Avery Newmark | (TNS) The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The early bird may not always get the worm, at least when it comes to cognitive performance. A study from Imperial College London suggests night owls — those who feel more alert and productive in the evening — tend to outperform their early rising counterparts on brain tests.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 26,000 participants and found evening people scored up to 13.5% higher than morning people on cognitive assessments. Even those without a strong preference for morning or night still performed better than early risers.

“Our study found that adults who are naturally more active in the evening tended to perform better on cognitive tests than those who are ‘morning people.’ Rather than just being personal preferences, these chronotypes could impact our cognitive function,” lead author Dr. Raha West explained.

The study accounted for age, gender, smoking, drinking, health conditions and other factors. Younger people and those without chronic illnesses generally did better on the tests. Healthier lifestyle choices were also linked to better brain performance.

But don’t stay up all night just yet. The study also found that getting the right amount of sleep is crucial for everyone. People who slept between seven and nine hours a night had the best brain function. Those who slept too little or too much showed decreased cognitive performance.

“While understanding and working with your natural sleep tendencies is essential, it’s equally important to remember to get just enough sleep, not too long or too short,” West said. “This is crucial for keeping your brain healthy and functioning at its best.”

Although these findings are interesting, the study notes more research is needed to fully understand how sleep patterns affect brain performance. So whether you’re a night owl or an early bird, focus on getting quality sleep to help keep your brain sharp.

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

By Sam Taube | NerdWallet

The investing information provided on this page is for educational purposes only. NerdWallet, Inc. does not offer advisory or brokerage services, nor does it recommend or advise investors to buy or sell particular stocks, securities or other investments.

What do fishing, air pollution and Bitcoin have in common? Maybe just one thing: Until recently, they were all regulated by a powerful legal doctrine known as Chevron deference.

But in late June, a fishing-related Supreme Court case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, brought an end to Chevron deference. Experts say the decision could cause substantial changes to financial rules — especially when it comes to cryptocurrency. Here’s what investors should know.

What was Chevron deference?

The term “Chevron deference” comes from a 1984 Supreme Court case, Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council Inc. That case hinged on whether the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was allowed to modify factory emissions regulations that were derived from a broadly worded air pollution law.

The court upheld the modified regulations, creating a “Chevron doctrine” under which judges had to defer to the expertise of federal agencies such as the EPA when those agencies issued, changed or enforced regulations based on ambiguous laws.

Jeff Sovern, a professor of consumer law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, summarizes Chevron deference this way:

“Congress writes statutes, and they can’t predict everything. No one can. So they leave gaps; they’re human. Somebody has to fill in those gaps. And under Chevron, if there were gaps, it was largely up to the administrative agencies,” Sovern says.

Over the past 40 years, Chevron deference has been used in over 19,000 federal court cases, and Congress has passed broadly worded laws with the expectation that Chevron deference would allow agencies to interpret them into specific regulations.

But on June 28, the Supreme Court ruled against a federal agency regulation on fishing boats in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, bringing Chevron deference to an end. Federal agencies no longer have the power to enforce regulations based on their interpretations of ambiguous laws. They can only regulate when their rulemaking powers are explicitly defined by law, either by Congress or by a federal judge.

Financial regulations could loosen

Chevron deference was a load-bearing legal principle in many federal regulations, and its disappearance has the potential to roll back a variety of financial rules.

Sovern says that the full impact of Loper Bright on financial regulations is unclear. Some agencies, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), have congressionally defined powers to make “appropriate” rules, and those rules might still hold up in court post-Loper Bright.

But that might not always be the case. For example, a federal judge in Texas has already referenced Loper Bright in an order that could potentially overturn the Federal Trade Commission’s recent ban on noncompete agreements.

According to Alex Alben, a professor at the UCLA School of Law and former chief privacy officer for the state of Washington, cryptocurrency is another area of financial regulation that could see a lot of changes because of Loper Bright.

“In cases such as the regulation of cryptocurrencies, where there are very few laws, and there are even very few agency interpretations — in those fields, we’ve definitely seen a power shift from the agencies to the courts,” Alben says.

Crypto rulemaking is up to Congress now

Congress has passed laws regarding the taxation of cryptocurrency, and it has debated several bills that would explicitly define a regulatory framework for digital assets.

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But most crypto regulation today consists of agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) enforcing rules based on their interpretations of their broad jurisdiction over financial markets. Without Chevron deference, many of those rules may not survive legal challenges.

Some cryptocurrency experts say that crypto can still be regulated post-Loper Bright; Congress just has to pass laws clearly defining those regulations.

“It creates an obligation for Congress to create actual rules that apply to this industry and pass new laws for a new technology. So it makes it more of a political issue than a bureaucratic one,” says Alexander Blume, CEO of Two Prime, a digital asset-focused registered investment advisor.

Blume says that in the short term, Loper Bright may turn the tide in favor of crypto companies in certain regulatory situations. For example, Uniswap, a developer of decentralized crypto exchange software, is facing legal action from the SEC, which regards it as an unregistered securities exchange and broker that may be violating federal securities laws.

The SEC has indicated that it may press charges against Uniswap, which has been the subject of class action lawsuits by investors who have lost money buying scam tokens on its software.

But last week, Uniswap’s legal counsel sent an open letter to the agency questioning its jurisdiction in the matter, in light of Loper Bright and the lack of clear laws that apply securities regulations to cryptocurrency.

For investors, buyer beware could be the new normal

“I see positives and negatives of this ruling, with respect to financial markets. I think we will have more innovation and more creativity in financial markets,” Alben says.

Many crypto investors are anticipating the approval of Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as soon as this month. Blume says Loper Bright could mean that staking (an interest-like reward system by which Ethereum holders earn new Ether coins over time) could be added to crypto ETFs “sooner rather than later,” although the current crop of Ethereum ETF candidates doesn’t have staking features for SEC compliance reasons.

The end of Chevron deference is “an anti-regulation ruling by the court,” Alben says. Less regulation may give investors more choice in what kinds of investments they can buy — but it also may leave investors more vulnerable to losing their money on potentially fraudulent or otherwise inadvisable investments.

“We’re probably going to have riskier environments for investors, who will need to educate themselves about the levels of risk that they’re taking, and do their homework before they make any kind of speculative investment,” Alben says.

The author owned Bitcoin at the time of publication.

Sam Taube writes for NerdWallet. Email: staube@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @samuel_taube.

The article The End of Chevron Deference Is a ‘Power Shift’ for Investors originally appeared on NerdWallet.

Amy Maxmen, Arthur Allen | (TNS) KFF Health News

As bird flu spreads among dairy cattle in the U.S., veterinarians and researchers have taken note of Finland’s move to vaccinate farmworkers at risk of infection. They wonder why their government doesn’t do the same.

“Farmworkers, veterinarians, and producers are handling large volumes of milk that can contain high levels of bird flu virus,” said Kay Russo, a livestock and poultry veterinarian in Fort Collins, Colorado. “If a vaccine seems to provide some immunity, I think it should be offered to them.”

Among a dozen virology and outbreak experts interviewed by KFF Health News, most agree with Russo. They said people who work with dairy cows should be offered vaccination for a disease that has killed roughly half of the people known to have gotten it globally over the past two decades, has killed cats in the U.S. this year, and has pandemic potential.

However, some researchers sided with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recommending against vaccination for now. There’s no evidence that this year’s bird flu virus spreads between people or causes serious disease in humans. And it’s unclear how well the available vaccine would prevent either scenario.

But the wait-and-see approach “is a gamble,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “By the time we see severe outcomes, it means a lot of people have been infected.”

“Now is the time to offer the vaccines to farmworkers in the United States,” said Nahid Bhadelia, director of the Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. Even more urgent measures are lagging in the U.S., she added. Testing of farmworkers and cows is sorely needed to detect the H5N1 bird flu virus, study it, and extinguish it before it becomes a fixture on farms — posing an ever-present pandemic threat.

Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said the agency takes bird flu seriously, and the U.S. is stockpiling 4.8 million doses of the vaccine. But, he said, “there’s no recommendation to launch a vaccine campaign.”

“It’s all about risk-benefit ratios,” Daskalakis said. The benefits are blurry because there hasn’t been enough testing to understand how easily the virus jumps from cows into people, and how sick they become. Just four people in the United States have tested positive this year, with mild cases — too few to draw conclusions.

Other farmworkers and veterinarians working on dairy farms with outbreaks have reported being sick, Russo said, but they haven’t been tested. Public health labs have tested only about 50 people for the bird flu since the outbreak was detected in March.

Still, Daskalakis said the CDC is not concerned that the agency is missing worrisome bird flu infections because of its influenza surveillance system. Hospitals report patients with severe cases of flu, and numbers are normal this year.

Another signal that puts the agency at ease is that the virus doesn’t yet have mutations that allow it to spread rapidly between people as they sneeze and breathe. “If we start to see changes in the virus, that’s another factor that would be part of the decision to move from a planning phase into an operational one,” Daskalakis said.

On July 8, researchers reported that the virus may be closer to spreading between people than previously thought. It still doesn’t appear to do so, but experiments suggest it has the ability to infect human airways. It also spread between two laboratory ferrets through the air.

In considering vaccines, the agency takes a cue from a 1976 outbreak of the swine flu. Officials initially feared a repeat of the 1918 swine flu pandemic that killed roughly half a million people in the United States. So they rapidly vaccinated nearly 43 million people in the country within a year.

But swine flu cases turned out to be mild that year. This made the vaccine seem unnecessarily risky as several reports of a potentially deadly disorder, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, emerged. Roughly one of every million people who get influenza vaccines may acquire the disorder, according to the CDC. That risk is outweighed by the benefits of prevention. Since Oct. 1, as many as 830,000 people have been hospitalized for the seasonal flu and 25,000 to 75,000 people have died.

An after-action report on the 1976 swine flu situation called it a “sobering, cautionary tale” about responding prematurely to an uncertain public health threat. “It’s a story about what happens when you launch a vaccine program where you are accepting risk without any benefit,” Daskalakis said.

Paul Offit, a virologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, sides with the CDC. “I’d wait for more data,” he said.

However, other researchers say this isn’t comparable to 1976 because they aren’t suggesting that the U.S. vaccinate tens of millions of people. Rather they’re talking about a voluntary vaccine for thousands of people in close contact with livestock. This lessens the chance of rare adverse effects.

The bird flu vaccine on hand, made by the flu vaccine company CSL Seqirus, was authorized last year by the European equivalent of the FDA. An older variety has FDA approval, but the newer variety hasn’t gotten the green light yet.

Although the vaccine targets a different bird flu strain than the H5N1 virus now circulating in cows, studies show it triggers an immune response against both varieties. It’s considered safe because it uses the same egg-based vaccine technology deployed every year in seasonal flu vaccines.

For these reasons, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and about a dozen other countries are stockpiling millions of doses. Finland expects to offer them to people who work on fur farms this month as a precaution because its mink and fox farms were hit by the bird flu last year.

In contrast, mRNA vaccines being developed against the bird flu would be a first for influenza. On July 2, the U.S. government announced that it would pay Moderna $176 million for their development, and that the vaccines may enter clinical trials next year. Used widely against covid-19, this newer technology uses mRNA to teach the immune system how to recognize particular viruses.

In the meantime, Florian Krammer, a flu virologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, said people who work on dairy farms should have the option to get the egg-based vaccine. It elicits an immune response against a primary component of the H5N1 bird flu virus that should confer a degree of protection against infection and serious sickness, he said.

Still, its protection wouldn’t be 100%. And no one knows how many cases and hospitalizations it would prevent since it hasn’t been used to combat this year’s virus. Such data should be collected in studies that track the outcomes of people who opt to get one, he said.

Krammer isn’t assuaged by the lack of severe bird flu cases spotted in clinics. “If you see a signal in hospitals, the cat is out of the bag. Game over, we have a pandemic,” he said. “That’s what we want to avoid.”

He and others stressed that the United States should be doing everything it can to curb infections before flu season starts in October. The vaccine could provide an additional layer of protection on top of testing, wearing gloves, and goggles, and disinfecting milking equipment. Scientists worry that if people get the bird flu and the seasonal flu simultaneously, bird flu viruses could snag adaptations from seasonal viruses that allow them to spread swiftly among humans.

They also note it could take months to distribute the vaccines after they’re recommended since it requires outreach. People who work beside dairy cows still lack information on the virus, four months into this outbreak, said Bethany Boggess Alcauter, director of research at the National Center for Farmworker Health.

Health officials have talked with dairy farm owners, but Boggess’ interviews with farmworkers suggest those conversations haven’t trickled down to their staff. One farmworker in the Texas Panhandle told her he was directed to disinfect his hands and boots to protect cows from diseases that workers may carry. “They never told us if the cow could infect us with some illness,” the farmworker said in Spanish.

The slow pace of educational outreach is a reminder that everything takes time, including vaccine decisions. When deciding whether to recommend vaccines, the CDC typically seeks guidance from its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or the ACIP. A consultant to the group, infectious disease researcher William Schaffner, has repeatedly asked the agency to present its thinking on Seqirus’ bird flu vaccine.

Rather than fret about the 1976 swine flu situation, Schaffner suggested the CDC consider the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic. It caused more than 274,000 hospitalizations and 12,000 deaths in the U.S. within a year. By the time vaccines were rolled out, he said, much of the damage had been done.

“The time to discuss this with ACIP is now,” said Schaffner, before the bird flu becomes a public health emergency. “We don’t want to discuss this until the cows come home in the middle of a crisis.”

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KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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(KFF Health News 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.

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

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