While President Barack Obama's
immigration push is stalled in a legal battle, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration has begun screening illegal immigrants who may be eligible for green cards and benefits,
the Daily News reports.
"Despite the injunction, we want to go forward and help families who think they might be eligible," the city's Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Nisha Agarwal told the newspaper.
Slightly more than half of nearly 600 people who went through a screening hosted by the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs event are potentially eligible if the Obama administration wins its court fight, the newspaper reports.
Forty percent of those screened may be eligible for other benefits.
"It’s a very large number if you think of all the undocumented people that are in New York City," said Baruch College law professor and Daily News columnist Allan Wernick, who runs a Daily News/City University of New York call-in screening event.
There are an estimated 750,000 undocumented, illegal immigrants in New York City, and "if you say 20 percent of them qualify for some kind of immigration benefit, if they could get legal status, that's an astounding number," he said.
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