Hundreds of Migrants Were Sent to ‘Live’ in a Brooklyn Heights Office Building (with commentary from I-ARC members)

The migrants started showing up at the Catholic Charities Brooklyn & Queens office on Joralemon Street in early July. At first, it was a trickle of people — maybe two or three — each day. “We treated it as an individual case,” said Richard Slizeski, the organization’s vice-president. “But all of a sudden, it was like, 20 people in line each day. Last week, we saw about 300.”

At first, the Catholic Charities staff weren’t sure why asylum seekers had begun arriving on their doorstep. Slizeski reasoned they had heard about the organization’s affiliate, Catholic Migration Services, which is located in the same building and provides low-income immigrants with free legal assistance. “But no, they were coming for us — the good old walk-in center!” he said.

The migrants — many of them from Venezuela, along with a few from Haiti — had all been bussed to New York City from Texas, said Bexabeth Gomez, a Catholic Charities program manager. And between 70 to 80 of them, she said, had shown up holding forms with the Catholic Charities office as their place of residence. “This was the Department of Homeland Security — their letterhead — listing, ‘This is your new residence now. This is where you will live,’” Slizeski said.

But there was a serious problem. “We’re an office building. We are not a shelter,” said Slizeski. The form is part of the standard paperwork for migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border who are allowed into the country to pursue asylum cases. Called the Notice to Appear, it asks people to list an address where immigration officers can reach them for upcoming court hearings. Some asylum seekers list the addresses of friends or relatives living in the U.S. until they can get settled somewhere on their own. But across the country, volunteers who help resettle the recent wave of migrants have noticed that an increasing number of recent arrivals have no connections in the U.S. at all — and nowhere to go once they’re released from DHS custody.

Continue reading the article HERE.