A Conversation with Carnegie Ethics Fellow Molly Schaeffer

Was there a moment for you that made you interested in ethics in your personal or professional life? 

It's been something that has come up time and time again. When I was in third grade, a teacher gave me a version of Anne Frank's Diary. I read it and then learned about the Holocaust and genocide. It made me really think: Why would a government do this? What would make somebody want to do this and why? So I've always been really interested in unfairness and justice and how to help people when you have these systems that sometimes turn.  

In my professional career, I've worked a lot with government leaders, and seeing how they make decisions in hard circumstances has always been incredibly interesting. Over the last five years, since COVID, I've really focused on emergency response. You don't always have all the facts, you have to make decisions quickly, and most times you don't have the resources that you need to be able to serve the amount of people you want. For the last two years I've been the executive director of the Office of Asylum Seeker Operations for New York City’s Mayor’s Office. I've managed the city's response to the influx of asylum seekers, our biggest humanitarian crisis in the last 40-something years in New York City. So how do you provide shelter? How do you provide legal support? How do you get people enrolled in schools? And how do you do that while still serving ALL the people of New York City?

How did you find out about the Carnegie Ethics Fellows Program and why did you think it would be a good fit for you? 

One of my staff members, Kristina Arakelyan, was part of the last cohort and she recommended it to me. She really loved it. I was also a guest speaker for the previous Fellowship, so I got to see what everybody was interested in.

I work in city government, but I'm always interested in expanding my worldview and giving myself more opportunities to learn differently and learn from people in different fields and to expand my frame of reference. So much of what we do in New York City is so global, especially the emergency response I've been running the last couple of years. It's important to keep yourself open, create new networks, and to try to learn and take time to reflect on what we've been doing and see it in a different way. 

Can you describe what your role looked like over the last few years as the city was receiving buses with asylum seekers from Texas? 

It started in April of 2022. Our homeless shelter system, which is our Department of Homeless Services, said to us, "Hey, something interesting is going on here. We're starting to see a lot of people coming in for shelter who are not from New York City, who are born in other countries, and a lot of them are being dropped off in front of shelters with that address and nothing else." 

This was new for us. We're a city of immigrants, but a lot of times immigrants will come and get absorbed into communities. You'll see a lot of Chinese people come, but then they'll go to Flushing or Sunset Park. There are certain enclaves that traditionally have those communities. 

So the emergency of this was not the amount of migrants coming into New York City—we've had bigger flows before—it was the amount of people coming in asking for city support. That expanded over the summer and then we started hearing that the Texas governor was sending buses. We saw our first bus in August 2022. The idea was you can either stay in Texas and sleep outside or you can take this free bus to either New York or Chicago. We had a lot of people coming who would say, "I just want to be in America. I don't necessarily need or want to be in New York City." And we had a lot of people who didn't necessarily have a community here, so first-generation migrants, a lot of folks from Venezuela, from other countries that didn't have a community here and really needed extra support. At that point, our Department of Homeless Shelter system said, "We need extra help." 

That's when we set up an entirely new system of sheltering that was an emergency system where we could house more people. We were doing it in more creative locations, like bigger hotels, parklands, we had tents, we were at a cruise terminal, we were in empty buildings. We were trying to be as creative as possible.

Every day, every hour looked different. We were working across 21 city agencies and state and federal partners to coordinate the city's response. We needed to very quickly figure out what was a structure that could handle sometimes 4,000 people a week coming in asking for shelter with nothing on their backs, just one pair of clothing, and a cell phone at 3 percent.

It was figuring out what's the infrastructure that we need as a city to manage this effectively? How do we work across our 21 city agencies? Everything from our fire department to our buildings department—we opened over 260 shelters for this population. We were working with people who had never done this before and really getting people up to speed and making sure that everybody was doing the same thing so that we were treating people with care and compassion. Over the course of two years, we nearly tripled the population in our shelter system.

We had to show people the ingenuity of New York City. We were managing a global crisis on a local scale. So it was federal advocacy, it was advocacy with the state, it was trying to make the case to New Yorkers and other partners that we needed help, and what did that help look like. It's very quickly figuring out things as simple as, “Okay, we just had a family come and the wife is pregnant. How do we make sure she gets the healthcare she needs in the language she speaks?” 

What would you most like people to know about what has been happening in New York with the influx of migrants? What do you see the media and politicians getting wrong?

What I want everyone to know is that these are people not headlines. It's sometimes hard to understand that each of these folks, each of these families, has an entire story and they were arriving here fleeing real danger, chasing real hope, and just wanting to come here, work, and provide for themselves and their families. 

I think that politicians and the media often oversimplify. They say, "We're doing a bad job," or "We're doing a good job," and it's really, really complex what we had to do over the last two years. We had more than 238,000 migrants come in and ask for help. That is exponentially larger than any other city in the nation. We were doing something that no other city was doing at scale. We were providing shelter, food, legal help. We started a pro se legal clinic that we got awards for, that everyone said we couldn't do, to help people file their federal immigration applications. 

Just to give you a sense of scale, we had a mail room that we set up for when people were getting important documents. And that mail room was for a quarter of our system. The U.S. Postal Service said it was the largest mail operation that they were picking up mail from, just because of how many people and what the services we were providing. 

We were definitely not perfect, but we showed what it means to meet a global challenge with a local heart. I think more and more local communities and municipalities have had to step in where federal or state responses have not been adequate. So I am really proud of what we've done over the last couple of years, and I think it'll be a model for what we need to do the next time there's mass sheltering, mass humanitarian needs, mass migration. There were really a lot of lessons learned. 

What have you personally learned about ethics and leadership while working in this role over the past few years? 

I've learned that real leadership means listening sometimes more than talking; listening to the people you don't necessarily want to listen to, and trying to find the common ground in what they're saying and the truth in what they're saying, and not just dismissing someone because you didn't want to hear from them before. 

It's owning a lot of the hard calls and the decision-making—that's always been very difficult—and making sure people understand why you're making those decisions. That was definitely a learning experience about how to communicate both internally and externally during those hard times and remembering that every policy affects a real person, usually someone who's already been through the wringer. How do you make decisions that can minimize harm when you don't have enough resources or all of the information?  

I don't think that ethics is about being perfect or always following the moral high ground. It's about staying grounded in your values when things get super, super, super messy and super complicated. That's something that I continue to learn through these kinds of emergency responses. 

Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is an independent and nonpartisan nonprofit. The views expressed within this article are those of the Fellow and do not necessarily reflect the position of Carnegie Council.