Friends of Refugees

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Archive for the ‘home visits’ Category

USCRIs International Institute of Wisconsin “Mostly Non-Compliant” With Contract Requirements

Posted by Christopher Coen on January 20, 2012

Last May we read news reports in the Milwaukee media that Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan had placed Burmese refugees in an apartment building overflowing with code violations, roaches, leaking sewage, and owned and operated by a known felon involved in child-porn. A local reporter tried to get some answers from the State Department about their contractor, but answers were not forthcoming.

Now, based on a State Department monitoring report of USCRI’s International Institute of Wisconsin (IIW), it seems  that agency was violating almost every State Department contract requirement. Monitors visited the usual small sample (too small?) of three refugee cases and found serious failure of the agency in providing minimal contract-requirements in all three cases. Problems ranged from lack of orientation or help of any type for a refugee family to refugees in substandard housing.

…[A] Burmese family of four lived in an apartment complex…The apartment visited had a smoke detector that did not work; the bathroom had missing ceiling tiles with pipes exposed, mold around the chalk in the bathtub, and evidence of water leakage; there were exposed wires in the hallway; paint was dirty with holes and nails on the wall…

They told monitors they did not receive any orientation from the agency. The caseworker told monitors that orientation was provided but that he had relied on the 17-year-old daughter for translation…This was not documented in the case file…

…[A] single Burmese Karen woman lived in a room in an apartment shared with a Burmese married couple…Her bedroom door did not have a doorknob or lock. She used a bookcase/dresser to block the door at night. The bathroom had a leaky ceiling. There were two broken windows in the living room and in the kitchen. She reported mice infestation in the apartment, and monitors observed mouse droppings in the kitchen pantry… Read more here

By the way, minors should never be used as interpreters.

Posted in Burma/Myanmar, community/cultural orientation, Cuban, cultural/community orientation, post arrival, dangerous neighborhoods, home visits, housing, housing, substandard, International Institute of Wisconsin, language, late health screenings, Milwaukee, pocket-money, rats and roaches, State Department, teenagers | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Refugees in Milwaukee in wretched housing – roaches, sewage, 900+ violations

Posted by Christopher Coen on May 24, 2011

Don’t think the deplorable conditions under which Australian refugee resettlement contractors are resettling refugees in Newcastle are any different from what keeps happening over here on the other side of the big pond. In Milwaukee journalists just busted Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan for placing Burmese refugees in an apartment building overflowing with code violations, roaches, and leaking sewage, and run by a known child-porn felon. He has been convicted of tax offenses, has a history of serious building-code violations, and is being sued by the city in four different lawsuits – yet Lutheran Social Services claims they have the best interests of the refugees at heart — for sure. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel tells more:

Dozens of Burmese refugees who fled persecution in their homeland have landed in recent years in cockroach-infested Milwaukee apartments, some thick with the smell of leaking sewage and almost all unprotected by working smoke or carbon monoxide detectors.

Many of the refugees were placed in the squalid conditions by Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, which acknowledges it never conducted a background check on the complex’s owner, Daniel Bruckner, a Fox Point lawyer.

State and city records reviewed by the Journal Sentinel show Bruckner faces hundreds of city building code violations and four city lawsuits, owes nearly a half-million dollars in delinquent property taxes and has seven felony convictions for importing child pornography.

Lutheran Social Services was unaware of Bruckner’s code violations and legal troubles, said Natascha Malkemes, a spokeswoman for the agency.

“We should know these things,” she conceded, adding,”We have our clients’ best interests at heart for sure.”

On Friday, the agency - which is paid federal dollars to settle refugees - released a statement saying, “The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has recently made our organization aware of litigation against and a criminal record of a landlord we have worked with in the past. Because of this development, Lutheran Social Services will immediately begin looking into ways to put procedures in place to apply background check standards on all of the landlords we work with.”

In addition, the agency pledged to contact the refugees who rent from Bruckner and assist any who wish to move.

Bruckner placed the blame for most of his 443 building-code infractions at Wilson Park Garden Apartments on his tenants, especially the Burmese refugees…

…The U.S. State Department’s standard agreement with social services agencies says refugees should have “decent, safe and sanitary housing” with working smoke detectors, adequate heat and electrical fixtures, and should be “free of rodent and insect infestation” with “no detectable dangerous or unsanitary odors.”

But in interview after interview, refugees living in the apartments on S. 20th St. said they had tried for months without success to get Bruckner to fix failings in these areas…

…The cockroach problems had persisted for months, according to residents, and were evident in numerous visits by reporters to the complex.

At night, bugs came out and bit her children, explained Paw Shee during an interview two weeks ago. Shee, a 36-year-old, lives at the apartment complex with her husband, three children and an army of roaches. Sometimes the bugs crawled over her face, Shee said,
speaking through an interpreter.

When workers finally fumigated apartments on May 5, they did so while adults and young children were inside, according to the residents. Missy Henriksen, a spokeswoman for the National Pest Management Association, said manufacturers usually recommend that a spray be dry before people re-enter a room.

One floor above, Moo Nge, his wife and their five children had one of the few carbon monoxide detectors in the apartments that reporters visited. The detector was installed only after Moo Nge was rushed to the hospital in September with carbon monoxide poisoning, which family members said happened when he was cooking. The hospitalization forced him to miss work, and he lost his temp job.

On the top floor of the same building lives a woman named Mu Mu, 43, her three children and three other family members. Their refrigerator is broken. So is one of the toilets, and there is a gaping hole behind the bathtub faucet.

“We tried to call, but he did not come,” Mu Mu said when asked about the landlord…

…Malkemes acknowledged that her agency had no idea that Bruckner is a convicted felon with a history of serious building-code violations who is being sued by the city in four different lawsuits. She agreed that these issues could affect the safety of the refugees.

When asked about the cockroach infestation at the apartments, Malkemes said by email: “New arrivals come from refugee camps where they had no electricity or running water, and sometimes are not accustomed to general upkeep or how to properly store food. In these camps, refugees are often exposed to insects and this is their everyday (life).”

Non-refugees agree

Although Bruckner and his building manager blamed refugees for the cockroach problem, other tenants who are not refugees also described having infestation problems at Wilson Park Garden Apartments. Moreover, these tenants provided accounts that mirrored other hardships cited by the refugees.

Families described arriving in winter to apartments without heat, going days without working refrigerators and weeks or months without working stoves. The problems the families described are consistent with those cited in inspectors’ reports.

Despite these conditions, the non-refugee tenants were paying as much as $845 a month in rent…Read more here

Let’s see, what could be LIRS’ excuse this time? No doubt it will be the same tired old excuses – their affiliate (subcontractor) didn’t
“know” about the apartments or the slumlord running the place. (Why not? Aren’t they paid to know?) Or, Lutheran Social Services has been growing. Gee, isn’t that the point of having LIRS and its vast experience on hand to advise and oversee its affiliate? And why didn’t the State Department know about this mess? Oh I forgot, LIRS and the other volags are “partners” and are supposed to “self-monitor” their affiliates. Yet once again that method proves disastrous. In the meantime the State Dept. monitors most likely haven’t inspected for years. These refugees would have continued to suffer in these deplorable conditions had journalists not intervened.

Lutheran Social Services claims it “will immediately begin looking into ways to put procedures in place to apply background check standards on all of the landlords we work with”? Yet LIRS has been
resettling refugees for decades and the State Department and
journalists have continually caught them placing refugees into
deplorable slum apartments. Why aren’t background checks the norm at every LIRS affiliate?

Will we see the State Department’s Office of Admissions conduct a timely Australian-style investigation – with an investigation report made immediately available to the public? Don’t count on it. Our national refugee resettlement program seems to be run secretively with the sole purpose of shielding the private refugee resettlement contractor partners and their government oversight friends from any real accountability.

Posted in Burma/Myanmar, Cooperative Agreement, faith-based, home visits, housing, housing, substandard, Karen, LIRS, Lutheran, Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, Milwaukee, openess and transparency in government, rats and roaches, State Department, Wisconsin | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Chicago’s RefugeeONE (formerly known as Interfaith Refugee & Immigration Ministries)

Posted by Christopher Coen on March 10, 2011

Greg Wangerin, Executive Director of RefugeeONE (fka IRIM)

The Gapers Block -- a Chicago-centric web publication – has an article reporting about refugee clients of the refugee resettlement agency RefugeeONE (formerly known as Interfaith Refugee and
Immigration Ministries, and InterChurch Refugee and Immigration Ministries), an affiliate of CWS, EMM and LIRS. An audio interview details the abuses the couple suffered in Sierra Leone. When the US government resettled them to Chicago the woman shoveled snow into garbage bags and put them into the dumpster because she didn’t know what else to do with it.  An elderly Somali man arrived and told her, “just push it to the side.”

But what about this resettlement agency? It turns out that they recently rebranded themselves as RefugeeONE, after long being known as Interfaith Refugee and Immigration Ministries (IRIM). Why the name change? Sometimes I worry that these agencies think they can rid themselves of past errors and weaknesses (wrongdoings?) by essentially becoming a completely different agency, in the public’s mind at least, via a name change.

So what is in the agency’s past? It turns out we have an old State Department monitoring report of IRIM, when the agency was under the directorship of someone named May Campbell. This is the most recent available inspection report (which tells me that they are just about ready for another once-in-ten-years inspection, or the Admissions Office has been illegally holding back reports from our FOIA’s. It’s either one or the other.)

Let’s see — 1) Placed a refugee in an apartment with a leaking bathroom ceiling and a broken door lock, and another in an apartment with a “water problem” (normal for Chicago low-income apartments after all), 2) left a refugee family, including an elderly woman, to sleep on the floor of their apartment for almost five months (until the day before the pre-announced monitoring visit – funny how that works). It turned out that the eleventh-hour delivery of beds (two single beds for four people) was the only home visit the case worker did (supposed to be done within 30 days, not at 4.5 months), 3) apparently didn’t bother to give another refugee family any chairs or couch, lamp, or a bed for their one-year-old child — just a dresser, three tables, and a double-bed (???), 4) no table or lamp for another family. [Check out so-called "minimum-requirements" in Operational Guidance to see why this is cheating the refugees and the taxpayers], 5) staff were not meeting with refugee families to make sure that they were giving them basic services and meeting their essential needs.

The refugee family that was sleeping on the floor of their apartment also reported that their employer was taking advantage of them by requiring them to make up bathroom break times at the end of the day. Apparently IRIM (now RefugeeONE) did nothing to help these refugees with this blatantly unfair treatment. No doubt the excuse would be that the agency ”didn’t know about it” (yet aren’t these contractors paid to know what’s happening to their refugee clients? If the only people watching over these refugees in their first several months don’t know what’s going on then who would? No one.) Apparently the refugee clients also reported that the agency had not told them what to do — via required community/cultural orientation – in the event that they experienced unfair, exploitive or illegal labor practices. By the way when I made a trip back to Chicago in 2001 some Lost Boys of Sudan” refugee clients of the Heartland Alliance agency told me that coworkers at an O’hare airport baggage handling company where they worked where screaming at them and physically threatening them. They said they told their Heartland Alliance case workers but nothing happened. Things just seem to keep happening when government monitors are away — for 10 years at a time.

On a last note, in 2009 journalists at the Chicago Tribune quote RefugeeONE’s current director, Greg Wangerin, saying,”I’m ashamed. I feel like I’m selling a lie”, in reference to all the problems in refugee resettlement during the recession. Here’s my question: Do these private refugee resettlement agencies ever look to themselves when pointing the finger of responsibility?

Posted in State Department, CWS, Operational Guidance, Sierra Leonean, faith-based, Christian, beds, community/cultural orientation, Chicago, housing, substandard, furnishings, lack of, housing, Episcopal, Lutheran, Baptist, home visits, employment abuses, RefugeeONE (formerly, Interfaith Refugee & Immigration Ministries), RefugeeONE (formerly, Interfaith Refugee & Immigration Ministries), RefugeeONE (formerly, Interfaith Refugee & Immigration Ministries) | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Yet another TX resettlement agency neglected refugees – Alliance for Multicultural Community Services

Posted by Christopher Coen on March 3, 2011

There is a new State Department monitoring report that we acquired via a FOIA that documents neglect of refugees. The State Department cited the Houston-based refugee resettlement agency, Alliance for Multicultural Community Services, an ECDC affiliate, for “partial-compliance” with their State Department refugee resettlement contract. Findings include:

  • The Alliance had placed all three refugee families visited at home by monitors in housing with problems, including serious mold, roach infestation, and a serious plumbing problem that forced an Iraqi refugee family to move.
  • A Burundian refugee woman did not know how to use either the stove or a thermostat in her apartment.
  • The Burundian family’s second bedroom had no furniture, so the couple’s infant and 2-year-old toddler had to sleep in the parent’s room.
  • The Burundian refugee family and a Burmese refugee family reported that the Alliance failed to give them required living-room furnishings, so the families had to garbage-pick sofas and chairs from dumpsters.
  • The Alliance did not give refugees pocket-money, as required.
  • The Burundian refugee family — with the infant and toddler — reported that the Alliance did not give them food or supplies for their infant upon their arrival as required, and that the Alliance did not use child safety seats when transporting the family to appointments.
  • The Burmese refugee family reported that the Alliance did not have interpretation at the airport upon their arrival or during orientation. The Alliance finally hired someone who spoke their Karen dialect over four months after their arrival.
  • Orientation to health care services in the area appeared to be incomplete, as both the Burundian and Burmese families expressed anxiety over their children’s medical needs and uncertainty about how to handle emergencies.
  • The Burundian and Burmese families expressed anxiety over their prospects for self-sufficiency.
  • The Alliance did not provide any structured training plan to new employees, as required.
  • Refugee client case note logs contained minimal information, and often failed to record home visits. Monitors were often unable to verify that the Alliance provided refugee clients with the minimum-required services of the State Department refugee contracts (see contract documents – the Cooperative Agreement and Operational Guidance).
  • Monitors noted Insect infestation in one or more refugee apartments.
  • Monitors noted that the Alliance did not give some refugee(s) a ready-to eat meal upon arrival after long intercontinental flights, as required.

Then there are these comments about the Alliance from 2010. Note that three years after this State Department monitoring the Alliance is still putting refugees in substandard housing, etc.

So, in other words, the State Department noticed all these problems and three years later many of the problems have not ceased. What does that tell us about the effectiveness of the State Department monitoring trips? The State Department does not use any penalties for resettlement agencies’ they find in “non-compliance” or “partial-compliance” with the so-called minimum requirements of the State Department refugee contracts. Resettlement agencies don’t have to give back any of the government contract money they received for agreeing to provide minimum services and then not providing them.

Posted in Alliance for Multicultural Community Services, beds, Burma/Myanmar, Burundian, children, Cooperative Agreement, cultural/community orientation, post arrival, ECDC, food, furnishings, lack of, health, home visits, housing, housing, substandard, Houston, Iraqi, Karen, language, language interpretation/translation, lack of, meeting refugees at the airport, Operational Guidance, pocket-money, rats and roaches, State Department, Texas, transportation | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

YMCA International Services’ depth of refugee neglect & contract-cheating revealed in new inspection report

Posted by Christopher Coen on February 27, 2011

The State Department finally released another inspection report of YMCA International Services, a Houston USCRI affiliate, three years after we submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. I blogged about this case last June.

This report is from January 2008 and reports that YMCA International Services was “non-complaint” with most of the terms of its government refugee contract. That’s a nice way to say “contractual fraud” and “neglect and abuse of refugees”.

Here are some of the highlights of the report:

  • All refugee homes inspected had significant roach and/or mice infestation.
  • Refugees and YMCA expressed concern about safety of refugee apartment complexes. Refugee families at the Glendale Park Apartments complex reported that people were harassing them on their way to the supermarket and their children were getting into fights on the bus (being attacked?).
  • YMCA did not give refugees ready-to-eat food upon arrival.
  • Records were in complete disarray.
  • Home visits to refugees were almost never documented.
  • A Cuban refugee couple only had a bed with one small, thin blanket, a plastic folding table, and two folding chairs. The bed was extremely uncomfortable, if not unsafe, with protruding mattress springs. The family waited over 45 minutes at the airport for the YMCA case worker to arrive, who did not speak their language. YMCA did the housing and personal safety orientation using hand signals. The couple did not feel safe in the apartment complex. They had heard of local robberies and the police had come to their door warning them to.use caution in the parking lot. YMCA took 3½ months to give the family community and cultural orientation.
  • Upon arrival YMCA gave an Iraqi refugee couple with a small child only one bed (no bed for the child) with one small, thin blanket, a plastic folding table, and two folding chairs. The bed was extremely uncomfortable, if not unsafe, with protruding mattress springs. The YMCA employee who picked them up at the airport did not speak their language. YMCA did the housing and personal safety orientation in English. The couple did not feel safe in the apartment complex as they had heard of local robberies and the police had come to their door warning them to
    use caution in the parking lot. YMCA took 3½ months to give the family community and cultural orientation. There was no ready-to-eat food upon arrival. The family used money they brought from Iraq to buy food until they received their food stamps. Neighbors told them the apartment complex was “risky” and they wanted to move. The family received an electrical bill that began one month before they arrived, but YMCA told them they must pay it. No one from YMCA visited the family until three months after their arrival, and YMCA did not give them a community orientation so they did not even know how to use the bus system.
  • YMCA placed a Burmese refugee family that arrived in December in an apartment that had a large hole in a ground-floor bedroom window, and the management still had not repaired it two weeks later. The bed YMCA gave them was so uncomfortable that they slept on the floor. No one from YMCA spoke their language at the airport. YMCA did the housing and personal safety orientation in English and hand signals. It was two months before someone from YMCA visited them at home.
  • YMCA placed a Burundian refugee couple in an apartment complex surrounded by barbed wire. The only furniture upon arrival was four plastic folding chairs and five beds. For their first two months the family ate their meals on the floor. They pulled couches from the trash. No one from YMCA spoke their language at the airport. YMCA did the housing and personal safety orientation using hand signals. The family needed clothes but YMCA did not offer to help them.
  • YMCA caseworkers were enthusiastic! Yipeeee!
  • The State Department monitors had to order YMCA to check all fiscal year 2007 refugee cases and compensate refugees for all missing money.
  • YMCA fired the Refugee Program Director, Gabriel Gebray, yet allowed the agency’s Executive Director, Jeff Watkins, to keep his job. He apparently got off scott-free.

Here is a question: if an Executive Director of an organization claimed he had no idea how his refugee clients were being neglected, what does that tell you about his performance? Don’t Executive Directors ever look at the records or talk to refugee clients?

I know ignorance is bliss but is it an excuse to not be accountable?

Posted in beds, Burma/Myanmar, Burundian, clothes, community/cultural orientation, Cuban, dangerous neighborhoods, food, furnishings, lack of, home visits, household items, missing or broken, housing, housing, substandard, Houston, Iraqi, language, language interpretation/translation, lack of, meeting refugees at the airport, rats and roaches, safety, State Department, USCRI, YMCA International Services | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Jewish Family Service of Seattle’s $3.6 million expansion project

Posted by Christopher Coen on February 20, 2011

Jewish Family Service of Seattle is conducting a lavish new expansion project while seeming to have little money for basic services for refugees. According to CHS Capitol Hill Seattle Blog the $3.6m project is actually a downsized version of what the organization originally planned for.

Following key approvals of permits by the city last week, East Madison is about to see the start of its third major active construction project. An important provider of social services throughout the region, Capitol Hill’s Jewish Family Service this month start work on a $3.6 million project to build a 19,000 square foot expansion on the parking lot adjacent to their current offices at 1601 16th Ave… Read more here

Yet, according to the most recently available State Department monitoring/inspection report for Jewish Family Service of Seattle the agency did not give refugees the minimum-required services required by a State Department contract. The agency did not bother to visit many of the refugee clients at home, even though they are only required to visit one time within 30 days of the refugees’ arrival. Monitors found one refugee man sleeping on the floor of a living room because the agency had not provided a bed. The agency claimed the refugee’s brother said he had an extra bed for the refugee, but since they had not visited the refugee they did not realize that this was not the case. The same refugee also said the agency never gave him an orientation and that they did not have anyone on staff who spoke his language, Farsi. He also said that he had a kidney stone but was not receiving adequate services, partly because each time he went to the hospital he saw someone different. Apparently Jewish Family Service of Seattle was not monitoring his case adequately.

Monitors also noticed that the agency had one of the lowest employment rates for refugees in the country. It also became clear during the monitoring review that more than half of the cases had not received a home visit, although many of the files contained a cursory home visit form that thay had completed only a week or two before the visit, despite the fact that many of the refugees had arrived four to five months earlier. Monitors later learned that they had completed these ”home visit” forms not during a home visit but during a phone conversation with the refugee.

Posted in State Department, faith-based, beds, Jewish, furnishings, lack of, employment/jobs for refugees, language interpretation/translation, lack of, Seattle, Iranian, Jewish Family Service of Seattle, home visits, lavish new offices | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

 
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