NEW YORK — Millions of dollars are being spent on migrants who now live in the U.S. It’s to help get them on their feet. The Reyes family, who recently relocated to New York City, say they don’t plan on using that aid for long.
It’s been a long journey for the family — one that took them from their native Venezuela all the way to El Paso, Texas. From there, it was another long journey to New York.
They’re now getting settled in the Big Apple.
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Three kids and two parents are packed into one room. It contains everything they own. The home, in a six-story motel in the Bronx, is temporary. The hotel is full. Dozens of migrant families are living there for now.
“We went to the aid office for shelters. We stayed in a hotel the first night and the next day they transferred us here, where we can stay for up to a year,” Michelle Hernández said.
The motel is paid for by New York taxpayers, but the family isn’t taking anything for granted. Hernández’s husband, Joel Reyes, found a job when he arrived in New York about two months ago. It’s his way of proving he’s there to work.
“I work in a nightclub as security on weekends, and during the week I make deliveries,” he said.
The children are already studying. Hernández wasted no time in getting them enrolled in school.
“Fifteen days after I arrived, the school asked me for my kids’ documents and they already began to study. My eldest daughter starts summer classes tomorrow at a school near here,” she said.
And although the Reyes family seem to do very well, they are not disconnected from reality.
“The reality is, for instance, how complex and bureaucratic the asylum system is,” said Niurka Melendez, a Venezuelan asylum seeker who arrived in New York in 2015.
With her husband, Melendez created the Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid organization.
“To fill the gaps, the lack of information, to understand better what an asylum seeker is. We are not DACA people, we are not refugees, we are not undocumented at all. We are just people seeking humanitarian protection in the U.S.,” she said.
With her years of experience helping hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, Melendez has realized that one of the most serious mistakes migrants make when arriving in the United States is not attending their appointments with immigration authorities.
“For those who came through the border and presented themselves before an immigration authority, they must go to any appointment that they got once they crossed the border,” she said. “So by those small details that you might think ‘probably I made a mistake,’ but they can be vital for their immigration process.”
As helpful as some agencies have been, Melendez recognizes many people in New York and across the country are not so happy about migrants sleeping in streets, filling up hotels or illegally crossing the border to get here.
“The top trend topic is regarding migrants, migrants, migrants. So, people might get tired of this topic, but bear with us. There are many of those migrants who are really [focused] on doing the right thing,” she said.
And doing the right thing is what Hernández says her family came to do.
“I don’t want to live forever in a shelter or let them to pay me lawyers or anything because I came here with a goal: to help my family and to work,” she said.
Even after months of an arduous journey and now trying to survive in one of the biggest cities in the world, Reyes feels it was worth it.
“Of course it was worth it. We are here, thank God. For God, nothing is impossible,” he said.
“[One hundred million] people around the world were forced to flee their homeland, and we should focus on that. We should focus on what is going on in these countries, especially Venezuela,” Hernández said.