Brooklyn neighborhood trying to answer city’s migrant crisis
Juan Carlos Ruiz spends most Thursday nights at his church. Bone-white and vaulted, slender and Germanic, in many ways the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn reminds Ruiz nothing of his native Mexico with its heavy and ornate Catholic, cathedrals. But his parishioners do.
By 7pm last Thursday night, over seventy migrants were gathered under the pinched arches of Good Shepherd. Spanish dominated the room. Between unfinished pizza dinners, families waited in line to receive legal aid from a handful of volunteer-run stations. Children slid up and down pews.
“We need to put on the table the hard questions,” said Ruiz. “Why hasn’t there been any humane immigration reform for the last 40 years? Why don’t we claim amnesty for those that have been living in the shadows for so many years?”
Throughout New York, church-run social service providers like Good Shepherd are facing pressure from the extraordinary recent influx of migrants. Some collect donations. Others offer food, sometimes a place to sleep. At Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Ruiz and his group of volunteers also host weekly English classes, know-your-rights sessions, a legal aid clinic, and workshops aimed at teaching migrants practical employment skills like sewing. Now, Ruiz and his team are formalizing their efforts through the creation of their own non-profit organization.
In the long term, Ruiz, the church’s pastor, hopes this will help him pay his volunteers and secure additional funding.
In a city of 110,000 migrants, there are no shortage of aid-seekers. Luke Petrinovic, 33, a legal aid volunteer and Spanish translator, says that legal clinics across the city have been asking Good Shepherd and other church-run services like it to do more. In June, a backlog of over two million asylum cases sat waiting to be processed. Today, asylum-seekers in the United States can now be expected to be assigned court dates as far as ten years in advance. There are not enough lawyers in New York City to keep up.
But increasing legal aid alone will not solve the migrant crisis, said Petrinovic. “A bigger point is getting people to come back, to get them to understand that they can get legal help and food. They need to feel supported or else they lose faith.”
After attending Sunday service in Spanish, migrants often line up to seek advice from Ruiz. One young father of two is scared of losing his two young sons to social services. Another is at risk of being deported — he illegally owns and operates a motorcycle.
Yet there is cause for hope.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director of the Greater Caribbean Studies program at the Columbia University Institute of Latin American Studies in New York City remarks on “the potential contributions of 110,000 migrants in a city which lost close to 500,000 residents during the pandemic.”
“About 40 percent of asylum seeker have already moved on from the shelter system,” she said.
Aid workers throughout the boroughs have started viewing Good Shepherd as a pilot program. Lou Kuhlmann, 59, a volunteer from the Sunset Park 5th Avenue BID, has been coming to Good Shepherd every week for the last six weeks.
His goal is to learn the ins and outs the asylum application process. “It’s pretty complicated, it’s like doing college applications and taxes at the same time” said Kuhlmann. He plans to bring back what he learns to Sunset Park, where he lives, and start a sister program there.
It’s this penchant for change that is fundamental to the work Ruiz pursues, says parishioner Philip Dominguez.
“This isn’t a church that serves a particular need,” said Dominguez. “Yesterday it was COVID, today it’s migrants — tomorrow, who knows.”
