Mik said he can go two days without eating, no problem. The 35-year-old from Mauritania quipped that Ramadan supplies him with that kind of grit. It’s the same perseverance he had to employ last year, as he made his nearly monthlong migration from his home country’s capital through Istanbul and Bogota, then up into Central and North America. At points along the journey, he said, the only nourishment he could get his hands on was water.

He didn’t expect to have to keep battling hunger when he arrived at his destination.

Mik, whose name has been changed to avoid jeopardizing his asylum case, recounted his story earlier this month from a shaded picnic table at a Brooklyn community garden known as Bushwick City Farm. A handful of other asylum seekers were there, charging their phones, using the garden’s wifi, practicing English, or just resting in the summer heat. Until recently, they also would have been cooking on the sidewalk outside the garden, but a recent run-in with police put a stop to that.

When congestion pricing passed the state legislature in 2019 after a decade of political wrangling, it was buoyed by Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents more than 41,000 New York City transit workers, including employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The TWU brought its members to rallies in Albany in favor of the proposal, even sending them to crash an anti-congestion pricing event. It ran an ad proclaiming that “congestion pricing will generate billions of dollars for necessary improvements” and that “the system needs funding so transit workers have the equipment and infrastructure to provide the world-class service that New York needs, and riders deserve.”