By Juan Soto
Help is on the way for borough immigrants.
At a time when immigration policy is changing and some immigrants are being victimized by unscrupulous service providers, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown has created a special office to assist foreign-born residents with “navigating and accessing” the criminal justice system.
The Immigrant Affairs Office will also coordinate efforts to strengthen the DA’s prosecution of crimes committed against immigrants.
More than one million of Queens’s 2.3 million residents are foreign-born.
Brown tapped senior prosecutor Carmencita Gutiérrez as the first director of the new unit. She is the daughter of Colombian immigrants.
“Our office handles many cases annually in which members of immigrant communities are victimized, both by crimes of violence and crimes of financial exploitation,” Brown pointed out.
The district attorney noted, “We recognize that with immigration policy changing and evolving on all levels of government there is an opportunity to do more and so we found it fitting to establish the office in an effort to provide better coordination of these prosecutions.”
The new special office in Queens follows the Immigrant Affairs Unit established by then Manhattan District attorney Robert Morgenthau in 2007 and last year’s Immigrant Fraud Unit created by Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson.
Immigrant advocates are glad to see the new special office open.
“Raising awareness of the harm that immigrant communities face at the hands of unscrupulous actors has long been a priority,” said Steven Choi, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition.
Elected officials also applauded Brown’s move.
“Immigrants are often the target of scam artists because of their lack of familiarity navigating the legal system,” said state Sen. José Peralta (D-East Elmhurst).
With the new unit in place, state Assemblyman Francisco Moya (D-Jackson Heights) said the DA’s office “will be able to foster relationships within the immigrant community and better explain to immigrants their rights under the law.”
And City Councilman Daniel Dromm (D-Jackson Heights) said that “making our court system more accessible to immigrant New Yorkers is a win for everyone.”
In addition to the new borough wide unit, City Councilman Ruben Wills (D-Jamaica) also announced new legal staff to assist immigrants and constituents in response to new immigration policy, President Barak Obama’s executive order on immigration and general legal matters.
Wills expanded his office space to accommodate the new service, provided in collaboration with CUNY Citizenship Now and CUNY School of Law’s Community Legal Resource Network, which includes an attorney and a paralegal.
The legislator said “we fully expect a future surge in demand” at the new Legal Services Annex at his office in Jamaica.
About 600 constituents, Wills said, used the legal services provided at the district office, both for immigration and general counsel services.
“Free legal assistance is vital to the community,” said Assemblywoman Vivian Cook (D-Jamaica).
