On a recent visit to Manhattan’s federal immigration courthouse, I sat beside a young child, and his mother, as a judge explained that the federal government’s representative across the room was challenging their right to remain in this country.
Outside, in a dim hallway, several men in tactical gear stood watch. Their faces were covered, sunglasses on, occasionally peering into the courtroom.
Shortly after, we learned from one of our nonprofit providers that another family with small children had been ordered removed and could be apprehended.
These situations are now unfolding in our city and across the country every day and may be only the beginning of what lies ahead for our immigrant communities.
And unless you have lived through something like this, it is easy to underestimate the impact these moments exact on people, particularly on children, but also the courage families and communities must summon just to keep moving forward.
The first time I stepped inside City Hall, I was an undocumented high school student, terrified to enter a government building.
I had crossed the border as a 5-year-old, nearly dying of asthma along the way, saved only by my mother’s prayers and by strangers who risked their own lives to help us.
I grew up with a constant awareness that stepping into the wrong place could change everything. At any moment, I could be separated from my family and from the only home I knew.
Decades later, when I walked into City Hall again as New York City’s commissioner of immigrant affairs, I carried those early experiences with me.
As painful and isolating as they were, they shaped me in profound ways. They taught me how to live through uncertainty. They taught me how to stay firmly connected to my purpose in the face of crisis.
And there was no shortage of crises.
In city government, it is often said that crises choose you. You do not get to pick their timing, their scale, or their consequences. You wake up each day knowing the next one might already be on its way.
That has been my reality for more than 1,400 days. In those moments, I found that your lived experience and the instincts it develops in you, truly do matter.
On my first day in office, I rushed to the Bronx, where a devastating fire had torn through an apartment building and taken the lives of many members of an African immigrant community.
Months later, I joined Haitian and Ukrainian communities in Brooklyn, who worried for their loved ones suffering from violence abroad.
By mid-year, I was at the Port Authority Bus Terminal welcoming buses of asylum seekers from all over the world. They arrived with nothing but hope, and I embraced them as I wished my family had been when we arrived.
Today, I am working with my team to support families across our city who are living with growing fear of being torn apart, just like the families I met at the immigration courthouse.
Despite the many crises we navigated, and constraints we faced, we built an office for our immigrant communities that I am truly proud of.
Over the last four years, every area of our work grew, from legal services, language access, to adult education and community engagement. Our budget and reach more than doubled across every immigrant neighborhood in the city.
We oversaw more than $126 million in contracts and grants to nonprofit partners. And together, we served more immigrant New Yorkers than at any point in the office’s history.
The office is now ready for its next phase, perhaps even becoming its own agency, as I have long advocated for.
In a city home to more than 3 million immigrants from more than 160 countries who speak more than 700 languages and dialects, our communities deserve this and more.
As New York enters a new chapter, I also hope we continue to uplift leaders whose lived experience reflects the communities they serve. This makes our local government stronger and better equipped for what our communities will need.
The last four years reinforced for me that leadership is measured in moments when there is no perfect answer, when you must carry the weight of the role while moving forward, because the people we serve cannot afford more instability.
This is the kind of leadership required when the stakes are high, the conditions are imperfect, and the consequences are real.
That is the spirit I will carry into whatever comes next for me.
Castro is New York City’s commissioner of immigrant affairs. He was previously the executive director of a nonprofit organization advocating for and serving immigrant and low-wage workers.
