Chair Lee Questions MOIA on AAPI Legal Services and Language Access

Um, and then moving now to the AAPI community support, um, I know that there was uh an analysis done by Stop AAPI Hate, and it found that a lot of the ICE arrests um actually have gone up seven times in the Asian community, and then um there have been over fourteen hundred arrests of individuals with Asian citizenship in New York compared to two hundred and five arrests of Asian immigrants during a similar period.

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

And so, um, how has your office or will your office increase access to legal services um 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 Moya meets the needs of AAPI immigrant communities through sustained engagement with stakeholders and advocates, different organizations, and that includes ongoing meetings with advocates and community organizations.

We have close partnership with AAPI serving organizations, and many of them are receive funding and are 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.

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 you know the systems.

So I think uh 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.

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

You know, I think that's primarily a reason why MOIA has focused heavily on our partnerships, um, especially when we're doing our multilingual know your 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.

And I think this is across all communities in general, and something we've heard in our roundtable conversations where there really is such a shortage of culturally competent attorneys that are available.