“I brought the car and everything else, but the cold still passes…”
Edith Quispe, a Peruvian, who is breastfeeding her two-year-old daughter and camping overnight, stands in line at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (USCIS) hoping to make an appointment.
Quispe.
“It’s certainly difficult, because suddenly if you’re late they won’t let you in, for the same reason you’re late, the appointment was for 8 in the morning, but I’m not the only one, many people will come and all I’m suddenly not going to make it,” Quispe said.
Like her, hundreds of asylum seekers share that fear of not being cared for as they improvise cardboard beds in their desperate attempt to get into headquarters.
Throughout the morning, the line was bundled up by families and individual applicants. Some have been lucky, but that was not the case for Venezuelan Leonardo Caso.
“They gave me an appointment for today, but they tell me that I won’t go ahead and that we won’t come back tomorrow and that we will do it through that, what is there,” explained Caso.
Authorities just tell them they have to scan a QR code with instructions and an email address to reschedule the appointment. Most of them must report within a 60-day period of entering the country.
For an appointment.
“The number of people who arrive and who have to report and who have to respect those protocols that they are forced to respect is so great that, apparently, there are not enough officers or there is not enough human material that can participate in all these people,” said Claudia Bernal, an immigration attorney.
Bernal adds that there are other factors that aggravate the situation:
“Aside from that, it’s not just the people who are scheduled for this date and have to show up, it’s the ones who got the date wrong and misread the day and time as we know in Spanish, for example, right? First is the day and then is the month, they got it the other way around, so they try to solve or try to fulfill their obligation and they show up, sometimes, some of them don’t have an appointment and they try to get in as they can.
In a statement to NY1 News, an ICE spokesperson said the agency “is working to resolve current processing delays at some ICE offices,” attributing the delays to the pandemic.
The spokesperson added that the agency only lets in the number of people they can see in a day, regardless of how many appointments are set or how long the queue lasts overnight. And if the case has not been processed, the applicant will be able to continue his process without any problem if he follows the required instructions.
