Both federal and city governments have asked the organization to initiate a resettlement project to support the growing influx of Haitian immigrants, according to HAUP’s Executive Director Elsie Saint-Louis.

 “HAUP was founded because of a crisis just like this,” said Saint-Louis. “We would need additional funding to do that; we absolutely cannot do it without additional funding.”

Haitian Americans United for Progress has been serving the New York City immigrant community for 46 years. It began in 1975 as a volunteer-based organization responding to the needs of those derided as “boat people”: Haitian refugees.

“What prompted the formation of this organization was the first wave of Haitian refugees,” said Herold Dasque, Community Liaison for HAUP. “They called Haitians the boat people, and they were not received well.And now in 2021.We still have political unrest, economic trouble, and bad policies from Haiti’s government and from the US.”

 In response to this turmoil, HAUP provides completely free immigration, education, training, medical and special needs services to those in its community. 

Herold Dasque, right, explains the process of applying for TPS and receiving a social security card to Stanley, an undocumented Haitian immigrant. Photo by Annie Iezzi

Yesterday, at HAUP’s Brooklyn office in Little Haiti, Dasque aided several undocumented immigrants requesting Temporary Protected Status, switching fluently between Haitian Creole and English.

 Smiling and gesticulating, he explained to a young man, Stanley, how the process would work. He needed to sign off on his demographic information, which Dasque would seal and file with the dozens of other TPS forms awaiting mailing. HAUP covers all legal fees for its immigration services, but it cannot cover the $545 governmental price for each immigrant between the ages of 14 and 65 that it aids in application.

 This poses a significant price barrier to many Haitian immigrants, who are fleeing, among other conditions, extreme poverty in their home country. Eventually, Dasque told him, Stanley will receive a social security card and the full governmental services that are benefits of TPS.

 In May of 2021, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced an 18-month designation of TPS for Haitian Nationals, citing “serious security concerns, social unrest, and an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources.”

 Now, those problems have only been exacerbated by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake that devastated the small country on August 14th, decimating homes, churches, and businesses. This blow followed the July assassination of Jovenel Moïse, Haiti’s president, which caused massive social unrest.

 But according to the Homeland Security website, immigrants to the United States who left Haiti after May 21, 2021 are not eligible for TPS and are at risk of repatriation. According to UNICEF, more than two in three Haitian migrants that have been repatriated are women and children.

 “When you have crisis upon political crisis that is creating insecurity, then you have natural disasters, a big storm, a big cyclone and within a decade two major earthquakes that destroy your country, this is expected,” said Dasque, shaking his head.

 He asserted  that the surge of Haitian refugees at the border is one that has been years in the making.

 “Everyone knew they were flying to Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama, you name it,” Dasque said. “And they end up travelling from Chile all the way to the border of the US.”

 Those arriving in the U.S. have been camping under the international bridge that connects Del Rio in the United States to Mexico. While these migrants have not yet reached New York, HAUP has already seen an uptick in TPS applications. Dasque sees himself in some of the migrants who come in search of legal aid, both Haitians and non-Haitians alike.

 “I came involuntarily,” he said. “I was very young and didn’t want to leave under the dictatorship. For four years I was here without papers…I always feel a connection with those who are undocumented. In 1994, I became a citizen; that’s a personal choice. At that time, a lot of Haitians didn’t want to become citizens because there is a mentality that they ‘don’t want to be Black twice,’ not in this country.”

 The inhumane treatment of Haitian migrants at the border prompts some at HAUP to be skeptical of the White House’s statement that President Biden is working to develop a “humane immigration system.”

 “We have been fighting forever for a path to citizenship and a path to legalization,” said Saint-Louis. “I wouldn’t mind putting all of my efforts into a real move toward immigration reform, but I just don’t see it. I’m honestly not sure what humane immigration would look like.”

 Now, as it has since its founding, HAUP strives to provide comprehensive services to the community of primarily Haitians that it supports. In addition to delivering crucial immigration aid, HAUP has been organizing vaccine drives and boosting information about the Excluded Workers Fund to help community members thrive.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Haup Inc (@haupinc)

 Behind their community-facing smiles, processing the brutalization of Haitians already fleeing a country in distress weighs heavily on the leadership.

“The luxury lacked by people like myself is the time to process things,” said Saint-Louis.

 I have an institution to run. There is no time for me to process how I feel. How do we prepare? What resources do we have? What resources do we need? What is our game plan?”

The post Local Haitian aid organization struggles with resources to help asylum seekers appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Katherine Franke is a Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University. She’s considered to be one of the “nation’s leading scholars writing on law, religion, and rights” and has written books on topics such as abolition and reparations. Now, Franke is joining a different distinguished group of Americans, she and her partner have decided to sponsor an asylum seeker, a young trans woman from El Salvador. They will take her in and be responsible for her until she is given permission to permanently reside in the country.

The woman, Ana, not her real name,  was being held in Tijuana when Franke met her. She was with a group of Columbia students volunteering with Al Otro Lado, an organization the provides legal assistance to migrants on both sides of the border when she met Ana and heard her story.  Ana told Franke about severe abuse she fled in El Salvador and then endured in Tijuana when she was sent there by the U.S. government. She says she was beaten and terrorized by drug cartels and the Mexican Federal Police.

“She had been into the clinic a couple of times, one of the other lawyers there had done an intake with her and had just been completely flattened by the story,” Franke explained. “We sort of took her under our wing when we were there, and get her ready as possible before she was put into detention.”

Sponsoring asylum seekers is not an answer to the number of people who are trying to enter the country, but it has been a method of welcoming refugees from into the U.S. from other parts of the world in times of crisis. Traditionally, sponsors were not private citizens like Franke – it was religious groups. According to a report from the Catholic church, they resettled 1.1 million refugees in the United States between 1987 and 2016.

Under a Trump administration policy (“Remain in Mexico”) that started in late January, Central American migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, are sent back to Mexico once they reach the U.S. border, to wait while their asylum claims are processed. In March, when Franke met Ana, it was projected that nearly 100,000 people  tried to cross to the U.S. – Mexico border just in the month of March.

Sponsoring asylum seekers is not an answer to the number of people who are trying to enter the country, but it has been a method of welcoming refugees from into the U.S. from other parts of the world in times of crisis. Traditionally, sponsors were not private citizens like Franke – it was religious groups. According to a report from the Catholic church, they resettled 1.1 million refugees in the United States between 1987 and 2016.

Franke did not become a sponsor through a religious organization, but instead through a non profit called Showing Up For Racial Justice. The group runs a program that supports “folks on the caravan by connecting them with volunteer sponsors in the U.S. in order to give them a chance to get out of detention and plead their case for asylum,” according to their website.

It was clear to Franke that Ana was facing incredible odds, and Franke was reminded  of the case of Roxana Hernandez, another trans woman who died in ICE custody in 2018. After weeks in Tijuana, Ana’s number was called – she would be moved to the San Ysidro, San Diego, CA., Customs, and Border Protection processing and detention facility – the same facility that held Hernandez before her death.

Franke decided to become Ana’s sponsor, responsible for her legal resettlement in the U.S. – she filled out the paperwork and will be responsible for everything from finding her a place to stay, to help with medical care, and bringing her to court appointments. When Ana entered detention she had Franke as a sponsor and a man named Jose Campos as her attorney. Campos spent the first week of Hernandez’s detention trying to find a way to get in contact with Ana. They hoped that because Ana had what so many did not – representation and sponsorship – that she would be processed and released quickly. Instead, she has been detained since she was taken from Tijuana.

“The biggest reason why we want to get them out of there is that they’re not being recognized as trans women, they are being put in with the men,” said Meredith Vina over the phone.

Vina is a trans woman living in San Diego. She and her wife Eleanor are both retired, and they have been able to visit Ana in detention.

“For example, we went to see Ana* today and she was in a room with five other men. Now, fortunately for her, we talked to her and we said: ‘Are you okay? Do you feel safe?’ And she said that the men were respecting her and actually respecting her pronouns so far.”

Vina not only visits Ana in detention – she is also sponsoring a trans woman seeking asylum from Central America.

“The way I got involved – It was just all these caravans coming up to Tijuana, and having friends getting involved in going down there and bringing supplies,” Vina said. . “Getting to the point where we said ‘How can we get these people to the United States?’”

The post Professor sponsors trans woman refugee appeared first on Pavement Pieces.