Seven months after the fall of Kabul, shelters in the U.S. caring for children evacuated without their parents are experiencing unprecedented violence while workers at the facilities have struggled to respond to the young Afghans’ trauma.
Some children have fled and punched employees, then stopped eating. Others tried to commit suicide. One shelter. ProPublicaIt was discovered that some children were hurt by their parents and sexually abused as minors.
At least three shelters have shut down in Michigan and Illinois after receiving large numbers of Afghan children. Federal officials then transferred them to another facility to further complicate their lives.
“This is not acceptable,” said Naheed Samadi Bahram, U.S. country director for the nonprofit Women for Afghan Women, which provides mentors to children in custody in New York. These children “left their homes with a dream to be stable, to be happy, to be safe. If we cannot offer that here in the U.S. that is a big failure.”
ProPublica reported in Octoberserious problems at the Chicago shelter that took in many young Afghans. Since then, we’ve found that the troubles in the U.S. shelter system are more widespread.
This account is based primarily on law enforcement records, internal documentation, interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked with or talked to the children in facilities across America, including shelter administrators, employees, interpreters and volunteers.
Advocates for the children acknowledge that the Office of Refugee Resettlement — the federal agency responsible for overseeing the nation’s shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors — is navigating an exceptional challenge. As U.S troops left Afghanistan, they had to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghan civilians in a hurry. This meant that there was little time to prepare ORR facilities which are used to housing Central American teens and children. Additional complications were created when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Around 1,400 unaccompanied Afghan minors were brought into the U.S. and placed in ORR custody. More than 1,200 of them have been placed in ORR custody and are now living with sponsors, usually family members or friends.
Nearly all remaining 190 children are teenager boys. There is no one available to take them in. According to data from the National Center for Youth Law, more than 80 Afghan children were in ORR custody as of March 8. The young Afghans are being held in what seems to be an endless detention, in a system that typically houses children for around a month.
It’s unclear how or when children will be reunited with their families. A spokesperson for the State Department said that they are working to obtain travel documents from parents who remain in Afghanistan. However, coordination of departures from Taliban-ruled Kabul proved difficult.
According to the ORR 56 of the 190 kids in its custody have been placed into long-term foster care or transitional foster care as at this week. More families are being sought to take them in.
A senior official at ORR spoke on condition of anonymity to say that the agency is trying its best to help Afghan children. This includes providing interpreters, mental healthcare services, additional staffing, and, in recent months, Afghan American mentors. But those efforts won’t “change the reality for a child that their parent is hiding from the Taliban or that their family has died or that they are grappling with some really terrible things that nobody should have to grapple with.”
“I do struggle to know what else we could be doing that we’ve already not been trying to do.”
The ORR could soon face another challenge. With the Biden administration’s announcement Thursday that the U.S. will accept 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing war, people who work in the system are bracing for the children who may arrive without their parents.
On a cloudy, cold evening in January, 19 boys were taken in vans to Grand Rapids shelter by the Samaritas non-profit organization.
Employees at the shelter had heard that they might receive Afghan children but thought they’d have two or three weeks to prepare for their arrival.
Instead, they had 24 hours’ notice, according to one worker. (The ORR says it gave the shelter two weeks’ notice.) A federal emergency intake site, which housed many Afghan children just 85 miles from Albion, Michigan, had been shut down abruptly. Children were then scattered to other facilities, including Samaritans.
The shelter was not ready.
“Everything from the food to the reading material [to the] grievance procedures and the rules — everything that we had was set up for Central American kids,” one Samaritas employee said. “And now we were really screwed.”
On any given day, approximately 10,000 children or teens are held in ORR custody throughout the country, with the majority of them coming from Central America. The majority of the staff who receive them are native speakers of their language and culture. Many of the workers are either Latin American immigrants or their children. They know what motivates Central American teenagers to immigrate each and every year: to pursue a better education; to flee gang violence; and to earn dollars to support their families.
The children, too, often know what to expect because they’ve heard stories from friends and relatives who immigrated before them. They know it’ll be about 30 days in ORR custody before they’re sent to live with a sponsor.
“The Afghan kids were a completely different story,” said a former worker at a Pittsburgh shelter run by the nonprofit Holy Family Institute. “I felt so sorry for them. They’ve been there three, four months, and they still did not know if they would ever see their families again.”
Shelters were left flat-footed after the pivot to housing Afghan children. Many families needed prayer rugs and halal meat, as well as connections to local Muslims who could offer Friday prayers. Communication between children and employees was difficult even with Pashto and Dari-speaking interpreters. This led to mistrust and misunderstandings.
In the hours before the Afghan children arrived in Grand Rapids, the Samaritas worker said staff members were scrambling: “OK, like, what language do they speak? … It was a culture shock for them. It was a culture shock for us.”
There were many “unexpected complications,” said Samaritas Chief Operations Officer Kevin Van Den Bosch, but “we looked at the challenge, and said, ‘If not us, who is going to do it?’”
Employees at several shelters described the trauma among the youths as more severe than anything they’d seen. Children want to call home to check in on their families and other relatives. Some of these relatives worked for the U.S. government and others for contractors. They are now potential targets for Taliban.
Some people feel guilty for being in America, while their families fear the worst.
Grand Rapids police responded almost every other day to calls about incidents such as missing persons, suicide threats, and fights after the Afghan children arrived at Samaritas. Although the police reports were not available, many of these incidents are documented in internal shelter records.
One boy put a rope around his neck, “acting like he wanted to hang himself.” Another day, a boy tried to suffocate another child with a plastic bag. A worker came across a boy scratching his arm a few days later. He told her that “when his body is in pain, it prevents his head from thinking about his problems.”
Meanwhile, Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the state’s Children’s Protective Services, is investigating allegations related to Samaritas, though it’s not clear what the allegations involve. Bob Wheaton, spokesperson for the department, said that details were not allowed to be disclosed by law.
Samaritas officials confirmed that the agency follows strict safety protocols to protect youth under its care. Although they couldn’t provide any details about the allegations against the nonprofit, they said that the agency could. The safety protocols include background checks, cameras at each facility and plans for children at high risk of self-harm. “We take every, every allegation, or everything that a youth says seriously,” Van Den Bosch said, “and everything gets reported.”
Advocates suggested that the struggles of some Afghan children should be anticipated.
“Even children who have no prior traumatic experiences would begin to show signs of distress at this point, being in shelter care for this long,” said Saman Hamidi-Azar, who visits children in ORR facilities as a volunteer with Afghan Refugee Relief, a community organization in California. “There is nowhere to pinpoint blame except for the manner in which Afghanistan is evacuated: way too fast. Nobody was ready for what happened. No one could have expected what happened.”
ProPublica in Chicago reported last fall that the lack of interpreters on-site exacerbated the difficulties faced by Afghan children in a shelter run by Heartland Human Care Services.
After the story was published in The Washington Post, lawmakers adopted the following: called for an investigationHeartland was able to hire interpreters.
Police were repeatedly called to the facility over the following months. Police arrested a 16 year old boy for allegedly punching and kicking two workers in January. According to police reports, the boy claimed that he was upset at being separated from his friends.
In a statement, Heartland said it’s not equipped to provide the mental health support some Afghan children need. “Heartland is not alone in our experience of how the severe lack of access to mental health resources dramatically impacted unaccompanied Afghan youth who arrived in this country last fall,” an official wrote.
The official said it stopped taking in children “after the challenging past few months” to support front-line staff through team-building and training. Heartland recently reopened, though in a reduced capacity.
Starr Commonwealth, Albion’s emergency intake facility, seemed to be off to a better beginning. When the Afghan children arrived last autumn, it offered a warm environment with cozy cottages and a lush green campus. It was staffed with Pashto and Dari interpreters, which is a departure from Heartland.
Starr’s children were visited by attorneys, who raised concerns early on. They said the site was too restrictive. Children complained about a lack physical activity and no phone to call their families.
What’s more, because of its status as a federal emergency intake site, Starr wasn’t licensed by the state. Immigration advocates have long criticized the government’s use of these emergency facilities because they operate without independent state oversight.
In response to the large number of Central American children crossing the border, the federal government began leasing the campus from the same nonprofit last spring. Starr later changed his focus to housing Afghan children.
As the children remained long past the short stays Starr was designed to accommodate, the local sheriff’s office started fielding calls about fights, runaways and suicidal behavior. A volunteer who often visited the facility — and asked not to be identified to avoid the risk of losing access to children in ORR custody — said children would tell her they “were crying all night long” and ask for prayers to help with depression.
She said to her husband that the shelter reminded of a prison.
Before Starr shut down in early January, the sheriff’s office in Calhoun County received referrals for at least five child welfare allegations in the final three weeks, records show. In one case, a 16 year old claimed that two workers shoved him and shouted at him. When interviewed by a deputy, one of the workers acknowledged yelling out of frustration but said he “does not put his hands” on the children.
According to a report, the other worker was suspended separately after being accused of kick a boy praying. Both were not charged. In the case in which the 16-year-old said he was shoved, the Calhoun County prosecutor’s office determined an assault did not take place. Prosecuting Attorney David Gilbert stated that the child who claimed that he was kicked cannot be found because he has been transferred elsewhere.
There were other issues. Three allegations of inappropriate behavior or sexual abuse between children were made by authorities. One was from an 8-year old boy who claimed that a 13 year-old boy entered his bedroom at night and touched him. “He is scared and does not feel safe,” according to a sheriff’s department report. Gilbert stated that the prosecutors had also brought up this case. However, Gilbert said that the children were no more at Starr and could not have been located.
It’s unclear who employed the workers, as Starr was mostly staffed by PAE Applied Technologies, a federal contractor. A representative of the company declined to comment. Other workers were also from federal agencies that lent their services to ORR.
A spokesperson for Starr said the nonprofit “did share a number of concerns” with both ORR and PAE. But Starr was “purely serving as a landlord,” she added, and “the government, not Starr, is solely responsible for programming and caring for children through its ORR program.”
Wheaton, from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, said the agency had no jurisdiction over Starr but forwarded allegations to local law enforcement and federal authorities.
The ORR official said that the agency has a “zero-tolerance policy for abuse of any kind” and that employees accused of abuse are immediately terminated or put on administrative leave. Facilities also send allegations to local law enforcement, child protective services, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general and the FBI.
Starr workers and those working in shelters across the country said they were overwhelmed. Some expressed frustration, calling the youth “spoiled” for asking for more phone time and Afghan food — which, over time, they received. Others believed their colleagues were afraid of children. One volunteer called the situation inside a shelter a “pressure cooker.”
Workers and others at several facilities said they heard children say they’d been told that if they misbehaved, they’d be sent back to Afghanistan.
ORR officials stated that threats against children are unacceptable. Employees accused in maltreatment are placed on unpaid leave until the details are fully understood.
Tensions were made worse by staff shortages. According to emails obtained by ProPublica, Samaritas administrators offered workers a $500 bonus for picking up an extra shift in recent weeks.
“The depth and breadth of the need, and the sudden nature of it … put everybody in a really tough spot,” Sam Beals, Samaritas’ chief executive, said. “When I think of what these kids have gone through … it’s shocking they don’t act out more.”
Samaritas stopped operations at Grand Rapids shelter to train and hire staff.
The decision was made by the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, which holds Samaritas’ grant with the ORR, according to federal officials. Lutheran Immigration declined to comment.
Three months after arriving at Samaritas, the Afghan kids were already on the move again, being transferred to new facilities. Employees made it their goal to prepare the children by taking them for virtual or physical tours as often as possible. Last weekend, the Samaritas shelter saw the last child leave.
Melissa Adamson, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law who is authorized to interview children in U.S. immigration custody, said the repeated transfers of the Afghan youth “further destabilizes their already fragile sense of security.”
Last fall, the ORR offered special training for staff at shelters that serve Afghan children. Federal officials stated that the agency allowed volunteer mentors from Afghanistan to visit children and offer emotional support.
Through a partnership with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the ORR began sending Afghan and Muslim mental health professionals to shelters in January.
The changes made a difference, said Hamidi-Azar — whose organization is part of a coalition of Afghan American community groups, advocates and others that mobilized last fall to assist evacuees in the U.S. “You have to give credit where it’s due,” she said. “From government agencies to community activists, we have all been trying to find a way to make the situation better.”
After visiting children at one shelter in California, one Afghan American volunteer realized she could do more: She became a foster mom and welcomed two small boys — cousins — to her home.
The woman, who asked not to be identified to protect the children’s privacy, took time off work to bond with the boys and enroll them in the neighborhood school.
“They have adjusted well and are so happy to be in a home environment,” she said. “Being able to experience many firsts has been pretty special” — including a trip to the beach and a ride on a carousel.
This is the kind story that advocates across the country want to tell Afghan children who are currently in ORR custody. The foster care system is overloaded, making it difficult to find homes for teenage boys. Foster parents often choose to care for younger children and are licensed to do so.
The ORR has partnered to recruit more foster parents with organizations like the Muslim Foster Care Association. About 80 Afghan families are still waiting to be licensed, though the process varies from state to state.
The foster mom in California thinks often about all the children still waiting for what’s next.
“As happy as I was that these boys were placed [with me], there were kids at the shelter that were devastated,” she said. “I know that one kid was crying: ‘Why? Why didn’t a family want me? What did I do?’”
Here are some resources for you or someone you know who needs assistance.
