A month has passed since rumors began circulating that busloads of Latino migrants from New York City would be arriving in Suffolk County. The busloads haven’t arrived, but tensions are real.
“It's not about the buses coming from the city,” said Minerva Perez, executive director at the Organización Latino Americana (OLA) of Eastern Long Island. “What it ends up being is hugely discriminatory.”
OLA is known in the five East End towns for the myriad services it offers the Latino community, from mental health care and food drives to diversity training for police and schools. Now, the advocacy group is staffing up with two new lawyers to grapple with government-backed bans on incoming migrants, and to provide legal assistance for asylum seekers.
“If you're Brown, if you've got an accent: what's going to happen now?” Perez said.
The goal is to strengthen OLA’s social justice advocacy and provide pro bono immigration legal services.
“I'm not interested in necessarily just changing hearts and minds,” Perez said. “I want to change policies.”
That includes the Town of Riverhead’s controversial order from May that blocks local hotels from taking in asylum seekers. Suffolk County Steve Bellone, a Democrat, issued a similar executive order in June requiring hotels to get permission from officials to house asylum seekers. The Republican-led legislature hired a lawyer to explore ways to ban migrants.
“You put a target on my granddaughter’s back,” said resident Lisa Eguizabal during a public hearing on May 23. “You also put a target on every Latino’s back, whether they're citizens or not, because these people cannot tell the difference between an American Latino and someone who applied for asylum, which is a legal process.”
Bellone describes his approach as “humane,” and based on guidance from the state. Legislative Presiding Officer Kevin McCaffery (R-Lindenhurst) said they are not “anti-immigration.”
But Perez said these orders and other laws — like the restrictions on using lawn mowers and leaf blowers — can have a discriminatory effect on Latinos.
“I'm not saying that our towns have created new laws to specifically catch immigrants or undocumented folks,” Perez said. “But if you've got laws on the books and they're going to harm people, then it's your job to fix them.”
Perez said that’s part of the reason why OLA, which has been at the forefront of Latino advocacy on the east end for two decades, has added Wanda Sanchez Day as general counsel and senior policy advisor.
A civil rights attorney for over 20 years, Sanchez Day has represented vulnerable clients in evictions and public benefit denial cases, and spearheaded organizations that tackle human rights issues in Puerto Rico, Ukraine and the United States.
Sanchez Day said immigration issues can’t be fixed with laws that lead to ethnic and racial profiling, or reactionary bans that target Latino migrants, like the Riverhead Town order.
“I don't say this lightly,” Sanchez Day said. “It's an extremely irresponsible way to deal with a social problem.”
Riverhead Town Supervisor Yvette Aguiar has said that the purpose of the order was to stave off a housing emergency.
Sanchez Day disagreed. She said bans contribute to the misconception that immigrants will overrun schools and take up resources.
“There are many, many counties across New York who have engaged in this sort of behavior of issuing emergency orders on the assumption — and the rumor — that they're going to receive hundreds and hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers into their counties,” Sanchez Day said. “And their concerns are really not based necessarily on fact.”
As Sanchez Day tackles big-picture policy questions, immigration lawyer Lucia Damerau is working alongside her to provide individualized legal assistance to clients seeking the protections of asylum and citizenship.
The different legal paths to citizenship can be multi-year, complicated ordeals according to Damerau.
“Think of a tree,” Damerau said. “The trunk of the tree is the base of the petition — could be asylum, could be family-based — the branches would be the green card. And then the leaves are like citizenship.”
Damerau’s own history as a child of Guatemalan immigrants inspired her career as an immigration attorney. She said her mother came to the United States first, while Damerau and her twin sister stayed in Guatemala. Phone calls with their mother always ended with the same question: When will our papers be ready?
“She’d be like, ‘Soon, soon, soon,’” Damerau recalled her mother telling her. “‘Soon’ turned out to be eight years of waiting.”
As an immigration attorney, Damerau has represented low-income clients and crime survivors in immigration cases and removal proceedings.
“It really affected me and my sister and we wanted to make sure that other families didn't have to go through what we went through, or at least get help with the process.”
In addition to hands-on legal help, Damerau will also run a series of webinars on different immigration related topics, like how to get a work permit.
For Perez, at the head of the organization, she said her legal team is tackling Long Island's immigration issues in two very different ways, but both are equally important.
“With the focus on immigrants as the most popular form of scapegoat, it's like, wow, when you got nothing else, you always have an immigrant,” Perez said. “It's just continuous.”
While OLA will fight bans against asylum seekers, Perez said it’s important to remember that migrants who do relocate to the East End will face impactful changes to their lives and need housing, employment and legal assistance.
