Pratt and Sheila Jackson-Lee, throughout her professional and political career.

“The reach of the sorors of AKA is so expansive that it will go beyond the sorority and Black women and we will be able to touch all groups, races and genders to create a swirl for Soror Harris,” Covington said. “As a Black woman, this move signals the progression in this country that we need to see.”

Staff Reporter DeAsia Paige contributed to this story.

©2024 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit at ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Hours before President Biden announced he would not seek reelection, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said there could be legal challenges — a warning election law experts said would only hold true if Biden was the official nominee.

“Every state has its own election system,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday on “State of the Union” — hours before Biden’s announcement. “In some of these states it’s a real hurdle replacing someone at the top of the ticket.”

The ticket, however, is not official until the end of the Democratic National Convention, set for next month in Chicago. Election law experts said changes made before then do not pose legal challenges.

“Joe Biden was never the official nominee of the Democratic Party,” election law expert Rick Hasen told the Daily News in an email Sunday evening. “So long as Democrats timely pick their candidates, the chances of any legal challenge to their presidential and vice-presidential candidates appearing on the ballot is incredibly small.”

The “election system” issues Johnson referred to come into play if the nominee is changed after the deadline for naming an official nominee and if ballots have already been printed, according to a scenario reported Friday by Iowa Capital Dispatch. Those deadlines are mostly in August or September.

Johnson nonetheless also implied potential subterfuge on the part of Democrats.

“Joe Biden was chosen after a long, ‘small-d’ democratic process by 14 million people emerging through that primary,” Johnson told Tapper. “It will be interesting to see if the so-called party of democracy, the Democrats, go into a back room somewhere and switch it out and put someone else at the top of the ticket. I think they’ve got legal hurdles in some of these states, and it would be litigated I would expect on the ground there, and they’ll have to sort through that.”

The Democratic party has promised anything but a “back room” process.

“In the coming days, the Party will undertake a transparent and orderly process to move forward as a united Democratic Party with a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November,” DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said in a statement after Biden’s announcement. “This process will be governed by established rules and procedures of the Party. Our delegates are prepared to take seriously their responsibility in swiftly delivering a candidate to the American people.”

Steven T. Dennis | (TNS) Bloomberg News

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is considering rejoining the Democratic Party to vie for its presidential nomination after President Joe Biden announced he would drop out of the race, according to an adviser.

Jonathan Kott, who previously served as Manchin’s communications director, said the senator is “seriously considering” running for president as a Democrat but did not share more information about his plans. The senator, who turns 77 next month, was the first elected official to express interest in challenging Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination.

Manchin would face an uphill battle if he were to proceed with a presidential bid. The senator left the Democratic Party in May to become an independent, and long irked his fellow Democrats by blocking major parts of Biden’s agenda and pursuing deals with Republicans.

Harris, 59, was endorsed by Biden minutes after he announced he would not seek reelection, and moved rapidly to rally key party members behind her bid. There’s little prospect that Manchin would be able to coax delegates pledged to Biden to defect from Harris.

One of Manchin’s first appearances will be a non-traditional one for someone who has indicated interest in a Democratic presidential run: he is sitting for an interview Monday on conservative-leaning Fox News with host Bret Baier, according to Kott.

___

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.