HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is asking states that take part in the unaccompanied refugee minors program to take larger number of these children (here) or (here).

The U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, which has 700 refugee children in foster care, has asked states to prepare to foster more international refugee children…whose parents either have disappeared or been killed by war or natural disaster. The need is heightened by continuing armed conflicts in Africa and recent events such as the earthquake in Haiti.

“Between all the wars going on and all the (human) trafficking laws that have changed, more children are needing safe homes,” said Sherrill Hilliard, the program manager for the Refugee Immigration & Assistance Program in Washington.

Massachusetts, a state that historically has taken in one of the largest shares of the nation’s unaccompanied refugee minors, has been asked to increase its current share from 93 to 125, said Richard Chacon, director of the Office for Refugees and Immigrants in Massachusetts.

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services says 14 states and the District of Columbia participate in the federal Unaccompanied Refugee Minor Program: Texas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia and Washington.

It is not the only way orphaned refugees can find safe haven in the U.S. The Obama administration, for example, recently said it would allow orphaned Haitian children to enter the U.S. temporarily on an individual basis. And some groups, such as the Heartland Alliance in Illinois, help unaccompanied, undocumented children by providing housing and legal representation.

The U.S. program, developed in the early 1980s to help thousands of orphans in Southeast Asia, has aided more than 13,000 refugee children fleeing war, famine and economic turmoil. It remains the most consistent source for refugee children in the U.S., with the assistance of the United Nations.

In 2008, foster homes and related facilities in the United States and 67 other countries took in 16,300 orphans, according to Tim Irwin, the spokesman for the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Refugees. That’s the highest number since the agency started keeping records, Irwin said.

In the U.S., states license foster homes with the help of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The federal government reimburses states for all costs of the children’s schooling, health care and related expenses.

This whole issue reminds me of a case several years ago when we helped a Liberian refugee in North Dakota (one of the 14 states that take part in this federal program) who was 17 when she arrived. The girl arrived alone with her 1-year-old daughter after inexplicably being forced by IOM to take a separate flight to the US from the woman who had raised her, who also arrived in Fargo with her children.

She asked her resettlement agency, Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota (LSSND), if she could live with the woman (whom she called auntie) who had raised her in Africa since she was 2-years-old and whom she was coming to join in Fargo. They said no, that she had to live in foster care since she was underage (but she wasn’t really an ‘unaccompanied refugee minor’ just because the IOM had her to take a separate flight to the US! She had been raised by and lived with her aunt for the last 15 years).

They wanted to place her with a white American family who also had male teenage children. Her auntie asked LSSND if she could be the foster-mother, but they said no since was not registered for foster care. The auntie asked if they could help her become certified for foster care. They did not respond. They also said her 3-bedroom apartment was not large enough for her, her five children, plus this 17-year-old girl and her daughter (couldn’t she move to a larger apartment?). At some point during all this the girl, I think after being put in foster care, she turned 18, but by then could not live alone with her daughter as some anonymous person reported that she had taken her daughter outside in the cold without a winter coat on. She said that was not true, and suspected someone from LSSND had made the complaint.

LSSND and their partner foster agency then took the girl and her infant daughter out of Fargo and placed them in the foster family’s home in a small town. She was unable to communicate with the family because she spoke Liberian English, which is almost unintelligible to speakers of American English, and vice-versa. So here she was, forced to live apart from her family and with strangers who spoke a different language.

Now, I guess that this alienating and highly expensive living arrangement could have worked to some extant, if an interpreter was available, and at any time but, of course, an interpreter was not made available.  Worse yet, the girl’s LSSND case worker was only available during limited work hours, and kept her voice mail on all day everyday (this case worker was also a former Yugoslav refugee – former refugee workers being highly touted by the resettlement agencies – yet was completely hostile to the Liberian girl).  There was yet another case worker from the foster care agency working with the foster family. It was a requirement that these caseworkers be consulted to do anything or work out any little problem.

An immediate problem was the family’s 16-year-old teenage boy. The girl said the boy would yell at her, call her a “bitch” and tell her to “shut up”, and open her door and come into her bedroom when the foster parents went out to eat and to the movies, which was every Friday or Saturday night.

She also said that the family regularly refused to even try to communicate with her.  She reported that they would go for long periods of time without speaking to her or trying to respond to her questions and statements. She said that each time she would enter one of the main rooms in the home where the family was, they would then get up and leave. 

The girl tried to complain about all of this but no one could understand her, and the tangled process of calling caseworkers and having them in turn arrange for an interpreter often meant complaints became a long involved and slow process, or went by the wayside entirely.

One of the only escapes from this unbearable situation for this Liberian refugee was to occasionally go to her auntie’s house for a visit. Yet even this required a process of coördination by various caseworkers, the foster parents, and her aunt. After getting the okay to go home to her aunt’s for a weekend to celebrate her 1-year-old’s birthday, her foster-mother suddenly told her on Friday evening that she would not be allowed to go. When she complained that she already had permission from her caseworkers and arrangements had already been finalized, her foster-mother told her that the case worker said she couldn’t go, and that no, she could not call the case worker to confirm that.

She tried to call anyway, but of course once again only got voicemail, and the foster-mother did a redial on the phone to see who she had called. Infuriated that the refugee girl had disobeyed her, the girl said the foster-mother screamed at her. She said that the foster-mother shouted “I don’t want to see you anymore!” and “you and your daughter get the HELL out of my house!” 

A confrontation then ensued with the girl and the foster-mother screaming at each other, and the mother called the police. The police arrived and demanded to know what the girl wanted to do (they never bothered to call for an interpreter). She said she wanted to leave and go to her aunt’s home. The police said okay (even though the only way back to Fargo would be on foot in subzero temperatures), but demanded that she first put her 1-year-old daughter down. She refused. She said the police then forcefully pulled the child out of her arms and knocked her to the ground. She said they then handcuffed her, arrested her for disorderly conduct, and took her to jail. By the way, they never put in the police report what she said had happened, only the foster-mother’s version.

We helped her aunt to bond the girl out of jail, and found her extremely withdrawn and depressed, and worried that her 1-year-old daughter had remained behind in this foster home where she felt she was not safe (she described how one time the foster mother had come home drunk from the movies and accidentally fell down on the garage floor with the 1-year-old in her arms).

Rather than making a bad situation better, the district attorney then decided to go ahead and conduct a full trial against this Liberian refugee girl for the crime of “disorderly conduct”!  The foster-mother also came out with a story that the Liberian girl had threatened to get a gun and said that the family would “not sleep [that] night”. It wasn’t clear how she claimed to understand that since the girl only spoke Liberian English.

The decision to hold the trial, once again at great public expense, also offered the opportunity for the agencies to continue to keep her separated from her young daughter until the trial was over. She kept asking that her daughter at least be placed in a different foster home, but nobody would respond to the letters we helped her to write to LSSND, the foster agency, the North Dakota government oversight agencies, the State Attorney, and a ND government agency’s “regional ombudsman”.

At the trial the foster mother admitted that she knew that the Liberian refugee did not have a gun, so could not make good on a supposed threat to keep the family awake. In addition, the language barrier made it plain that neither the girl nor the foster family were really able to communicate. (She spoke the Gbazon dialect of Krahn – a Western Krahn dialect from Liberia — but also understand most of Liberian English, and some American English, but not all words.)

The judge of course threw the charges out. We don’t know for certain what all of his reasonings were – it may have involved just about anything, e.g. maybe a witness suddenly failed to cooperate — but it seems clear that there never should have been a trial.

The girl also told us that LSSND and it’s partner agencies went about making many false allegations about her to other agencies and people in the community, saying that she was of “low intelligence” and “mentally ill”, when in fact she just had problems communicating with them. It’s hard to imagine the frustration of not being able to effectively communicate with any of the Americans she dealt with surrounding all the problems she was having. 

Although the girl did not have any charges stay on her record, the false arrest does stay there. In addition, the county social services separated her from her young daughter for months, and these experiences were psychologically traumatizing.

In the meantime continue to assign more unaccompanied refugee minors to LSSND. They were never even admonished for their role in this absolutely disgusting case. We wrote to the State Department, ORR, and ND state agencies telling them the details of the case from the girl’s stand point, and they never even bothered to respond to say they would investigate or anything. The refugee is not even considered a stakeholder.

Business goes on as usual with no consequences and no accountability for any of the agencies involved.