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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We announced on the show earlier this month that this year's Lehrer Prize for Community Well-Being will be awarded to individuals or groups who are helping the asylum-seekers who have come to the city in the last two years. The premise is that the media focuses a lot on the politics and economics of so many new arrivals coming so quickly and, to some degree, on their housing. Those are all real issues and need to be covered and we do talk about them here a lot, but much less so in the media as a whole on helping them with their daily needs like food and clothing and education and healthcare. You can nominate a person or a group who you think deserves public recognition for helping the asylum-seekers on a form we've set up for that purpose online. Go to wnyc.org/lehrerprizenominate. Wnyc.org/lehrerprizenominate.

New York City Council is now dealing with one such quality-of-life issue: the dilemma that asylum-seeker families are often moved several times by the city from temporary housing to temporary housing, but it's still best for the children in those families that they stay in the same school for a full school year. They've already been experiencing so much instability.

At the end of September, the Adams administration announced that adult migrants in the city shelter system will be asked to leave their assigned shelter after 30 days, although they may reapply if they can't find housing. That's what we've seen recently reported in the news: asylum-seekers standing in line for hours in freezing temperatures, waiting to reapply for housing at reticketing centers, as they're called. In October, the administration did announce a similar rule for families with children, except that they will have 60 days to leave. After two months, families with children have to either leave the shelter system or reapply.

Now under federal law, families have the right to stay in their current schools, but some city councilmembers are saying it'll be too hard for most families to manage housing disruptions and the new, often long commutes if they are moved to new boroughs. Yesterday New York City Council's Committee on Immigration and Education held a joint hearing- the two committees, Immigration and Education, held a joint hearing on immigrant students in the public schools right now.

Joining me to discuss that hearing and what the city could do to protect asylum-seeking children in New York City, we are glad to have Councilmember and Chair of the Committee on Immigration, Shahana Hanif. Her District 39 includes Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Columbia Waterfront, Gowanus, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Borough Park, and Kensington.

Councilmember Hanif, welcome back to WNYC.

Councilmember Hanif: Thank you so much, Brian. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: For those who aren't familiar, can we start with some additional background? Can you describe this rule further and your position on it?

Councilmember Hanif: Absolutely. Just as you so eloquently articulated, the cap that the administration is mandating basically says that single asylum-seekers have to vacate their shelter in 30 days. Then the same goes for families with children, but they have a total of 60 days at their shelter. For families with children, the only tiers of shelters that have to follow that mandate are the relief centers, which are the HERCs, or the respite centers. This has not been expanded to the Department of Homeless Services' shelters, or the emergency hotels that have also placed families with children, but this is all really confusing and opaque because there is another voucher program that had families shuffling every 28 days.

There's a lot to uncover here, but basically what I've put forward is a legislation that would undo, repeal this cap. I find it prohibitive, shortsighted. It is creating more chaos and instability, and so I have intro'd 1212, which basically prohibits caps on shelter stays. This is setting a very dangerous precedent. This is really moving us backward in our pursuit of a sanctuary city, being a city that has invited so many immigrant communities for a better life to escape political repression, to escape the compounding climate crisis and so much more.

Now yesterday's hearing was really to analyze, from the Department of Education's perspective, how they are going to handle and manage when families receive these notices that they have to vacate their shelter. As you mentioned, under the federal McKinney-Vento Act, the students can stay at their originally enrolled school, but while state law additionally requires transportation options to be provided, we have already heard that kids are missing school because of long travel times.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and it seems like we're coming to a cliff in this respect. The education news site Chalkbeat reports that approximately 2,700 families have received notices since October 27th. That means families would have to leave their shelters as early as December 27th. For families who do reapply for shelter, there's no guarantee that they'll end up in the same site or even the same borough. That's a quote from Chalkbeat.

Will the shelter transfers impact students in your district, for example, as far as you know? Or talk about that very large number of families with children in the public schools: 2,700.

Councilmember Hanif: That is a lot of families. In my district, I don't have a respite center or a relief center, but I have emergency hotels, and families have been shuffling around. I described a shuffling that included a family to transfer to a shelter in Jamaica, Queens. Meanwhile, their child is in a school in Park Slope. That is a one-and-a-half hour, depending on the train line or the traffic, two hours traveling to school and then another two hours coming back home. It does not make sense.

Yesterday we asked about what are the transportation issues given that we've heard about staff shortages, particularly around Floyd Bennett Field, which is a family shelter in Marine Park, and many students had missed an entirety of school because they didn't have coats for winter. We're critical of the absenteeism, but also when we've heard from representatives say that, "Well, children didn't have coats, so they couldn't go to school," that makes you wonder, well, what are we doing to prepare these families to ensure that their kid can get to school?

Also, we asked about what kind of transportation in a space like Floyd Bennett Field, which is a transportation desert. The administration is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a private bus service. They identified the company to be Accord, to be available to take families and their children with a bus to the MTA station and back. That just seems quite chaotic. It is expensive. In the past I've opposed these transportation desert locations as shelters, families with children or not, and we're seeing the hardship as a result of these policies.

Brian Lehrer: If I can digress for just a minute. I think you just touched on another need that a lot of the migrants, adults as well as children, probably have, and that's for winter clothing; all these families who've come from tropical regions, near the equator, et cetera. Do you know if that's a thing, or if there are ways that people can donate winter clothes?

Councilmember Hanif: The Department of Education has done a tremendous job working with our school community, and of course I give so much thanks and gratitude to the families in our school communities who've stepped up: mutual aid workers, our parent-teacher associations, the community education councils. Everyone is doing their part to make sure that families of asylum-seekers are getting their needs met, that they have the resources to feel equipped and prepared and confident to begin their school journey. To hear about the Department of Education's partnership gave me courage, but it is simply not enough.

The Department of Education is not the agency that forced this prohibitive, shortsighted policy onto families. I was really disappointed that while I invited the Department of Homeless Services, Health and Hospitals, the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, the Office of Asylum Seeker Operations to testify, they all neglected to appear. The Department of Education is doing their best to make sure that families, principals, school administrators know what is happening, but they are forced to push a policy forward that will gravely impact families. That was very clear at the hearing yesterday. They all came very prepared to respond to our questions, but they are not the ones administering this policy that will have dire impacts on our families.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we know it's a school day, so we may not have a lot of our educators listening, but if you are, maybe you're on your prep period now, maybe you're homesick, whatever, give us a call and share your experience with asylum-seeking students, especially the question of stability, not being moved from school to school or not having hour-and-a-half commutes. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Or anyone else who's working closely with students from those families, what have you seen? What are the biggest challenges for asylum-seeking families, especially when it comes to education, which was the focus of the City Council hearing yesterday? What do you see as being part of the solution? 212-433-WNYC, for Brooklyn Councilmember and Immigration Committee Chair Shahana Hanif. 212-433-9692, call or text.

The Adams administration has said that these limits, 30 days for adults alone, 60 days for families with children, are necessary to relieve the severe overcrowding in city shelters, which the Mayor has said on more than one occasion is on the brink of collapse. What's the alternative?

Councilmember Hanif: The alternative is to invest in legal services, it is really creating the pathway for individuals and families to get their lives started here, and we don't do that by providing eviction notices. We do that by ensuring that every single person who has come to our city has the ability to apply for asylum or of course, Temporary Protected Status if they're Venezuelan, and the fight continues to expand TPS to other countries where folks have migrated from, and really setting them up to get their work authorization.

This administration has been very clear and loud in their efforts to say that we want the federal administration's help with work authorizations. Yes, we can do that by ensuring that we as a city are investing, which is through the support of the Mayor, investing in legal services. Myself and the Comptroller, from the very beginning of the influx of asylum-seekers, have been really beating the drum on this call for investing in legal services.

Additionally, we do that by securing child care services for families. Promise NYC is a unique program that the City Council fought for, particularly myself and Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, which allows undocumented families to have access to child care. That has dramatically made a difference, $10 million the first year, $16 million this year, and ensuring that families can get to work.

We want to make sure that these families can move out of the shelter system. If that is what we want to see, we need to create those paths. We don't do that by saying, "Hey, you can stay here up to 30 days, or you get an opportunity to stay here for 60 days." Just the New Yorker here who is looking for an apartment, it takes us weeks on end to find secure stable housing.

The Mayor can also additionally support our city FHEPS voucher package that he vetoed earlier this year. We want to see that implemented to make sure that, yes, families in shelters are not being warehoused for years on end. That we are creating opportunities for them to move out of the shelter system, live in permanent housing. That should be the goal of our city.

Right now, with the enrollment numbers of our schools at pre-COVID levels, we've welcomed over 30,000 asylum-seeker students into our schools. This should be a great opportunity for the Mayor and his administration to say, "You know what? Our public school system deserves our largest investments right now. This is the opportunity for us to support bilingual programs and have bilingual educators on-site, to have social workers and expanded libraries and afterschool programs," but as we've noticed with the PEGs, he is removing over $120 million from our 3-K/pre-K program, almost $100 million from afterschool programs and Summer Rising. What he's doing is harsh and antithetical to a city that should be prioritizing working families.

Brian Lehrer: Well, he says it's because of all the expenses for the migrants, as well as the pandemic year of federal aid falling off a cliff, so where can you find that money?

Councilmember Hanif: I recognize that the federal dollars are drying up, but the mismanagement that he has done of our budget is deeply concerning and needs to be called out. We didn't come here because of migrants. We are here because this administration has relied on these for-profit companies and expensive emergency contracts that have milked the city for billions of dollars. We need to call that out, and he needs to be held accountable in the midst of being in chaos and scandal himself.

What we are witnessing is the administration's own doing, and scapegoating migrants is not going to get us out of it. We need to be very clear that the budget mismanagement was done by this administration and we cannot blame migrants; doing so further pits communities against one another, and we've seen that. We've seen even elected officials pit communities against one another. We can't keep pointing fingers. Right now, it is a priority for us to look at the budget spending and recognize that we have a moral imperative here to support every New Yorker no matter when they arrived to our city.

Brian Lehrer: With New York City Council Immigration Committee Chair Shahana Hanif from Brooklyn on the hearing that they held yesterday on migrant children being forced to either leave the public schools that they started in at the beginning of the school year or endure hellacious commutes, which are also bad for their stability and their education, because of the Mayor's policy of removing families from their shelters, if they've newly arrived there, after 60 days.

Alan in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hey, Alan.

Alan: Hi, how are you? Thank you so much, Brian, and thank you, Councilwoman Hanif, for bringing this really important topic to the city's attention. I run a program called Terra Firma, which is a medical-legal program that serves unaccompanied migrant children and families that are relocated to New York City. We have co-located medical, mental health, social services, and legal services for families. We are currently taking our mobile medical units to shelters in the Bronx where migrant families are located. Yesterday I worked in one of those shelters and heard from a number of families how they had been moved around from one side of the Bronx to the other.

I think just to reiterate everything that is said. First of all, just to say that children cannot learn unless they have stability and a sense of safety, and their parents have to be able to mitigate and buffer the stress that they have of migration and of everything that's been happening to them. That's really hard for them to do that when they have to keep moving from place to place.

One other issue that wasn't talked about yet is just not only the disruption of the school and the learning process, but when kids are moved from school to school in a very short period of time, not only does it affect their education, but it affects their social wellbeing and their emotional wellbeing and their ability to acculturate. I heard this from one girl yesterday who had hearing loss and had hearing aids, and has already had difficulty adjusting and then just found it so much harder when they had to move from school to school.

Then lastly, just to say that also, they're also moving from their community. One mom really eloquently told me about how she formed this community within the shelter system, which is so important for new arrivals, and then all of a sudden, that whole community was disrupted when she moved to another shelter and they lost so much from that move. It's not going to change the capacity issue in the shelters, and it's also going to be disruptive for the schools themselves who have to have this then new influx of new children. I just can't imagine how this is good for anybody. Just to say that my experience is just very personal seeing these kids and the families and caring for them.

Brian Lehrer: Alan, thank you for your first-person report. We really appreciate it. Tia in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tia.

Tia: Hi, Brian. I'm calling from Central Queens where we've seen an influx, since the war in Ukraine, of migrant children; first, migrant children from Ukraine, and now migrant children often from the Global South. One of the things that's happening in schools, besides the schools that are enduring these sadistic, brutal, rolling budget cuts that are starving them, is that these children who are refugees, essentially, are coming in and they don't have a translator. They don't speak English, they're speaking the language of their home country. What happens is another child that's in that class that speaks that child's language but also speaks English becomes their de facto translator.

That means that we're sending children to school-- one, we're sending migrant/refugee children without the services that they need, that is their right to get an education. Then on top of that, we have other children who are here who are essentially doing the work that an adult should be doing and that should be paid. Those children, instead of going to school to learn, are going to school to work a job as a translator, essentially.

From the Mayor on down, we have abdicated the responsibility for the rights of all these children, and migrant children are suffering and other children in their classroom are just providing de facto services for those children which are in the form of translation, and also more broadly, acculturation into the American school system, that adults have allowed this to happen.

Brian Lehrer: Tia, I'm going to leave that there for time because we're running out of time in the segment, but thank you for that. This came up in the hearing, right, Councilmember? Then we're going to be out of time, but I see that it came up, that one in five public school students in New York City is considered an English language learner. According to our news reporting from our newsroom, the city did increase funding for bilingual programs this year, but there's a long-standing shortage of bilingual teachers. What can the city do to get more teachers certified as bilingual?

Councilmember Hanif: Absolutely. There are certain challenges that allow educators to pursue their licensure, and we probed the administration on what they're doing to not only recruit but also to retain talented educators. The DOE had taken a step to bring in educators from outside of New York City, but the goal should be to really look at our own talent. First-generation students like myself, I speak Bangla, and there was a professor from Queens College yesterday who shared a proposal of building a bilingual program at the CUNY campus and acknowledged that Bangla is one of the languages that the students speak and could use educators who speak that language.

There's already talent in our city, and we should be really looking at that as a power, as an encouraging part of the enrollment of students in our schools increasing, to the necessity of making sure that we are a model of what celebrating multilingualism, knowing and having students who speak multiple languages in our schools, does for us. It strengthens our city. I love knowing that I'm in a city with so many languages and so many stories and histories that build up this beautiful mosaic of a democracy.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it with New York City Councilmember and Chair of the Immigration Committee Shahana Hanif. Her District 39 includes Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Columbia Waterfront, Gowanus, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Borough Park, and Kensington.

Again, listeners, if you want to nominate a person or a group who is helping the asylum-seekers with things like education, clothing, food, you can do so at wnyc.org/lehrerprizenominate. That's the category for a Lehrer Prize for Community Well-Being. This year is people and organizations helping the asylum-seekers. If you want to nominate a person or a group, go to wnyc.org/lehrerprizenominate.

Councilmember Hanif, thank you so much.

Councilmember Hanif: Thank you. Take care.

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