Chair Lee questions MOIA on AAPI community legal services access

Okay.

And then moving now to the AAPI community support, I know that there was an analysis done by Stop AAPI Hate, and it found that a lot of the ICE arrests actually have gone up seven times in the Asian community.

And then there have been over 1,400 arrests of individuals with Asian citizenship in New York compared to 205 arrests of Asian immigrants during a similar period.

And in April, the ALDEF, Asian American Legal Defense Fund, released a report highlighting systemic gaps in language access, outreach, funding structure, and institutional partnerships.

How has your office or will your office increase?

access to legal services specifically for the AAPI community and what are some challenges you've had connecting to the population to legal services which I'm sure a lot of is language and other things but

yeah I think first it's really important to sort of highlight that MOIA meets

the needs of AAPI immigrant communities through sustained engagement with stakeholders and advocates, different organizations, and that includes ongoing meeting with advocates and community organizations.

We have close partnership with AAPI serving organizations, and many of them receive funding and run our legal support centers or our immigrant rights workshops.

I think that one of the biggest challenges, to answer your question more directly, is language access.

Earlier this year, MOIA met with ALDEF after they released that report, and I think one of the findings that really stood out and reflects what we see in our own work is that nearly six in ten

New Yorkers who speak an Asian language have limited English proficiency.

And while many of the legal services hotlines right now primarily operate in English and Spanish, and so for many AAPI immigrants, the legal system can seem inaccessible, but language is only part of the challenge.

I think that AAPI communities is incredibly diverse as well with different immigration histories and cultural contexts and levels of familiarity, frankly, with the systems.

So I think...

Like, you know, typically we tend to lean on a one-size-fits-all approach to outreach, but in this instance, it just is not something that would work.

There are real gaps when it comes to culturally and linguistically competent legal services, particularly for some of the lesser common languages that are spoken.

You know, I think that's...

Primarily a reason why MOIA has focused heavily on our partnerships, especially when we're doing our multilingual Noya Rights outreach.

We've relied heavily on our ethnic media engagement.

You know, the community media is where many of the Asian communities seek, you know, trusted information from.

And so that has been really important for us to forge those relationships with ethnic media and to get the information out.