Ever since fleeing Honduras for the United States five years ago with her two children in tow, Gule R. has applied five times for a fee waiver for her work permit application in an attempt to provide for her family.
“They denied my work permit because I don’t make enough money [to pay], but they give me money for my baby,” she said, in reference to the social assistance she receives from New York State.
Gule is one of 530,000 individuals who were granted parole, which allows noncitizens to enter and remain in the United States for a temporary period if they do not have a legal basis to apply for admission into the country. Parolees are required to pay up to $520, an amount that Gule doesn’t have. Fee waivers are granted if applicants can prove they have an inability to pay; however, Gule has been repeatedly denied.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said, in Spanish. “I don’t make enough money, and I can’t make more money because I can’t work.”
After five unsuccessful attempts to appeal for a fee waiver, Gule, who asked her last name not be used due to her application status, said she will not be trying again.
In 2023, 1.45 million refugees crossed the border to seek asylum in the United States, with 545,833 coming from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras fleeing gang violence and political persecution. Despite New York state government’s allocation of $4.3 billion in resources toward asylum seekers for fiscal years 2023-2024 and 2024-2025, people like Gule and her children remain in city shelters facing challenges in New York federal immigration courts.
Some fear the upcoming presidential election could curtail asylum access and make the situations like Gule’s harder still.
“The lack of humanity in all of it kind of really worries me,” said Charles Otero, an advocate and interpreter for Team TLC, which gives asylum seekers legal advice and reviews their application papers. “Even with the administration we have now we’re still using people as pawns in this bigger political sphere.”
Voters divided on immigration, asylum
Immigration has emerged as the number one issue for voters heading into the 2024 presidential election, according to a February Gallup poll. In May, the Senate failed to advance a bipartisan border security bill after former President Donald Trump told Senate Republicans to reject the bill if it wasn’t “perfect.” The bill would have given nearly $4 billion to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, provided $440 million to the Executive Office for Immigration Review to minimize backlog in immigration courts, and initiated a plan to close the border during peak times.
But experts say asylum seekers stand to lose the most in the upcoming election with both candidates embracing a stricter approach to immigration and border control.
Daviel H., who asked that her last name not be used out of fear it could affect her family’s pending asylum applications, came to New York from Venezuela with her husband, Luis, and their five children. They applied for asylum in February, and while Daviel was granted asylum and work authorization, her husband hasn’t. Her kids are still waiting on an asylum decision as well. Daviel came to Metro Baptist Church on W. 40th street in Manhattan one Thursday afternoon in October seeking assistance from Team TLC.
“We are here because we have problems,” she said, in Spanish. “[Luis] was fingerprinted and everything, but he hasn’t received work authorization. The children had two appointments for the fingerprints—and nothing.”
Team TLC NYC runs a Pro Se Asylum Clinic every Monday night and holds legal triage every Thursday afternoon to help asylum seekers like Maria and Luis. Overseen by attorneys Jethro Eisenstein and Michael Barkow, the clinic recruits volunteer lawyers and translators to help asylees file pro se asylum applications and authorizations to legally work.
New York is the top city for asylum seekers
As the number of migrants crossing the border has grown to more than 53,000 per month, New York City is their top destination. Nearly 215,000 asylum seekers have sought refuge in the city since spring of 2022, with over 70,000 arrivals from Latin America and West Africa in the past year alone.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency in 2022 after homeless shelters across the city’s five boroughs became overwhelmed with applications. The city has opened 212 new housing sites, including 15 humanitarian relief centers and one central navigation center at The Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, to meet the demand. Since then, Adams has initiated several restrictions on asylees, including a 30 day shelter stay limit for adult immigrants and a 60 day shelter stay limit for families with children. The result has been “haphazard” since the city failed to give families critical information, according to New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul promised $2.4 billion for housing and healthcare for the state’s asylum seekers and immigrants, which she announced earlier this year in her State of the State Address. Her commitment follows numerous pleas from Mr. Adams to the federal government to provide monetary aid for the city’s asylum seeker programs.
“New Yorkers’ compassion may be limitless, but our resources are not,” the mayor said in a statement addressing the asylum seeker humanitarian crisis in August 2023. “We continue to face impossible decisions about allocating our resources, and that means a lose-lose for our most vulnerable New Yorkers as well as those seeking asylum.”
Harris, Trump, differ on asylum
Trump has made immigration a central issue while on the campaign trail. He has doubled down on rhetoric attacking immigrants, claiming “illegal aliens” are stealing jobs from African American and Latinx communities—a claim most economists roundly refute. Trump has vowed to “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion,” but he made similar claims leading up to his first presidency. He recently promised “the largest deportation in the history of our country” at several rallies across the country, echoing previous promises he made during his two previous campaigns for president in 2016 and 2020.
Jose Gomez-Espinal, an assistant professor of political science at University of Massachusetts Boston, said that while Trump’s first presidency was seen by many as ineffective given his inability to follow through on many of his promises regarding border security, a second Trump presidency could be different.
“A lot of what he has proposed in his speeches, in his rhetoric, does have awful effects on migrant communities,” he said.
In September, Police in Springfield, Ohio were put on alert after bomb threats were made against schools across the city following Trump’s false claims that Haitian migrants were eating pets.
As vice president, Harris was tasked with addressing the root causes of migration in northern parts of Central America to reduce illegal border crossings at the southern border. She stressed the importance of a ban on asylum for those who cross the border illegally, citing her experience in prosecuting transnational criminal organizations who engaged in trafficking.
Harris has reaffirmed her support for DACA, which protects undocumented children from deportation, and criticized Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy, which separated at least 3,900 children from their families during his presidency.
In response to the overwhelming number of migrants at the southern border, President Biden announced executive actions to ban immigrants who unlawfully cross the border from seeking asylum in June—a move many such as the ACLU say violates national and international law.
Ana Gonzalez Vilá and Montserrat Prado contributed interpretation to this report.
(Photo credit: Megha Gupta)
About the author(s)
Megha Gupta
Megha Gupta is a multimedia journalist based in New York City covering politics, culture, and sports. She is pursuing a dual M.S. in Journalism and MIA at Columbia University.