New York-based community groups have taken up a national campaign to fight Arizona’s controversial anti-illegal immigration law by targeting a local foundation supporting environmental causes.
At a recent city council hearing, local immigrants and their advocates spoke with restrained optimism about Paterson’s new panel, which held its first meeting the last week of May. By: Chris Giblin
At a hearing conducted last week by the City Council’s Immigration Committee, city officials and residents spoke with restrained optimism regarding Gov. Paterson’s recently created immigrant pardon panel. The panel – designed to review the pardon requests of ex-convicts facing the threat of deportation – held its first meeting on Monday, May 24th, according to Paterson’s Director of Communications, Morgan Hook. A pardon from the panel – the first of its kind in the country – would prevent an ex-convict’s deportation by wiping his criminal record clean.Mark Maynard, a Guyanese immigrant who testified at the City Council’s hearing, said he is worthy of such a pardon. Maynard testified that he emigrated to the United States at the age of nine, was convicted of armed robbery in 2000, and is now facing the threat of deportation.
For Tasnim Huque, the past few months have been full of surprises. Her Muslim parents, who immigrated to New York City from India’s sprawling eastern city of Calcutta in the late 1980s, are gradually allowing the 18-year-old to show some independence. While there’s little inhibiting most seniors at Hunter Science High School in Manhattan from attending the prom— except, perhaps, the cost of limos, gowns and tuxes— Huque was certain that she’d be missing it for a different reason: her 6 p.m. curfew. But her parents recently told her that she could, in fact, attend.“They even bought me a nice Westernized dress,” she says excitedly. And that’s not all she’s excited about.
For young people born without that proverbial silver Spoon in their mouths, New York City has never been An easy place to grow up. It’s a tough love kind of city.For every person who has described a rather idyllic Childhood in old New York, there are many more who Remember a harsher one, going as far back as the days of Jacob Riis, the social activist and photographer who chronicled The lives of poor young people in Lower Manhattan in The late 19th century. What he saw and showed the world influenced attempts at making their tenement lives better. In How the Other Half Lives, he observed:“Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about. When last spring some workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on a North River pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up.”A contemporary of Riis’ in the late days of the 19th century did even more.
The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant is designed to handle 60 million gallons of sewage per day. Photo by: Marc Fader
Projects to upgrade a sewage plant and construct a cement facility open the next chapter in a complex—and controversial—industrial history. By: Jake Mooney
The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant has stood on Staten Island’s North Shore, purifying the sewage of about half of the island’s residents, for 57 years. Soon it will get a $29 million upgrade, thanks to a citywide infusion of federal stimulus funds. It will also get a new neighbor, a transfer station about a mile down bumpy Richmond Terrace where cement will arrive from South America by boat and head to local construction projects by truck.
Ruskin Piedra is the founder and director of the Juan Neumann Center, an organization tied to the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help church, which provides low-cost legal services to immigrants, many of whom are Latino and hail from the surrounding Sunset Park area. Piedra is a busy man. He manages about 3,000 cases, including undocumented immigrants seeking to adjust their status or who are facing deportation or seeking asylum.Piedra is not an attorney, but he has taken many courses in immigration law and procedure that qualify him to appear in immigration court. In New York, many nonprofits and charitable organizations employ representatives like Piedra who often charge less than an attorney.”These poor people have no clue and most of them don’t speak English,” Piedra said. “They have no other recourse but to come here.
People on the street in Saint Louis, Senegal. The U.S. State Department says femal genital mutilation is widely practiced in Senegal. Photo by: Alexandra Pugachevsky
Some deportees must choose whether to leave their citizen children behind or bring them back to the ancestral land. That choice is even harder when genital mutilation is a threat. By: Kateryna Stupnevich
After undergoing female genital mutilation as a child in Senegal, Fatoumata thought that her days of hardship were behind her once she settled in the United States.
Drugs dominate the list of the top 10 crimes leading to legal immigrants’ deportation. A new state panel would expedite the pardon of old or minor crimes.
As immigrants and their allies march in New York and around the country, City Limits looks at where New Yorkers came from.
Civil liberties groups are suing the federal government to get information on a program that makes local jails—including New York—part of the immigration enforcement network.
City Limits uses investigative journalism through the prism of New York City to identify urban problems, examine their causes, explore solutions, and equip communities to take action.
Founded in 1976 in the midst of New York’s fiscal crisis, City Limits exists to inform democracy and equip citizens to create a more just city. The organization is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit funded by foundation support, ad sponsorship and donations from readers.
Support local, investigative journalism that has informed and empowered New Yorkers for 45 years.
Support local, investigative journalism that has informed and empowered New Yorkers for 45 years.
