Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
Terry Rusch, the Director of the Office of Admissions, PRM at the State Department is retiring. In her farewell address she tells us that staff at the PRM like to “party hard”. Of course, I never really doubted that during the past nine years of monitoring their office.
Refugees kept encountering the same disgraceful problems – whether it was resettlement to dangerous inner-city neighborhoods or having resettlement agency case workers who would not return calls or help refugees look for jobs – and always the Office of Admissions failed to address the issues. They usually just simply refused to respond to refugees’ complaints that we forwarded to them. The group that Rusch is retiring from is a tight inner circle of close associates that lives large, parties hard, and is absolutely heady about the magnificence of their humanitarian work.
According to Rusch:
The Bureau has always been home to intelligent, committed and hardworking people. It is a model of how the Department’s Civil and Foreign Service personnel can bring their various skills and expertise to the table to work on issues together – whether we are in crisis management or day-to-day operations mode. But those who work hard should party hard and PRM’s reputation for the latter is well-deserved. I’ll miss participating in our various theatrical productions in which we’ve spoofed everyone and everything refugee world-related, always with the goal of ensuring that no one was allowed to take themselves too seriously around here….
…And now, a big part of the reason I am so comfortable with the move into retirement is that the program is in great shape and staffed with excellent officers led by a skilled and experienced leadership team of Larry, Kelly, Barbara and Amy…
…As in politics, all resettlement is local. Neither the federal government nor national voluntary agency headquarters resettle refugees. Communities do. Cities and towns across the country are on the front lines of refugee reception and integration – day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out. They are the ones who welcome the newcomer and give them the chance for a new life. They need to be listened to and deserve our respect and gratitude… Read more here
This last paragraph is a kicker because volunteers in our group have spent years helping refugees at the local level, during which time we have tried to open a dialogue with Terry Rusch to show her what was really happening locally, instead of the usual filtered picture she received via her refugee resettlement contractors. Rusch showed no sign of listening at all. In multiple dozens of letters we documented the failure of resettlement agencies to give the most minimal of refugee services which they were contractually obligated to, yet the Office of Admissions under Rusch ignored almost every one of these letters.
When the Lost Boys of Sudan refugees in Chicago complained of violent street attacks, Rusch’s office dismissed their complaints as mere “perceptions” of neighborhood safety. Rusch sent colleague Kelly Gauger to Chicago, who personally rejected our imploring that the Lost Boys said they had been repeatedly attacked. Nothing was done. A group of the Sudanese refugees were then attacked by a gang in their neighborhood the next month, with three of them receiving serious knife wounds.
When we warned Rusch’s Office of Admissions over the course of several years about refugees in Fargo whose resettlement agency did not give them winter coats, who gave the refugees broken furniture, forced them into foster care, and didn’t help them look for work, the Office of Admissions responding by waiting a few years to send monitors to inspect, and then marveling at the resettlement agency’s use of three-ring binders.
When we warned Rusch and her helpers about refugees outside Tampa who slept on the floor for months because their resettlement agency failed to give them any furniture and referred the refugees to jobs that involved 2-3 hour bike commutes in each direction to Pinellas County, there was no response for a year. What the Office of Admissions did with the complaint remains a secret mystery – a way in which they like to run the operation – but not only did things not change outside Tampa, they got worse. The next year the resettlement agency loaned out refugees as free labor, making them sign sheets of paper that were folded over so that the refugees could not see what they were signing. Rusch’s office did finally cut off the resettlement agency’s refugee resettlement contract but only after refugees were harmed for two more years.
I hope Ms. Rusch enjoys her retirement and her government pension, but refugees have had their lives permanently damaged by the sort of refugee resettlement services her office has managed over the years. Let’s hope that future leadership will have less interest in incessant Bureau staff meetings and office theatrical productions and more interest in responsible refugee resettlement, real listening, respect and gratitude of local communities, as well as the value of government transparency.
