The Lawyer Priest From Ireland Who Counsels New York’s Immigrants

Outside a nondescript storefront in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a line of people stretched down the block.

They stood rocking babies, pushing toddlers in strollers and clutching thick envelopes of paperwork. They were looking for help with visa requests, work permits, green card applications and citizenship paperwork, all in hopes of living and working legally in New York.

Inside sat Msgr. James Kelly, an 87-year-old priest turned lawyer who leads a team that provides guidance, at a steep discount, to immigrants seeking legal status.

The work they do out of their cramped office, District Three Immigration Services, has never been in greater demand — and their ability to help has never been less guaranteed.

What began as a passion project for Father Kelly when he arrived in New York from Ireland 65 years ago has become a lifeline for immigrants who are terrified about President Trump’s promises of mass deportations.

On a recent weekday, the line of people looking for help appeared never-ending. A rudimentary sign taped to the front door denoting a lunch break from noon to 1 p.m. was summarily ignored. Before the inauguration, the office would typically see 50 clients in a day; that number is now up to 80.

One mother said she was afraid to send her child to school. Others said family members were deciding to leave the country rather than risk being forcibly sent away.

Mr. Trump began issuing executive orders targeting unauthorized immigrants almost immediately upon taking office, including one that seeks to end the recognition of their U.S.-born children as citizens, an apparent violation of the 14th Amendment. Twenty-two states sued to stop the measure, which has been blocked in federal court.

Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies are working to arrest undocumented immigrants with criminal records — though there are growing concerns that people without records are also being arrested.

Amid the chaos, Father Kelly said he was unsure what to tell those seeking his advice. He works only with clients whose cases are likely to be approved, in order to avoid giving false hope.

But he fears that even the clients he does take on may face trouble.

“I don’t know exactly what they’re doing — I don’t think they know either,” Father Kelly said of the Trump administration’s early moves. “But we have a huge problem.”

While Father Kelly and those who work in his office contend with the uptick in business and swelling fears, they are also reckoning with the fact that their work has become more controversial than ever.

As hundreds of thousands of migrants arrived in the city over the past three years, public opinion regarding New York’s status as a sanctuary city, with laws that limit its cooperation with federal immigration authorities, has shifted.

A Siena College poll last month found that 79 percent of New York State voters supported deporting undocumented immigrants who had been convicted of crimes, while 39 percent supported deporting immigrants without criminal records.

Father Kelly’s work was not always so challenging. Born and raised in Ireland, he was brought to Bushwick in 1960 by the Catholic diocese of Brooklyn, after he graduated from seminary in Rome. At first, his congregation consisted mainly of postwar immigrants from Germany. Later, Italians flooded his pews.

All the while, Irish undocumented immigrants sought him out, having been told back home that he could help them obtain American citizenship.

He enrolled in law school at St. John’s University in Brooklyn, attending classes at night and earning his degree in 1980.

He would encounter judges with Irish last names who were more lenient with his Irish clients, he said.

“People weren’t anti-immigrant then,” Father Kelly said. “These people were well-received.”

As European immigrants in Bushwick began to move elsewhere, Hispanic immigrants, mainly from Central America, moved in, according to John Dereszewski, a local historian. The neighborhood is now predominantly Hispanic and has the largest Hispanic population in Brooklyn, census data shows.

Though the shift in Father Kelly’s clientele took place gradually over decades, in recent weeks their needs have become more urgent than ever.

A man named Marcello, 70, paced around the waiting room the other day, repeatedly sitting down and standing back up as he listened for his name to be called. He is a citizen, but his wife, who lives in the Dominican Republic, is not, and he was trying to make sure his employment paperwork was accurate ahead of her visa appointment next month. (He and the other clients who spoke to The New York Times asked to be identified by only one name because their or their relatives’ cases were not yet resolved.)

Another client, Larissa, 36, who had successfully submitted her own citizenship application, her mother’s and her nephews’ through Father Kelly’s office, was waiting to go over an issue with her sister’s documents.

She said she was not too worried about her sister’s prospects, but that the Trump administration’s rhetoric was concerning.

A 29-year-old woman who asked to be identified only by her last name, Sanchez, waited with her husband, who was hoping to apply for citizenship. She said many people she knew were alarmed.

“People are scared, scared to go out,” she said. “Other people are trusting that nothing is going to happen, or it will just be people with records.”

Immigrants looking for help from Father Kelly used to visit him at his parish, St. Brigid Catholic Church. As demand for his services increased, he moved to a nearby office on Wyckoff Avenue — and his influence grew.

Now, when he walks around the neighborhood, leaning on his cane, he is often recognized like a celebrity. Cries of “Padre Kelly!” follow him down the street.

“I had a very important role to play,” he said. “I was the one who helped them with their immigration problems. And they all had immigration problems.”

As the years passed, he stretched to meet the new demands. He learned four languages — French, German, Spanish and Italian — in addition to the English, Latin and Irish he already knew, in hopes of helping everyone as best he could.

“I suppose I changed in the sense that I’ve been exposed to more different kinds of people,” Father Kelly said, reclining in his cluttered office filled with signs of his eclectic past — his law school diploma, a painting of Jesus and a clock with the Limerick coat of arms.

“It made me more tolerant and more understanding of their situations than I would have been had I not come here,” he said.

His office doesn’t have to advertise; the clients it receives through word of mouth alone are almost more than it can handle.

Though he has retired from his parish and no longer represents clients in court, Father Kelly is still in his office six days a week.

He trundles among the red cubicles, overseeing a team of primarily Spanish-speaking women who help people renew their green cards and prepare for citizenship tests.

Clara Ugbor, an immigrant from Zambia, first sought out Father Kelly six years ago, when immigration lawyers were quoting her $2,000 for half an hour of work — money she did not have as a working mother of two.

Father Kelly connected her with lawyers he knew, who worked for free, and his assistants completed her paperwork. It was invaluable, she said.

“They might think, ‘Oh, it’s just a piece of paper that we’re helping this person with,’” she said. “But no, it goes a long way, a long way. It’s actually survival.”

Father Kelly said he charges clients around $200 for citizenship applications that cost his office about $500 to submit. He also sometimes covers or subsidizes the cost of immigration lawyers. The office’s main revenue stream comes from its ownership of a nearby building that it rents to the Department of Education.

The office is run by Princess Reinoso, 26, who serves as its director of operations. Father Kelly helped Ms. Reinoso’s parents, who immigrated from Ecuador, gain their citizenship. She began helping out at District Three when she was around 12, volunteering to answer phones or check people in.

She was eventually hired as an office manager and worked her way up to her current role, in which she is essentially Father Kelly’s right-hand woman.

When Ms. Reinoso sits across from clients, most of whom are Ecuadorean, she feels connected to their struggle. She said she gets more nervous about deadlines than they do, and she is just as emotional as they are when they finally get approved.

“When I see people crying in here, and stuff like that, it heals my heart,” she said. “We care for people.”

But not everyone feels the same way. The highly publicized benefits given to the most recent migrants who arrived in New York, including free shelter and help securing work permits — as well as debit cards for food distributed through a pilot program that gained widespread attention — led to feelings of resentment among some immigrants who have lived and worked in the city for decades.

“We see people come to us and they’ve said: ‘I’ve been here 25 years. I don’t have a work permit, I don’t have Social Security, I’ve never taken any help from the government,’” Ms. Reinoso said. “‘How is it possible that I’ve been here all these years and the new people that have just arrived and caused a ruckus are getting everything?’”

As they do their best to adjust to their clients’ new reality, the District Three staff is also preparing for the unknown — a time when Father Kelly will no longer be able to report to the office.

He had a health scare last February that sent him to the hospital, struggling to breathe, but he returned to work immediately. He wanted to prove that he did not yet need to be sent to a nursing home for priests out on Long Island — a place he calls “God’s waiting room.”

In Father Kelly’s own waiting room, Ms. Reinoso’s brother, Richard, fields unending requests from stressed-out clients. He attends law school at night in hopes of one day taking the baton from Father Kelly and representing the immigrants who come to District Three for help.

But for now, this is still Father Kelly’s territory. As clients fill the waiting room, they sit among remnants of the office’s long history, one that is irrevocably intertwined with the priest’s own. A bookcase against the wall, next to a copy of the Constitution, holds a variety of Irish history books and Catholic tomes — as well as a pocket Spanish dictionary.

It is here that Father Kelly sits when he wanders out to check on clients and hear their stories.

“Buenos días,” he says.

“Padre!” they shout in reply.