Every Monday night since September 2023, approximately 30-40 volunteers have consistently shown up at either Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights or Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan to offer a free legal clinic to asylum seekers. This pro se (self-representation) legal clinic provides migrants with assistance in completing their applications for asylum, Temporary Protected Status and work authorization. Some of the volunteers are attorneys and legal advocates, while others are translators, organizers and childcare providers. Each Monday they serve 15-20 applicants — and each “applicant” may be an entire family, as asylum is family-based. On Thursdays, members of the group provide legal triage at Metro Baptist Church in Manhattan, where they answer questions to help explain the process to migrants.
This remarkable initiative is led by an American expat who recently returned from San Miguel de Allende to New York City. For six years, from 2016 to 2022, New Yorker and anti-trust lawyer Tracey Kitzman lived with her young son and daughter in San Miguel de Allende, where the kids became bilingual and the whole family regularly volunteered in the community. Kitzman was the president of women’s microlending organization Mano Amiga and the volunteer coordinator for Casita Linda, which builds homes for families living in extreme poverty. Kitzman and her family continue to work with Casita Linda by leading service trips for groups of students and volunteers who have raised money to fund a Casita Linda home.
In 2018, migrant caravans traveled through central Mexico, and Kitzman joined volunteers who donated food and other critical supplies. She was particularly inspired by a friend, fellow San Miguel expat and attorney Rebecca Eichler, who traveled to join the caravan to provide pro bono legal assistance, an effort chronicled in the award-winning documentary film Las Abogadas.
The family returned to New York City in fall 2022 for Kitzman’s son to attend high school. At that time, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas had started sending busloads of migrants to New York, so Kitzman and her children immediately volunteered with a nonprofit organization called Team TLC NYC. Their role was to greet and assist people coming off the buses at the Port Authority terminal, putting their Spanish skills to good use. At that point, the Port Authority allowed Team TLC to work out of an old American Greetings card store in the terminal. “It was chaotic but wonderful,” said Kitzman. “I was proud to see New Yorkers stepping up to help people in need.”
Kitzman quickly offered to organize volunteer lawyers to assist the asylum seekers. She teamed up with Jethro Eisenstein and Michael Barkow, retired attorneys with pro bono experience in immigration law. They started running a triage table at the Port Authority and soon realized that what people needed most was assistance in filing for asylum applications and work authorization. Given the huge influx of migrants, particularly from Central and South America and West Africa, the capacity of other pro bono providers was maxed out.
So they offered their first legal clinic in June 2023 at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, where Kitzman is a member of the congregation, and they have been running them weekly since September 2023.
“The people we work with are anxious about the future, eager to comply with the rules of a system that they don’t understand, and grateful for our assistance. It is a pleasure to work with them,” said attorney Jethro Eisenstein.
“It’s rewarding to give people hope when they are facing an intimidating, somewhat arbitrary system,” Kitzman continued. “I have to say it’s challenging for anyone to navigate a bureaucracy in a new country while learning a new language. I am a lawyer myself, but when I lived in Mexico I found myself needing to hire a local advocate to assist me in applying for residency visas for my family. Even basic biographical information is difficult to provide when you have to do it in another language.”
The legal clinics offer only pro se (self-representation) assistance because of the volume of applicants. The advocates focus on the critical step of getting the asylum seekers’ applications correctly submitted, but they unfortunately do not have the resources to then support each applicant throughout what is often a multi-year adjudication process.
One key form of assistance that Team TLC NYC volunteers provide is helping individuals apply for work authorization. Being able to work legally in the United States is a primary goal of many of the migrants that attend the clinics, according to Kitzman. “I receive so many wonderful photos from people when they get their work authorization cards. There is such joy in the photos.”
Team TLC NYC volunteers also assist migrants with filing for changes of venue and updating their address with the court and immigration service. Because many migrants are initially housed in city shelters that require people to reapply for spaces every 30-60 days, address updates are all too frequently needed. The group also provides monthly training sessions on the asylum process and work authorization for their own volunteer advocates and for volunteers from other organizations.
“The triage operation spearheaded by Tracey Kitzman has helped scores of people to navigate the immigration system,” noted Eisenstein.
Team TLC NYC, founded in 2019 by Ilze Thielmann, also runs the Little Shop of Kindness, a boutique where migrants can shop for free. The store offers clothing, toys, toiletries, and other necessities.
Based in San Miguel de Allende, Ann Marie Jackson is a writer and NGO leader who previously worked for the U.S. Department of State. Her award-winning novel “The Broken Hummingbird,” which is set in San Miguel de Allende, came out in October 2023. Ann Marie can be reached through her website, annmariejacksonauthor.com.
