The Buck Stops With Us: Municipal Innovation and the New York City Asylum Application Help Center
Masha Gindler, Alicia Berenyi, Ann Cheng, Kate Dempsey, Susana Liu-Hedberg, Tanya Molina, Molly Schaeffer, Sam Solomon, Arabella Walley, Kelly Yzique-ZeaExecutive Summary
In times of crisis, local governments transform from service providers into emergency responders. When hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers arrived in New York City from 2022 to 2024, New York City government was compelled to help them integrate into communities. To do this, New York City designed, opened, and operated the largest asylum application help clinic in the country. The New York City Asylum Application Help Center (the Center) was the first in the nation to combine government, private sector, nonprofit, and university support to provide
Advocacy should start with good operations. The Center was able to achieve positive changes to procedural hurdles in the federal immigration system because of its scale and the quality of its applications. High-quality operations at scale cannot only have a large impact but also create leverage to advocate for change. Municipal governments should operationalize best practices learned during emergencies. Short-term emergencies often result in some of the most effective government responses. Successful innovations should be incorporated into local governments’ social service systems once the emergency ceases to exist. Public and private actors can, and should, collaborate in response to major challenges facing cities. The success of the Center was due in large part to collaboration among public and private actors. It represents the work of a city that found ways to leverage the highest and best use of each collaborator to rise together and meet a challenge. Government systems should simplify processes and focus on substance. The US immigration system is fractured. Reform is needed to ensure that immigration benefit applications are adjudicated on their merits, rather than on the ability of the applicant to access and navigate complex federal processes.
The section “The challenge facing New York City” of this paper provides context, explaining the challenge facing New York City as hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers arrived. The section “The Asylum Application Help Center and Its Impact” describes how New York City ran the Center and its impact. The final section, “Policy Recommendations”. expands upon the recommendations noted above. More broadly, the Center illustrates how municipal governments can use operational innovation (separate from policy advocacy) to influence implementation of federal immigration law.