‘Dark Days’ for Immigrants Don’t Deter Upper West Side Asylum Clinic

By Bonnie Eissner

Most Tuesday nights, the fellowship hall of Rutgers Presbyterian Church on West 73rd Street, four floors above the sanctuary, becomes another sort of sanctuary.

The generously sized room turns into the base of the Asylum Support Clinic. At long tables, volunteer translators and document drafters, with occasional guidance from pro bono lawyers, aid immigrants with the arduous and now fear-inducing process of claiming asylum in the U.S. 

Since opening in 2022, when thousands of undocumented immigrants who crossed at the southern border were sent by bus to the city, the clinic has helped 189 people from 25 countries apply for asylum.

Now, with tighter border controls and regular arrests, immigrants are staying away or keeping a low profile. But the leaders of the clinic, which advises but does not legally represent immigrants, are undeterred. Instead, they are finding new ways to aid both recent immigrants and those who remain in an increasingly hostile country. 

“In these dark days, being able to use your time, your resources, your energy, and your skills helping somebody on their journey to finding a safer, more secure pathway feels like a very good use of time,” said the clinic’s program manager Sherri Levine, a retired lawyer and, most recently, the executive director of a progressive synagogue. “We’re a small but mighty clinic.” 

The Asylum Support Clinic takes in around 16 new immigrant participants in each of its six-week cycles. In September, at the start of its 14th cycle, it made a shift. For the first time, the clinic invited back immigrants from prior cycles to help bolster their asylum claims.

About half of the participants in the current cycle are filing I-589, or asylum application forms. The other half have returned for support with preparing supplemental declarations that describe in detail the persecution and threats the immigrants experienced in their home countries and why they fear returning. 

The clinic has adapted in other ways to the policies and practices of a federal government intent on repelling immigrants. For example, clinic volunteers now help parents complete family preparedness forms, which designate another person to care for their children if the parent is detained.

That change was made, Levine said, “given the heinous detention operation that’s going on at the courts.”

The Asylum Support Clinic, which receives both space and financial assistance from the church, has also had to raise funds to cover new application fees imposed by the Trump administration. Immigrants must pay $100 to apply for asylum and $550 to file for employment authorization, another form that volunteers assist with. 

The fees are “a tremendous bar for incredibly vulnerable people,” Levine said. “That’s an additional change that’s happened to punish and deter, and there’s a commitment to try to offset that.” 

Over the summer, the clinic partnered with Sacred Court Support, whose volunteers accompany immigrants to their hearings in court, where masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers now make regular arrests. The partnership, Levine said, has “been another tremendous blessing.”

The new services augment an array of existing ones. At each session, the clinic provides childcare and bags of sandwiches, which are donated by a food pantry. Asylum seekers, who have come from all five boroughs, also receive MetroCards to travel to and from each meeting.

Levine and her two fellow staff members rely on about 60 volunteers each session to carry out the work. Earlier, the group had to scramble to recruit volunteers, but now there’s a full roster every session as many volunteers return, and interest in assisting is high.

As a volunteer document drafter, Sara Latta, a writer and children’s book author, helps immigrants complete the extensive biographical information the I-589 requires, as well as the narrative about why they fear returning home. 

“That’s a difficult part,” she said, “because these people who are applying for asylum aren’t doing so because they want to come here for vacation. They’re doing so because they experienced terrible trauma—threats on their lives. It’s often a difficult thing to write about, but it’s really necessary to try and convince the judge they need to be here, because otherwise they will be in great harm.”

At a recent clinic session, snippets of Spanish and French mingled with English as immigrants from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, seated at tables around the room, shared with teams of translators and document drafters the details of their lives and sometimes a laugh. 

To protect the immigrants’ safety and privacy, West Side Rag did not speak to any. But profiles posted on the clinic’s website describe the persecution immigrants who participated in previous sessions endured for being transgender in Nicaragua, for being Chinese and Christian in Indonesia, and for a slain brother’s ties to the government in a rebel-controlled region of Colombia. 

As a pro bono lawyer at the clinic, Kate Campana answers questions about the forms and advises on aspects of the immigrants’ experiences to emphasize. 

“It’s really, really interesting and very heartbreaking,” she said of the work, “because people are up against it and they’re having a hard time. The United States is not a terribly welcoming place, and if there’s anything that we can do to ease their pain a little bit by helping them with the paperwork, I’m interested in doing that.” 

Seth Goodman Park, the supervising attorney, joined the clinic in 2022, two years after opening his immigration law practice on the Upper West Side. Decades before that, he began pro bono work in immigration law. 

While the clinic doesn’t track the outcomes of its participants, Park said that he has heard of some gaining asylum. He also knows that quite a few past participants lost their cases. 

“What keeps me going is the knowledge that doing something is better than doing nothing,” he said, “that there are some people whose lives we’ve changed for the better, that those who, unfortunately, are unsuccessful, at least we made an effort to succeed. Getting involved is better than simply sitting on the sidelines and putting your hands on your head and saying, ‘When is this ever going to change?’” 

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