Chicago’s refugee agencies struggle amid disruptions
Number of people allowed into country drops, U.S. ends some programs
The sign, in English, was a simple “Welcome.”
But for Fatima Idris, whose father and brother were killed and whose apartment was bombed in her war-torn home of Syria, it symbolized a new life. Maybe one not so steeped in grief, here in Chicago.
On that chilly February day in 2015, Idris’ main worry was that she wouldn’t be accepted in America, for speaking Arabic, for wearing a hijab, for being a refugee.
But the sign, and the Catholic Charities employees who came with it, filled Idris with relief.
“They were everything good from God,” Idris said of the refugee resettlement agencies and volunteers who have helped her and her family make a life in the West Rogers Park neighborhood.
Others will not be so lucky. As the number of refugees permitted to enter the United States has fallen, the agencies that serve them have atrophied.
And with the decline, the U.S. has abandoned its longtime role as a global leader in refugee resettlement. Advocates worry that the world’s most vulnerable will no longer be able to seek refuge here, in a country of immigrants. Last
week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the refugee admissions cap for the next fiscal year would be set at 30,000, the lowest since the Refugee Act of 1980 was established. Earlier this year, the State Department indicated that even fewer agencies may be contracted to work on resettlement in 2019. The refugee cap last fiscal year was set at 45,000.
The numbers have never before spiraled so low.
So far this year, a little more than 15,000 refugees have been admitted to the U.S., according to the State Department — the lowest in the country’s history amid the largest crisis of displaced people worldwide.
The reduction in refugees has been felt in Chicago, where some resettlement agencies have gone months with no new refugees. At their peak, agencies in Illinois helped acclimate more than 500 new arrivals a month. Now, some months they see fewer than 50 altogether.
Fewer refugees means less federal funding for agencies that receive money from the State Department. Agencies have had to get creative to survive.
As staff members have been let go, larger resettlement agencies have used the lull as an opportunity to re-envision their services, focusing on ways to aid refugees who already call Chicago home.
But smaller operations have had to close after the State Department issued a directive in December: Those settling fewer than 100 refugees a year would be closed or consolidated.
“The changes will reduce costs and simplify management structures to help the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program run in a way that is fiscally responsible and sustainable in the long term,” a State Department spokeswoman said. The State Department refuses to have its representatives named.
“It’s certainly, I think, part of an overall dismantling of the resettlement program,” said Jessica Schaffer, director of HIAS Chicago, which was forced to end its resettlement services after the State Department’s directive. “If there are no people coming, then you’re not getting those dollars, and there’s no way for you to maintain the infrastructure of your program or your agency.”
Dismantling the system
Shock, disappointment, anger and disbelief.
The jumble of emotions washed over Schaffer last December when she was informed by the State Department that HIAS Chicago’s refugee resettlement program would end.
“It came out of the blue,” she said.
The agency had expanded its resettlement program a year earlier, and it had received positive feedback during a routine State Department visit, just a few weeks before the decision was issued.
HIAS Chicago wasn’t alone. Of the 50 local affiliates of national agencies affected by the department’s decision, six stopped placement altogether, and 21 chose to suspend placement for the rest of the fiscal year, a State Department spokeswoman said. As of July 5, there were 268 local affiliates nationwide.
Five resettlement agencies remain in Chicago. For some, lurking just below the surface of the shock that came with the HIAS Chicago program’s closure was a forewarning of changes to come.
World Relief Chicago has seen its funding drop by about $300,000, said John Barcanic, the agency’s executive director. If something doesn’t change soon, more staff and office space will be in jeopardy.
And at smaller refugee resettlement agencies, like the Ethiopian Community Association, which reduced its staff from five to two full-time and one part-time worker, closing is the next step.
“We can close today or tomorrow. We don’t know. We’re still just waiting. It’s hard to know,” said Almaz Seyoume, the association’s refugee resettlement program manager.
In fiscal year 2017, RefugeeOne resettled 728 refugees — the largest number in its history. This year, it’s unlikely it will reach 200, said Jims Porter, the agency’s spokesman and policy coordinator.
English classes that once spanned five levels and required a waiting list now have fewer than 10 students for just three levels, said Sarah Glazer, the only English language instructor at RefugeeOne.
The lack of refugees entering the U.S. has chipped away at agencies’ infrastructures in other ways.
“It’s really hard to build all programs back up,” Schaffer said. “Once they are broken down, it’s not something where you can just jump to your feet and start all over again.”
Agencies point to a variety of factors that have slashed the number of refugees entering the United States. For fiscal year 2019, President Donald Trump set the cap at 30,000 — the lowest in the program’s history.
And in January, the Department of Homeland Security increased screening measures for refugees.
“Refugees who are already approved for resettlement are now having to go back and redo previous checks in addition to the enhanced security mechanisms, so that’s really slowing down the process. I think that’s been intentional on the part of the administration,” Porter said.
In late June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Trump’s ban on travel, which included five predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Most recently, the Trump administration decided to cut all aid to an almost 70-year-old U.N. agency that provides resources to Palestinian refugees; a State Department press release expressed concern for Palestinian schoolchildren while calling the beneficiaries “entitled” and the agency “unsustainable.”
In the past fiscal year, only eight refugees resettled in Illinois have come from the five countries. In years past, hundreds of the state’s refugees have hailed from them. In 2017, Illinois resettled only two Palestinian refugees.
“There’s obviously some overt racism at play,” Schaffer said.
“The U.S. is forfeiting its position as a global leader in refugee resettlement,” Porter said.
But Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser who is credited as the architect of many of the president’s hard-line immigration policies, has often stressed putting the U.S. first.
“Just imagine what could happen if large numbers of radicalized individuals with extremist views were able to infiltrate our immigration system, and how much damage they could do,” Miller said to Rolling Stone magazine in a February 2017 interview. “… With the cost of resettling one refugee in the United States, we could help 12 in their home region.”
The refugees agencies serve are often unable to return to their native countries, after being forced to
flee because of wellfounded fears of persecution, war or violence, according to the United Nations.
The Omarein family knows that struggle all too well.
Chasing safety
If you ask 12-year-old Abdel Hamid Omarein whether he remembers growing up in Syria, he’ll start to tell you about the night the men with guns drove them out.
It was late at night in the crowded one-bedroom apartment in the Baba Amr area of the city of Homs that his family shared. Abdel Hamid, who was 6 at the time, was heading back from the bathroom when he heard the knocking.
Men with guns were at the door.
They said, “‘Tomorrow, we’re going to come and burn your house.’ And then they were saying bad words,” Abdel Hamid recalled.
The Syrian civil war was just beginning. He and his family fled at 4 a.m. and took nothing but the clothes they were wearing. They traveled to Damascus, Syria’s capital, where they stayed for six months, before the Syrian army’s widespread arrests forced them to leave, once again chasing safety.
They escaped to Lebanon, where they remained for three years. There, Fatima Idris gave birth to her second son, Osama — named after Idris’ brother who was killed the same month — and she and her family began the long process of coming to the United States as refugees.
“We come here just for peace,” Idris said. “We escape from war because we want a life for our children.”
With the help of agencies and nonprofits, Idris has been able to foster a life for her kids.
On the wall of the Syrian Community Network’s office, a large black and white poster of two beaming boys with long hair greets those who enter. The boys are Idris’ sons, whom the staffers know well.
It’s these staff and volunteers who taught Idris English, helped her translate paperwork, furnished her apartment and spent time with her at home.
Now, the family lives in an apartment in West Rogers Park, where families from Syria, Iraq, Russia and Mexico are their neighbors.
Idris’ husband, Fadi Omarein, leaves in the morning to paint apartments, video chatting with Idris on his lunch breaks.
Her eldest son, Abdel Hamid, is an avid chess player, and Osama, who is now 5, often dances to music videos in their living room.
Idris often finds herself thinking of the family they left behind.
“Now, we find ourselves alone,” Idris said. “We never forget our home.”
On a recent July evening, the sound of cicadas filled the air as Omarein leaned into his phone from his couch in Chicago. His mother and brother’s faces crowded the tiny screen, despite being thousands of miles away.
They video chat often, when Dahouk al-Omar, Omarein’s 68-year-old mother, isn’t too tired from her work at a restaurant. She hasn’t seen Omarein and his family in person in seven years, and she’s never met her grandson Osama.
Often on the calls, she cries.
It’s “only in my dreams that I see you before I die,” Idris recalls al-Omar saying.
They’re hoping to bring Omarein’s mother and brother from Lebanon, but the process, which they recently began, could take years.
Unable to return to Syria, al-Omar must work to support her 26-year-old son, Mohammad Habib Omarein, who deserted from the army and can’t work without the proper papers.
“He didn’t want to hold blood in his hands and kill innocent people, so he had to leave the army,” said Abdel Hamid, translating for his uncle.
Idris is among those who have been the first in their families to make a home in the U.S. and who worry about their relatives’ hardships abroad.
Idris prays, but the waiting can be unbearable.
“He has the right, because he is the president,” Idris said of Trump’s executive order banning travel. “But we ask God if he change his decision. We (don’t) want money. (We) only want to be together.”
Cuts to come
It’s a hope that many refugees in Chicago share. Like Abdullah Abdu Munaf and Tashminara Sultan Ahmed, Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, who long for Ahmed’s mother to come live with them and leave behind a refugee camp in Bangladesh.
Or like a Syrian refugee whose kids are scattered across Norway, Dubai and Turkey. She asked her name not be used so she doesn’t jeopardize her children’s chances of coming to the U.S.
But the State Department will ultimately make that decision.
“We’re doing our best to prepare for whatever the State Department decides. But we really don’t know what it’s going to look like in the upcoming fiscal year,” said Matthew Soerens, director of World Relief’s church mobilization.
In an annual notice issued in March, the State Department hinted that not all nine of the agencies contracted since the 1990s would be funded in fiscal year 2019.
“U.S. funding needs to be in line with how many refugees are coming in, and we’re trying to maintain a national network that can resettle refugees, with the same level of support, even if the number is lower. We’re prioritizing family reunification,” a State Department spokeswoman said. “Even though the refugee ceiling is lower, the quality of resettlement services is not diminishing.”
For the agencies, the change would be a devastating one.
“You’re losing institutional knowledge, talent, the people who really developed the skill sets to carry out this work. And that will take years to build back up,” RefugeeOne’s Porter said. “It doesn’t mean just because Trump is voted out of office that everything will fall back into place. It will take a really long time.”
Agencies worry that even more will be forced to shut their doors, making it harder to help refugees become self-sufficient.
It’s been about 3 1⁄2 years since Idris first came to the U.S. With the aid of agencies, volunteers and a bustling Syrian community she has grown to call herself an American.
But despite their support, there are times Idris still feels lonely.
It’s then that she thinks about Homs, her home in Syria that was always there for her to return to as she grew up, got married and started her own family.
Now, her father and one brother are dead, her mother and siblings live in Germany, and one brother’s fate is unknown after he was arrested by the Syrian army.
Idris has learned to find home within. But there’s one thing she still yearns for.
“The life needs father, mother, family. It’s the best thing,” Idris said. “If you stay without food — without anything — and your mother only hugs you, it’s worth everything.”
“If there are no people coming, then you’re not getting those dollars, and there’s no way for you to maintain the infrastructure of your program or your agency.” — Jessica Schaffer, director of HIAS Chicago, which was forced to end its resettlement services