Victor Pacheco spent $18,000 he borrowed from relatives, endured three weeks traveling from Ecuador to the U.S.-Mexico border, and crawled through a tunnel for 25 minutes to finally reach what he saw as the “promised land.”
Six months later, in early January, he was standing on a street corner in 35-degree weather in Farmingville, hoping someone would hire him as a day laborer.
By 9 a.m., after a 2½-hour wait, it wasn’t looking good.
But Pacheco was not deterred as he stood among a group of new friends from Ecuador, all looking for the same thing — work.
Back home, “No hay trabajo,” he said in Spanish. “There’s no work.”
Pacheco, 46, is among a record-breaking surge of migrants who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally during the past two years, and in many cases, made their way to New York City. Some of those migrants are now living on Long Island, according to immigration advocates.
The influx has triggered a crisis in the city — officials there estimate the cost of housing and feeding the thousands of migrants who have arrived will total $10.6 billion through June 2025. The city has processed about 172,000 migrants, most of them from Venezuela and Ecuador, since April 2022.
No one has an exact number on how many migrants have landed in Nassau and Suffolk counties, since they are not processed like they are in the city and they often remain in the shadows. But advocates say many signs point to sharply higher numbers in some areas of the Island and that agencies charged with assisting them have been strained.
The Central American Refugee Center, with offices in Hempstead and Brentwood, over the past 18 months has seen demand for legal services for asylum cases increase from an average of four a week to 25, said Elise de Castillo, the group’s executive director.
Because of that, CARECEN, the largest immigrant legal services agency on Long Island, more than doubled its legal staff from 12 at the end of 2022 to 28 at the end of 2023….
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