Friends of Refugees

A U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program Watchdog Group

Archive for the ‘Liberian’ Category

Refugee boy repeatedly brutalized at Philly school, complaints to school officials fall on deaf ears

Posted by Christopher Coen on October 21, 2011

Once again a school in Philadelphia is the subject of a case involving a refugee child beaten so badly that he had to go to a hospital. A year ago 30 Asian refugee children went to the hospital after just one bullying incident. Now, a Liberian refugee father claims that his pleas to a teacher and principal about the regular beatings of his 6-year-old son brought no relief, and that a phone call and later letter to the district superintendent also got no
response. An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer explains the story:

At first, Gbahtuo Comgbaye, a West African immigrant, was more puzzled than worried when his 6-year-old son started coming home from school with bruises on his chest and neck.

His concern turned to alarm on a mid-September morning as he helped his child, Menduawor, get dressed for the day. The boy tearfully asked, “If my friends beat me up, and hurt me, and wanted to kill me, would you do something about it?”

The story that emerged: Menduawor, a slight, soft-spoken boy, was being routinely beaten by three bigger first-grade classmates at Patterson School in Southwest Philadelphia. They told him, “We don’t like your name.”…

…Comgbaye described his growing horror as his son came home from school bruised and shaken day after day. He said that his pleas to the teacher and principal brought no relief and that a phone call and subsequent letter to the district superintendent got no response.

At the end of September, the boy was beaten so severely that his mother took him to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Hospital records show Menduawor was treated for chest and abdominal injuries, which physician Sarah Wood wrote were caused by blows from a person or object...Read more here

Posted in abuse, children, dangerous neighborhoods, Liberian, Philadelphia, safety, school for refugee children, schools | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Drowning deaths of new American children

Posted by Christopher Coen on July 5, 2011

A second African new American child has drowned in Rock Island, Illinois in a little over two years. On May 28, 2009 a 6-year-old Liberian child drowned during a school field trip, and now an 11-year-old Burundian boy has drowned while swimming with friends in the Mississippi River. A Quad-Cities Times article gives the details:

The drowning of 11-year-old Michel Niyubahwe on Monday will likely be used to help local immigrants understand the dangers of the Mississippi River, said Jill Doak, the organizer of a recent immigration study.

Niyubahwe, who immigrated from Burundi with his family four years ago, drowned while swimming with friends Monday afternoon near George Skafidas Parkway in Rock Island.

Josh Ngao of Fishers of Men Ministries in Davenport, who helped translate between police and family members who speak Swahili, said many in the local African immigrant community don’t realize the dangers of the Mississippi River.

Doak, who organized several recent study circles in Rock Island to discuss issues that immigrants and refugees face, said the river and the danger it poses
hadn’t come up for discussion but likely will now.

“Definitely, there is something that could be done that could identify the environmental changes here,” such as the river, she said.

Many native Quad-Citians grow up with knowledge of how dangerous the Mississippi River can be, but many immigrants come from regions of the world where the rivers are safe for swimming and wading, Doak said.

“We shouldn’t assume families know things,” she said.

Doak said the study circles developed five action strategies, including helping establish a better communication system between immigrants and police. Now that the local African immigrant community has had two children drown in the past two years, water safety also likely needs to be addressed, Doak said.

On May 28, 2009, 6-year-old Grace Vah, a native of Liberia in West Africa, drowned during a school field trip to the Whitewater Junction swimming facility in Rock Island... Read more here

This is also less than a month after a 9-year-old Burundian refugee boy drowned in a pond in Buffalo, New York.

Posted in Buffalo, Burundian, children, cultural/community orientation, post arrival, drowning, Liberian, Quad-Cities, safety | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Refugee parents find themselves in morass when key facts are lost in translation; then buried in bureaucracy

Posted by Christopher Coen on June 13, 2011

The Roanoke Times has an article about the subject of refugee parents trying to deal with the system when their children are suffering from a disorder – in this case Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD is a problem with inattentiveness, over-activity, impulsivity, or a combination, affects about 3 – 5% of school aged children, and specialists diagnose it much more often in boys than in girls. Depression, lack of sleep, learning disabilities, tic disorders, and behavior problems may be confused with, or appear with, ADHD. Most children with ADHD also have at least one other developmental or behavioral problem, and may also have another psychiatric problem, such as depression or bipolar disorder.

In the case illuminated in Roanoke the system (county social services, county attorneys) compounds the problem via their inability or unwillingness to competently manage the cultural and language barriers that new Americans have, and the power that refugee children with behavioral health issues can have. (This is yet another reason that adults should not use minors as interpreters – not only can a minor manipulate the communication but, more importantly, acting as a go-between with adults often places undue stress on a minor). In this case no amount of warning and explanation to county social workers did the slightest good — officials simply blamed the messenger — a community volunteer — because her style/approach didn’t satisfy them.

Melva Belcher is a formidable school administrator, determined and unafraid to forge her own path. When low-performing schools get into trouble, she’s often the go-to taskmaster to whom Roanoke City Public Schools turn to shake things up.

As principal of Westside Elementary School, it’s what she did in 2006 when she first encountered the likes of 10-year-old Ibrahim Kromah, a troubled refugee from war-torn Liberia who came to the United States angry and determined to wreak havoc wherever he went, fighting at school, showing disrespect to his mother at home — and even stealing the money she’d put aside for rent.

Belcher put him on a rigid discipline plan, and she visited regularly with his mom, 44-year-old Makagbe Toure, with whom she became friends.

But Belcher has been stymied by what happened to the family once Ibrahim left her school. She’s found herself face to face with a system that even she can’t stare down.

Now 64 and a semiretired administrator on assignment, Belcher watched powerlessly as Ibrahim bounced from his home in the Indian Village public housing project to four different foster-care homes in the region before finally landing, in January, at Keystone Newport News Behavioral Health Center, a residential mental-health treatment center for teens…

…This is a story about the morass that immigrant families find themselves in when key facts aren’t just lost in translation; they’re also buried in bureaucracy…

…Most service providers are well-meaning, added Liberian-born Danielle Taana Smith, a Rochester Institute of Technology sociologist who studies refugee assimilation. “But they lack cultural understanding.”

What Taana Smith used to hear murmured occasionally, she now perceives as a steady drumbeat: “People are saying they were better off in the refugee camps because they may not have had much, but they had hope.

“Now, they’re realizing it’s easier to escape from a refugee camp than it is from an urban ghetto,” she said…

…the situation exploded in August 2009 when Toure thought she was signing paperwork to have Ibrahim placed at Sanctuary, the crisis intervention facility for youth.

Because interpreter services weren’t provided at that time, it wasn’t until later that she learned she had actually signed away her custodial rights, Toure said. She also didn’t realize that she’d been charged with abuse and neglect at the same time — until she was terminated from her school housekeeping job following a background check, she said.

“They said I hit him,” Toure said. “I didn’t hit him, but we always argue, and he always threatens to call his caseworker.”

The situation so angered Belcher, who had become like a mother to Toure — opening her mail and taking her to doctor appointments — that she hired lawyer Onzlee Ware to represent Toure. (The case is currently being reviewed by a regional social services administrator.)

Thus began the shuffling of the boy amid four different sets of foster parents, all of whom complained about the same disruptive behaviors that his mother had, according to documents provided by Belcher and Toure.

While cases involving legal action always require interpreters, Department of Social Services Director Jane Conlin said it’s not always clear during home visits when an interpreter is needed. As for immigrant parents communicating with social workers, she added: “I think it’s more difficult when parents may not speak English and where there may be some fear in general of the government… Read more here

But what about the basic responsibility that refugee resettlement
contractors and county social workers have to provide interpretation/translation? That probably would have made all the difference in the world in this case. (If it’s not “clear” to officials that an interpreter may be dispensed with, then isn’t it clear that they need an interpreter?) At the end of the day these public servants don’t care because its simply a nuisance to them, and they don’t suffer all the damages that result from this lack of accountability – only the immigrant parents and children do.

Note: 1) Social services working with the courts took away the six children of a Burundian refugee woman in Idaho, also apparently due to lack of interpretation, and bureacratic mistakes and misunderstandings.; 2) Combining poor social work and poor prosecution work with love of power has also driven people from their home countries – causing them to become refugees.

Posted in child protective services, children, Commonwealth Catholic Charities (Virginia), court, foster care, language, Liberian, mental health, teenagers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Yet another refugee killed in Buffalo

Posted by Christopher Coen on June 7, 2011

Another refugee has been killed in Buffalo – this time an elderly Liberian man. He was hit by a stray bullet after opening the door at his west side apartment complex. A leader in the Liberian community is asking for protection for his community. WKBW Channel 7 Eyewitness News gives more details:

BUFFALO, NY (WKBW) – A violent Memorial Day weekend turned deadly Saturday afternoon when an elderly man was struck in the head by a stray bullet.

82-year-old Ansumane Kanneh, a Liberian refugee, was killed outside the door of his apartment. Police say he was not the intended target in the shooting.

Neighbors describe Kanneh as a kind-hearted man who constantly opened his house to children, and would even watch kids after school until their parents could pick them up.

He was an active member of the United Liberia Association in America (ULAA), and was actively studying U.S. history in an effort to become an American citizen.

Kanneh leaves behind a wife and three children as well as a number of grandchildren…

…”We ran away from war…we came to the United States and we expect to be protected,” said Nelson Nagbe, Vice President of the ULAA… Read more here

It was only April of last year that 8-year-old Burundian refugee Tumaini Philbert was struck and killed by a car in the same neighborhood.

The founder of PUSH Buffalo, a Buffalo west side non-profit, just a few months ago referred to refugees as “perfect candidates” to help solve the west side’s high vacancy rate. Yet, has anyone considered asking new Americans if they are willing to be used for that purpose? Unfortunately it seems that the players in the US refugee resettlement program consider refugees to be low-power, second-class citizens from whom permission is neither needed nor required.

By the way, earlier this year refugees in Omaha, Nebraska held a protest to demand police protection after thugs repeatedly attacked them at a public hosuing project.

Posted in Buffalo, dangerous neighborhoods, Liberian, safety | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Clinic in Boston uses alternative therapies to assist refugee torture survivors

Posted by Christopher Coen on January 24, 2011

A clinic at the University of Boston is offering non-Western therapies to refugee torture survivors, according to an article in BU Today. Movement, acupuncture, cupping, and chanting are some of the alternative, or integrative, therapies offered by the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Refugee Health Clinic (CAM).

Tap tap. Acupuncturist Ellen Silver Highfield’s finger gently nudges the tiny needles out of their tubes and into the mocha skin of Maryan Abdi. Color-coded by size, the metal quills protrude from the 73-year-old Somali woman’s feet and legs as she reclines on the examination table, her ankle-length floral dress a splash of color in the sterile room at Boston Medical Center…

…The exam room is one of four at the one-year-old Complementary and Alternative Medicine Refugee Health Clinic (CAM), staffed by Highfield and Michael Grodin, a psychiatrist and a BU School of Public Health professor of health law, bioethics, and human rights. Every hospital harbors the suffering, but most CAM patients have lived through a particular hell: they are torture survivors, having endured personal abuse or watched loved ones suffer through it. Two-thirds of the patients—CAM has treated about 50—fled war-shredded sub-Saharan Africa, their psyches haunted by memories of family murdered or left behind.

“It’s not like a single trauma, like a hurricane,” says Grodin. “These people are trapped, imprisoned, and they can’t escape.”

Grodin began his career three decades ago working mainly with Holocaust victims. He wondered why some torture victims were more resilient than others. In 1998, he helped found with several BU faculty members the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights, based at BMC, and worked extensively with Tibetan Buddhist monks tortured by Chinese authorities.

Grodin started CAM as an outgrowth of his work at the Boston center because he believes that to best diagnose and treat patients from other countries, physicians must understand their religious and cultural background. The clinic, which sees patients for four hours every Friday morning, gets financial support from BU, the UN’s Voluntary Fund for Torture Survivors, and the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, as well as private donations from organizations like the Tides Foundation.

“A lot of my patients have ‘heartache,’” Grodin says. “They’re not talking about chest pain. They’re talking about homesickness—sadness. In many cultures, people don’t talk about mental health, depression. They manifest it as back pain or chronic body pain.”

He is convinced that psychotherapy—talk—often doesn’t help such survivors. Some don’t trust doctors, who were their tormentors back home. Others, he says, used disassociation to survive the physical agony of torture. “They were sitting in their mind” during the painful events, he says. “They were separate from their body.  Grodin uses Chinese movement exercises to bring those people back into their bodies.

“Good chi flow,” he says while examining a Liberian patient. The woman has complained that her knees hurt, but when asked the cause, she says she doesn’t know. Grodin has some clues. He knows that the woman has been beaten, raped, and forced to walk on gravel on her knees, and he also knows that memory loss is a coping mechanism used by many survivors. He asks if her pain has improved from his treatments. “Little by little,” she tells him in accented English.

“OK, let’s get to work,” the doctor says, proceeding to array the areas around her knees and some other spots with acupuncture needles. He also proposes to cup her, referring to a traditional Chinese pain remedy that places upside down cups on afflicted parts of the body.

“I don’t want cups today,” she tells him.

“You’re the boss,” Grodin replies, inserting the green-tipped needles into her skin. The predominance of female patients is not coincidence. “Mainly we’ll see women,” says Grodin. “The men are arrested and tortured and often killed or imprisoned.”

Movement, acupuncture, cupping, chanting: alternative medicine to Westerners, these are conventional treatments to CAM patients. “We don’t see what we do as alternative,” says Grodin. “We see it as integrative. We work together with the primary care doc.” That, he says, is because much of Western medicine, such as pain-killing drugs, works quite well. Grodin says he uses the complementary medicine to decrease the dose of narcotics that patients need.

CAM is currently collecting data to measure the effectiveness of its treatments. Grodin’s Liberian patient and Abdi have both reported that their pain had at least somewhat diminished after their visits. Elsewhere, researchers are investigating why acupuncture works with some forms of pain and not others.

“I’m less concerned about the science than I am about people getting better,” Grodin says… Read more here 

Although two patients report that their pain had somewhat diminished after their visits to the clinic, the therapies really should be compared to sugar pills to determine the effectiveness.

Posted in Boston, health, Liberian, mental health, ORR, Somali | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

For refugees, ’tis the season of broken arms and legs

Posted by Christopher Coen on November 19, 2010

The approach of winter means that many refugees in cold states will be breaking their arms and legs when slipping on the ice. The main way that resettlement agencies can prevent this problem is to give all new refugees winter boots (with good traction) and instruction that refugees must wear the boots when walking outside in the winter.

A couple of years ago I was helping a Somali refugee in Fargo who had arrived with two young sons. Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota (LSSND) rarely gives refugees proper winter clothing, and more rarely winter boots, but in this case to my surprise they actually gave her boots. Unfortunately she went walking without the boots and slipped on the ice and broke her leg. The injury was extremely painful and took a long time to heal, and the leg is often never quite right again. That same winter an Iraqi refugee woman also slipped and fell several times on the ice. In that case LSSND did not give her any boots, although luckily she was not injured. What scared me the most was several years earlier when I found some Liberian and Sierra Leoneon refugee women in Fargo whom LSSND had not given any boots. One of the Liberian women was pregnant and I imagined her slipping on the ice and going into early labor.

Now I read that a refugee woman in Manchester, New Hampshire broke her arm on a slip on the ice, so I’m realizing that this is not uncommon at all.   

Udai Baskota, a newer resident of Laconia and a Bhutanese refugee, also shares his story in the documentary, which also includes Somalian and Iraqi refugees living in the Manchester area…

…Before the film showing, Baskota said he likes living in the Lakes Region now, but it was a difficult transition.

“At first I was scared,” Baskota said. In the documentary, he said he was frustrated at first because of all the cultural differences and the challenges of dealing with his first New England winter. He said that, during that first winter, his wife slipped on some ice and broke her arm… Read more here

I notice each winter that I slip on the ice too, but I always catch myself before I fall. Growing up in a northern state I learned as a child how to tread carefully on ice and how to stabilize myself when I begin to slide. Refugees who arrive here and face their first winter, especially if they are from a warm region and have no experience with ice or snow, are at greater risk from falls on the ice. Many refugees also have weaker bones due to previous malnourished, and are more likely to break bones when they fall. Hence, the absolute need for resettlement agencies to give all incoming refugees proper winter footwear. (The State Department’s Operational Guidance contract requires, “Appropriate seasonal clothing…for work, school, and everyday use…for all members of the family, including proper footwear for each member of the family”).

Posted in Burundian, clothes, Liberian, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Operational Guidance, Somali | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Bridge Refugee Services Inc. in Knoxville gets a new director

Posted by Christopher Coen on August 17, 2010

A notice in Knoxvillebiz.com announces that Bridge Refugee Services Inc. is getting a new director:

Jennifer Ward Cornwell has been promoted to executive director of Bridge Refugee Services Inc. here

Who is this Jennifer Ward Cornwell? I looked her up and couldn’t find much of anything. Then I found a Facebook page with her name, which indicates that she just graduated from Furman University in 2007, and only just got a graduate degree this year. How is it possible that someone just out of school could be qualified to be the executive director of a refugee resettlement agency? (Although we hope she’s highly qualified and we wish her the best of luck, especially for the refugees’ sake.)

I suppose I should not be surprised by this at all in a field that also regularly employs people as caseworkers who have no experience working with refugees, and who often do not have masters degrees in social work. In fact you’re lucky as a refugee if your case worker even has a Bachelor’s degree in social work. But even in that case most of these people do not have a clue how to network with businesses to help refugees find jobs.

The other thing that resettlement agencies do is hire almost anyone who arrived here as a refugee themselves, and maybe has a college degree or worked for an NGO before they arrived in the US. But having been a refugee in no way automatically qualifies someone as a good case worker. I suspect that resettlement agencies hire refugees mainly for their foreign language abilities. Yet those skills often don’t help for long. Bosnian and other refugees from former-Yugoslavian republics are found all over the refugee resettlement field working as caseworkers and in other positions, and have language skills that are now fairly useless for the new set of refugees arriving these days. Although resettlement agencies are quick to tout the former-refugee experience of their caseworkers I think we should always ask, “but is this person a good case worker?”

Getting back to Bridge Refugee Services Inc., I just realized that we have a US Department of State inspection report for the agency from 2006. Bridge’s services leave a bit to be desired. Of all the refugees in the four families that the inspectors visited only one refugee was working. A Sudanese refugee family had arrived six months earlier yet the father was still unemployed even though he spoke good English. Refugees had to live in transitional housing for weeks – e.g. in a motel, a shelter, and in a host family’s home – before Bridge transferred them to permanent housing (this is a violation of basic requirements). Bridge also did not give ready-to-eat meals to all refugees upon arrival, as required. Files were often disorganized, incomplete or contained inappropriate documents. Caseworkers also did not know that refugees do not need social security cards to get a job, so the refugees were left to wait for months until social security cards arrived. I’m always struck with how we keep going year after year with the same basic mistakes being made over and over.

Bridge Refugee Services Inc. has had a several publicized problems this year — problems that the State Department inspectors obviously did not detect. See our previous coverage here, here and here.

Posted in Bridge Refugee and Sponsorship Services, Bridge Refugee and Sponsorship Services, Christian, CWS, EMM, employment/jobs for refugees, Episcopal, faith-based, food, former Yugoslav republics, housing, Knoxsville, Liberian, Meskhetian Turks (Ahiska
Turk), State Department, Sudanese, Tennessee | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Burundian refugee raped, left on her own – Is Title VI of Civil Rights Act of 1964 merely a suggestion?

Posted by Christopher Coen on July 12, 2010

According to the requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, agencies receiving federal funds need to make sure that limited English clients have access to adequate qualified interpreters. As is seen with the refugee resettlement program, however, that is more of a friendly “partner-like” suggestion than a real requirement.

In Chattanooga, Bridge Refugee and Sponsorship Services (a Church World Service and EMM affiliate) apparently placed refugees in public housing and then let them fend for themselves. Only recently has Chattanooga Housing Authority gotten around to trying to accommodate non-English-speaking residents.

Chattanooga Housing Authority officials are establishing a list of CHA employees who are bilingual and will volunteer to assist non-English-speaking residents.

“We have an emerging Latino population and an emerging Burundian speaking population in Chattanooga, so we wanted to make sure that we could accommodate their needs,” said Betsy McCright, CHA’s executive director.

So far the authority has identified staff who speak Arabic, French, Hindi, Burundi, Russian, Spanish and Swahili.

Establishing a language access plan is part of an overall goal to better accommodate non-English-speaking residents, said Ms. McCright, who also speaks French.

CHA board members approved a policy to establish the so-called language bank at their monthly board meeting last week.

…Bridge Refugee Services, a resettlement organization in Chattanooga, said it has placed about 100 residents in public housing sites or in CHA’s Housing Choice Voucher Program since 2007. The residents are from the Ukraine, Burundi, Cuba, Liberia, Sudan and the Congo. here

But all of this comes a little late to help a non-English-speaking Burundian refugee woman who was raped in May 2009 at Chattanooga Housing Authority’s Boynton Terrace housing development, and couldn’t find anyone to whom she could explain what happened to her.

The policy comes a little more than one year after a Burundian woman was raped twice in her public housing apartment. The man arrested for the crime lived next door to her and wasn’t taken into custody until five days after he allegedly committed the act because there was no translator to interpret for the woman. It was CHA residents who started to demand then that more services be in place to assist the refugees.

The language bank is a good program, but it took the housing agency a long time to do it, said Joe Clark, president of Boynton Terrace Apartments.

“It was the language barrier that was the problem a year ago when the lady got raped,” he said. “The housing authority didn’t have anybody to interpret for her, nor did the police department.”

The language barrier may make non-English-speaking residents easy prey for criminals, said CHA board Chairman Eddie Holmes, but the language bank should help.

In adition, as of January 2010 Burundian refugees continued to be harassed in Chattanooga Housing Authority homes.

…Councilwoman Sally Robinson pointed to recent harassment of Burundi refugees living in Chattanooga Housing Authority homes.

…In May 2009, a Burundi refugee living at the Boynton Terrace housing development was raped, which sparked calls for increased support to the refugees, a particularly vulnerable population. here

So where was Bridge Refugee and Sponsorship Services when the rapes and the ongoing harassment was occurring? No staff member who could speak the Burundian refugees’ languages (Kirundi and Kiswahili)? Well, it’s not like they have much to worry about. The federal government oversight agencies don’t have any penalties for refugee services contractors who violate federal law, i.e.Title VI. According to the reining partner-like relationship philosophy espoused by the State Department, if, on one of their rare inspections of a resettlement agency, the State Department inspectors find that the agency does not have adequate staff whom are able to speak the refugees’ languages, they simple politely ask that the agency think about trying to hire someone who can interpret. That’s that. A woman was raped twice and unable to communicate what had happened to her? Oh well, that’s unfortunate.   

An earlier posting on Bridge Refugee and Sponsorship Services is here.

Posted in Bridge Refugee and Sponsorship Services, Bridge Refugee and Sponsorship Services, Burundian, Chattanooga, Cuban, CWS, EMM, faith-based, former Soviet republics, language, language interpretation/translation, lack of, Liberian, public/private partnership, safety, sexual abuse, State Department, Sudanese, Tennessee | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

LFSC Greensboro “contract non-compliant” long before media involvement

Posted by Christopher Coen on June 16, 2010

We just received a State Department inspection report from April 2007 which shows that Lutheran Family Services in the Carolinas (LFSC) in Greensboro was already neglecting their refugee clients a year-and-a-half before they got caught by the local media (here). Previous coverage is here, here and here.

As usual the State Department’s Office of Admissions enacted no penalties whatsoever. They advised the resettlement agency’s national partners (Church World Service, and Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service) to do their own monitoring instead. This wolf-guarding-the-chicken-coop “self-monitoring”, which has proved so disastrous in the financial and oil industries as well, then led to the situation we had at the end of 2009 and early 2010 with refugees in Greensboro still being placed in dilapidated apartments, scrounging dumpsters for furniture, and wearing shorts and flip-flops in December, three months after they arrived.

According to the report LFSC Greensboro was in “partial compliance” with their State Department refugee contract documents (yes, they are federal contractors, not non-contractor “partners”). Refugees were found in poor quality housing, lacked necessary furnishings, had incomplete resettlement orientation, and there was poor case file documentation. Three of four refugee families visited were found in poor quality housing and lacked furnishings (that’s 75% of the sample). All four families did not seem to have undergone a complete orientation (100%), and three of the four could not name their case worker (75%).

A Burundian refugee man had furniture in his apartment that was in such extremely poor condition that State Department inspectors had to ask him about it.  He indicated most of it came from dumpsters. He said he asked LFSC for a mattress several times, but they ignored his request, and after two weeks he found himself a mattress in the trash and brought it home (think bed-bugs). His window was cracked, he had no idea who his LFSC case worker was, and had not received any immigration information (the requirement to tell the Department of Homeland Security when he got a new address, how to get a green card, etc.). He said he wanted to go to Georgia because LFSC wasn’t helping him (this is what is known as “secondary-migration” and resettlement agencies and stated refugee coordinators are quick to complain to the federal government that they need more money to deal with it, but look at this case for why it so often occurs).

A Liberian refugee and his son also did not know who their case worker was, and did not receive any information on immigration issues.

A Montagnard (Degar – indiginous Vietnamese) minor female refugee who arrived to join her parents was found in a poor condition two-bedroom apartment (occupied by the family prior to the minor’s arrival) which was crowded with seven family. She had to sleep on a mattress on the floor in the living-room with her parents.

Another Montagnard refugee woman with four children who arrived to join her husband did not have any heat because of dismantled baseboard heating units which emitted a bad smell (gas leak?). The family did not have adequate clothing storage and had only three chairs for six people. She also had not received any orientation from LFSC.

Is it really a surprise that this agency then continued on in its ways for another year-and-a-half before things got so out of hand that community members started complaining, and a newspaper started covering what was happening? They got caught neglecting refugees in April 2007 but there were no significant consequences. The agency would not have shut down if it had not been caught, and would probably still be abusing refugees. Suzanne Gibson-Wise, the negligent CEO of LFSC, probably just went on about her arrogant ways — buying blackberries, getting wireless internet installed at her home, sitting on her personal commode. Where are the teeth in the State Department’s inspection process? No serious consequences means nobody cares. Isn’t that obvious?

The problem is that nobody learns from these incidents. The system trashes refugees’ new lives in America, the volags continue on in their negligent ways, all the while doing little other than advocating for more public money with inadequate accountability requirements, and the government agencies continue to keep up secrecy so the American public won’t understand what the problems are.

We need change we can believe in.

Posted in beds, Burundian, Christian, clothes, community/cultural orientation, Cooperative Agreement, CWS, employment services, faith-based, funding, furnishings, lack of, Greensboro, housing, overcrowding, housing, substandard, immigration services, Liberian, Lutheran Family Services in the Carolinas (2), Lutheran Family Services of the Carolinas, Montagnard/Degar (indigenous mountain people), North Carolina, State Department | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Unaccompanied Refugee Minor Program in North Dakota

Posted by Christopher Coen on February 22, 2010

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.

Posted in court, EMM, government, HHS, Liberian, LIRS, Lutheran Social Services of ND, North Dakota, ORR, State Department | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 85 other followers