Campaign News

Medical School students and the Center for Popular Democracy’s Opioid Network—a band of more than 45 grassroots organizations that have formed in response to the opioid crisis—organized the demonstration.

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New York Times - June 25, 2014, by Peter Markowitz - For too many years our nation’s discourse around immigration has been distorted by anti-immigrant activists who have advanced bold but regressive state immigration policies. State laws in Arizona and elsewhere have powerfully, but inaccurately, framed the immigration issue through the lenses of criminality and terrorism. While these laws have not generally fared well in court, their impact on our national perception of immigration has impeded federal immigration reform. Meanwhile, states like New York continue to suffer the consequences of our broken immigration laws. Our families continue to be fractured by a torrent of deportations. Our economic growth continues to be impeded by the barriers our immigrant labor force faces. And our democracy continues to be undermined by the exclusion of a broad class of New York residents.

The New York Is Home Act, recently introduced by New York State Senator Gustavo Rivera and Assembly Member Karim Camara, with support from the Center for Popular Democracy and Make the Road New York, charts a path forward on immigration — a path that like-minded states and ultimately the federal government could follow. The legislation would grant state citizenship to noncitizens who can prove three years of residency and tax payment and who demonstrate a commitment to abiding by state laws and the state constitution.

The bill is an ambitious but sensible assertion of a state’s well-established power to define the bounds of its own political community. Unlike the Arizona law, this legislation is carefully crafted to respect the unique province of the federal government. As misguided and brutal as the federal immigration regime is, New York cannot alter federal deportation policy. However, it is absolutely within New York’s power to facilitate the full inclusion of immigrants in our state. By granting state citizenship, we would extend the full bundle of rights a state can deliver — the right to vote in state elections, to drive, to access higher education, among others — and we would define the full range of responsibilities that come along with citizenship, including tax payment, jury service and respect for state law. By reorienting our national conversation on immigration around the more accurate and productive themes of family, economic vitality and political inclusion, this legislation will move us toward a real solution to our nation’s immigration quagmire.

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New York Times - June 26, 2014, by Kirk Semple - A long-sought initiative that would provide municipal identification cards to all New Yorkers, including those without legal immigration status, has been finalized, and will come before the City Council for a vote this week, officials said.

Undocumented immigrants could use the cards as proof of residence, and to check out library books, sign leases and open bank accounts, among other benefits.

The Council is expected to consider the item on Thursday, the same day it is slated to earmark $4.9 million to provide a lawyer for every poor, foreign-born New Yorker who has been detained by immigration authorities and is facing deportation, officials said. The initiative would make New York the first jurisdiction in the nation with a fully covered public defender system to assist detained, indigent immigrants in deportation proceedings.

Taken together, the measures, which officials said were expected to pass, would further cement New York’s reputation as one of the most accommodating places in the world for immigrants.

“The city is sending a strong message to its residents that we have your back,” City Councilman Carlos Menchaca, who has championed both initiatives, said in an interview on Tuesday. “These are clear messages, indicators, commitments that we mean we’re serious about how we take care of our immigrants and, really, all New Yorkers.”

With the passage of the municipal identification bill, a pledge made by Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York would join several other cities that have already introduced similar measures, including Los Angeles, New Haven and San Francisco.

The terms of the bill were hammered out in meetings involving City Council members, the mayor’s office and city agencies, including, perhaps most important, the New York Police Department. Proponents of the initiative wanted to ensure that the police would recognize the cards as acceptable forms of identification during police stops and for other law-enforcement matters.

At the crux of those negotiations was the effort to balance the demand for privacy against the need to protect against fraud, Mr. Menchaca said. Under the arrangement, the city will keep application documents on file for two years, but the police will be required to secure a judicial warrant to look at the files, the councilman said.

City officials still need to work out the bureaucratic mechanics of the program but plan to start issuing the cards by the start of 2015.

The public defender initiative, which is included in the city’s proposed budget, would be an expansion of a publicly funded pilot program started last year that inspired the admiration and envy of immigrants’ advocates across the country.

The plan, called the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, seeks to help correct a woeful lack of qualified representation in immigration court. In contrast to the nation’s criminal courts, defendants in immigration court have no constitutional right to a court-appointed lawyer.

The initiative would provide legal representation to 1,380 detained, indigent New Yorkers facing deportation at the immigration courts on Varick Street in Manhattan as well as in Newark and Elizabeth, N.J.

The program “marks a sea change in the quality and quantity of justice that will be afforded to New York City’s immigrants,” said Peter L. Markowitz, a Cardozo School of Law professor who has helped lead the initiative.

Mr. Menchaca said he expected the program to inspire other municipalities and states to start similar initiatives.

“We are the first doing this kind of work at this kind of level, and it’s really going to send a ripple effect across the country,” he said.

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In a new report from the liberal-leaning Fed Up, a coalition of community groups advocating for continued low interest rates from the Fed with a view to helping the country's poorer families enjoy some of the benefits of the recovery, the group says a lot of work remains to be done despite recent progress on diversity under Yellen's tenure.

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