With Open Arms

Lancaster, Pa., isn’t exactly a big city, but with a population of about 60,000, it’s also not the sort of place where you’d expect to bump into people you know at every intersection. Neither would you expect those people to be from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cuba, Ukraine, or Syria.

But if you’re Christine Baer, congregational resource developer for Church World Service, such encounters are all in a day’s work, and they usually result in an invitation to someone’s home for dinner.

CWS is the relief, development, and refugee assistance arm of the National Council of the Churches of Christ. It relies on volunteers in the community to help newly arrived refugees restart their lives in the United States.

Congregations make up the family welcome teams, a vital part of the resettlement process. But about 10 years ago, congregational co-sponsorship of refugees resettled in the Lancaster area began to decline, and as recently as three years ago, only five congregations were sponsoring families. Baer attributes the drop to a difference in the way people practice church and community today and to people’s lives being busier and faster, with less time to commit to volunteer work.

Since Baer’s position was created nearly three years ago, CWS has worked to get those numbers back up. Nearly half of the families that arrived in the area last year, more than 400 individuals, were assigned to welcome teams. The teams ranged from families to large congregations and include Muslims, Mennonites, and Quakers. The experience is bringing faith groups together in a new way, Baer says. One welcome team is even taking Arabic lessons.

Baer speaks passionately about the warmth and generosity of the resettled people she works with: “I just want everybody to meet a family, to be able to talk to their neighbors and say, ‘Can you tell me a little bit about your story?’ or be willing to sit down for coffee or tea or dinner, because I tell you, I have not met a former refugee family that has not been willing to feed me or welcome me for juice or tea or coffee. I want the politicians to sit down for a meal.”

Raised in the Mennonite church, with a degree in peace building and development, Baer attributes her commitment to this work to that foundation. “When we hear about overwhelming issues and events in the world, big-picture news stories, phenomena, and disasters,” she says, “it’s difficult to see yourself playing a role toward peace and being a peacemaker in that moment. But when I’m working one-on-one with the families, that is where I know I can make a difference.”

The big picture

For the people Baer works with, the resettlement process begins years before they’ve ever heard of Lancaster, when they are forced from their homes and register as refugees with the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Not everyone chooses to register. Many fear being on a list or being sent to a camp where they will be a religious minority. Those who do not register are ineligible for resettlement.

Once registered, refugees essentially put their lives in the hands of the UNHCR, which decides in what country they will be resettled; the refugees themselves have no say in the matter. Those referred by UNHCR to the United States are processed through resettlement support centers run by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which screens applicants with the help of the Department of Homeland Security and multiple other U.S. government security agencies. It should be noted that these agencies rigorously—exhaustively—vet all refugees referred by the UNHCR, which resettles only the most vulnerable cases, those who can neither return to their home country nor safely live in a neighboring country (female-headed families, religious minorities, the sick, and the disabled, for example). The screening process, which occurs while the refugee is still abroad—often but not always in a refugee camp—can take more than two years.

Those who pass the vetting process are subsequently assigned to one of nine non-governmental resettlement agencies, which include Church World Service, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, World Relief, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, among others; six are faith-based, three are not. Those groups often work with churches and interfaith groups to help the refugees acclimate.

The U.S. admits approximately two-thirds of all refugee resettlement referrals worldwide each year, and has historically been a generous and open-armed global citizen. But a revised executive order issued March 6 by President Trump, and currently blocked by federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland, would cut refugee admittance by more than half (to 50,000), halting it completely for 120 days. A 120-day halt can send a refugee family that has begun the process of receiving security and medical approvals (which have expiration dates) to the end of the line, only to begin the process all over again, a potentially devastating setback.

The United States accepted 84,995 refugees in 2016; the existing refugee acceptance cap for 2017—as determined last fall by President Obama, a power granted the president under the Immigration and Nationality Act—is 110,000. To put that number in context, there are currently more than 22 million refugees worldwide; 86 percent of them are hosted by developing-world countries; fewer than 1 percent will ever be resettled. The average length of displacement is 17 years. All of which is to say that those who make it to our shores after being forced to leave their homelands, possibly for the rest of their lives, are among the luckiest—and most scrutinized—refugees in the world.

Maryland’s interfaith effort

Once refugees land in the United States, they are eligible to receive resettlement services and the help of a caseworker for 90 days through the Refugee Admissions Program (some services are available for longer). During that time, the assigned case worker must ensure that they have gotten Social Security cards and housing, that the children are enrolled in school, and that the adults are taking English language classes. Each member of the household receives a total of $925 to cover general living expenses, including housing costs. In addition, all admitted refugees must ultimately repay their travel expenses to the U.S.

This is where communities of faith often come in, playing an invaluable role in the resettlement process. They can provide the long-term accompaniment—as well as warmth, compassion, and patience, among other things—that a government bureaucracy could never supply.

In Prince George’s County, Md., refugee families have been set up in several nondescript apartment complexes not far from FedEx Field, where Washington’s NFL team plays. Those families are assisted by multiple groups, including the Montgomery County Interfaith Refugee Resettlement Neighbors (MCIRRN), which was founded in fall 2015, partly in response to a request by Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, that then-President Obama not settle Syrian refugees in the state. (Hogan was one of 30 governors, most of them Republicans, to make such a request, which was not granted.)

As anti-immigrant sentiment swept parts of the country, the Islamic Center of Maryland, located outside Washington, D.C., found itself becoming a hub for faith communities that felt morally compelled to respond to the ongoing refugee crisis. Today, at least 13 Muslim groups, seven Christian churches, and two synagogues are members of this Maryland interfaith effort.

“We knew the numbers [of refugees] would be so high. How could we do it alone?” says Shahnaz Baten, a case manager at the Islamic Center. “We couldn’t. So why not invite everyone we know?”

Baten, co-founder of the Montgomery County Neighbors project, is an elegant, dynamic force in a headscarf. An immigrant herself—she came to this country from Bangladesh at age 10—she leads the MCIRRN meetings and does check-in visits with the families they support, most of which were referred through the Ethiopian Community Development Council, one of the nine official resettlement agencies, based in Arlington, Va. This, she says, is her calling.

“[God] has chosen this work for me and I am blessed with this work,” she says. “How can I turn down this work when so many lives are struggling?”

Each MCIRRN family is assigned an interfaith team (ideally made up of congregants from one church, one synagogue, and one mosque) that provides assistance—rent, grocery cards, food packets, English tutoring, and social support. As families become more self-sufficient, they receive less assistance and the group takes on new families in their place, for a total of about 14 at any given time.

Nelofar Anwar is another Islamic Center member. A physician by training, she cares for her children and her mother at home while volunteering with MCIRRN and the center’s other community programs, which include making dinner for the homeless and providing weekend snack packs for children who receive free and reduced-price lunches at school.

Through MCIRRN, Anwar has been working with two Hindu families from Sri Lanka and a Muslim family from Iraq. “Because it’s an interfaith effort, we want to reach out to different faiths,” she says, adding that the exposure to other congregations has been a blessing. “I think that’s probably the silver lining in the new administration. It has kind of pushed people to come together, people of different backgrounds.”

Another MCIRRN member, Merritt Groeschel, studied international development and worships at D.C.’s Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church. Her congregation was already working with a refugee family through Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, as well as with several other families in more informal relationships, when they joined the Montgomery County network. The church’s library has become a gathering spot for members of diverse faith communities to discuss the logistics of tutoring immigrant children, job opportunities for the parents, and plans to bring everyone together for an afternoon picnic.

The refugees have had varying experiences, Groeschel says, and the communities in the different apartment complexes are evolving in unexpected ways. One has seen the emergence of a few dynamic leaders, and the families—from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq—are networking on jobs and language classes while their children regularly play together in the courtyard. The Syrian families in another complex seem to be struggling more socially and with finding suitable jobs for the fathers.

“No family is like a snapshot of all the other families,” she says, and all are having some trouble adjusting to a completely new culture.

Groeschel is concerned that with so many church and volunteer groups giving aid, no one is tracking the overall picture for each family. She worries that the financial assistance might make working-age adults less likely to take entry-level jobs for which they are sometimes over-qualified based on their job experience in their home countries. It’s a delicate balance, she says, and the church groups are learning as they go about when to offer help and when to step back and let the families figure things out for themselves.

From refugee to citizen

Back in Lancaster, one of Baer’s colleagues at Church World Service is Omar Mohamed, 29, who was first resettled in Tucson, Ariz., in 2009 from his native Somalia. He came via the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, which has more than 250,000 residents, making it the largest in the world, a dubious distinction. He and his disabled younger brother, who was resettled with him, lived in Dadaab with their parents for more than 15 years. They have not seen their mother since leaving the camp.

“That’s where I grew up and that’s where I went to school,” says Mohamed, a U.S. citizen since 2014. “But life was very difficult.” An internship at Lutheran Social Services while an undergrad at the University of Arizona led him to the job with CWS.

“I was always interested in working with refugees because I was a refugee myself,” he says.

Now Mohamed walks beside recent arrivals as they adjust to life in the Lancaster area. He does everything from picking them up at the airport to going with them to the Social Security office to teaching them how to use the stove. He recently witnessed the reunion of a Somali mother with her two daughters, ages 12 and 14, from whom she had been separated for seven years. It turns out that Mohamed’s mother, a midwife, delivered both girls in the camp.

“A miracle,” he calls it. Mohamed and his brother were scheduled to travel to Kenya in May for a three-month visit with their mother, taking with them Mohamed’s two oldest children, 5 and 6. He worried about whether they would have trouble re-entering the United States, but assured his friends and family it would not be a problem. “I’m a citizen,” he says, “like any other person.”

Losing ground

The confusion caused by the president’s executive order has affected not just the refugees but the official resettlement agencies that receive them. Kirt Lewis, director of the Sacramento field office of World Relief, says his agency was one of the first to announce it was laying off staff. In February, the agency released 140 staff and closed five offices, in Florida, Idaho, Maryland, Ohio, and Tennessee. Both Catholic Charities and the International Rescue Committee have been trying to raise emergency funds to keep field offices open.

Lewis expects other agencies will follow suit, letting go of hundreds of workers as the reality of accepting perhaps 60,000 fewer refugees this year than last begins to hit home and agencies suddenly find themselves overstaffed.

If the executive order is allowed to go forward, he wonders, “How many years of passion and expertise in helping refugees resettle and rebuild their lives here, how much of that is going to be lost?” On top of that is the effect on the congregations and volunteers who sign on to accompany the new arrivals once they land. “I think it’s really starting to sink in to some of our partner churches that have really been transformed. They love refugees.”

A former pastor and Iraq war veteran, Lewis is frustrated but thoughtful. “It’s heartbreaking, because these folks have come to know and understand refugees for who we know them to be,” he says of the volunteers. “These [refugees] don’t represent the threat. They represent wonderful people, courageous people, people with tremendous gifts and talents who make our communities stronger. They enrich our communities. Those volunteers and pastors have expressed a lot of sadness over realizing they’re not going to get the opportunity to help those people.”