Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
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.
