Oak Park’s village board approved an agreement with Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd. to assist local migrants with navigating the United States immigration process.
The firm will be working with them until June 30.
The village received roughly $1.9 million in a Supporting Municipalities for Asylum Seeker Services grant in February, $360,000 of which was designated for legal services. Those services include legal fees and access to attorneys for aid with asylum, temporary protected status and employment authorization applications.
Danielle Walker, the village’s chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer, said the Greater Chicago Legal Clinic had been providing services at all the village’s shelter sites during the first round of grant funding. Their representatives, for example, gave presentations in Spanish to help migrants learn about immigration processes and timelines in the United States, she said.
“Some of it was jarring for some of the migrants,” Walker said.
But the conversations were necessary, she added.
In January and February, the migrants living in Oak Park had an opportunity to go over legal documentation with attorneys, Walker said. Now, their next steps are to apply for asylum, TPS or work permits. The new firm will help with that process.
Kelli Fennell, a partner with Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd., said it’s important to find out who is eligible to apply for asylum, but not everyone has a strong case for it.
Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel for Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, has told Wednesday Journal that only about one in four asylum applications are approved.
Applicants typically need to prove that the government or police were abusing them, were denying them employment opportunities, harassing them or even torturing them, Tsao has said.
It’s also important to time those applications correctly, Fennell said, because once an asylum application is submitted, a 150-day countdown starts before a migrant is eligible to submit a work permit application, too.
“Everyone that we’ve met with knows exactly where they stand,” she said.
However, timelines for immigration court are unpredictable, she said, due to a huge backlog of cases. In terms of final adjudication for asylum for the migrants, those decisions are likely several years away, Fennell said.
“This is a great move forward for folks who have been living with a lot of uncertainty in our village,” trustee Cory Wesley said.