Volunteers, Municipalities Alone Can't Support Refugee Families, Says Portland Official

By Dan Neumann, Maine Beacon:

Amid an affordable housing shortage, refugees and asylum-seekers from Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo and El Salvador and other counties arriving in Maine are currently being put up at hotels in Portland, South Portland, Westbrook and Old Orchard Beach.

While the community response in Greater Portland has been powerful, including many volunteers who have come together to donate and deliver essentials like clothes, food, cleaning products and toiletries, April Fournier, a Portland City Councilor and an early childhood specialist at MaineHealth, worries the current system of support that has been set up for families may have an expiration date.

“The hotels are not sustainable in the long term,” Fournier said. “I’m worried about next summer when the tourists are back and those hotels are no longer available. What’s Plan B?”

Moving families back and forth to health care providers, legal assistance and other services has also been a massive undertaking, Fournier said. Without reliable public transportation from the hotels to these services, agencies tasked with resettling the families have been arranging taxis and Ubers to move them around.

“That’s what I’ve been doing all morning, setting up Ubers,” Fournier said. “Transportation, we’ve found, is the biggest gap we’re facing.”

Much asylum-seeker resettlement in the U.S. is handled by faith-based groups that receive funds from the federal government. Catholic Charities has led the effort to resettle Afghan refugees since the Biden administration pulled military forces out of Afghanistan in August and the Taliban seized control of Kabul, the capital.

Catholic Charities Maine is supporting nearly 70 Afghans in Maine, all of whom have family ties in Cumberland County. The Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine is supporting 25 additional Afghans and up to 100 other refugees.

A number of volunteer-led groups have also stepped forward to support the resettlement efforts. Volunteers with Maine Needs in Portland have sorted supplies donated from the community like coats, shoes, bedding, towels, kitchen items, art supplies and toys into kits that are distributed to refugee families.

But Fournier thinks this patch-work approach, where services are not carried out directly by the government, presents problems for families.

“I think it’s really challenging for these families that are trying to navigate the system to be like, ‘I have no idea who is helping me with housing. I don’t know who’s helping me with legal services,’” she said. “There’s really no funding for a case manager to be the central point of contact for a family. So, all of these different community providers are trying to cobble it together and communicate as best as we can.”

Asylum-seekers are ineligible for work permits while their cases are still in progress. They also aren’t eligible for most public housing programs offered through state and local housing authorities. That means many rely on general assistance, which is administered by often-underfunded municipalities. Large municipalities like Portland are reimbursed by the state at around 70%, leaving the localities looking to the federal government to make up the remaining 30%.

That reliance on general assistance programs puts a lot of strain on municipalities to lead resettlement efforts.

“I think there’s a tremendous community response both from agencies, municipalities and from the community, but I think we need more,” Fournier said. “It needs to really come from the state.”

In the upcoming legislative session, which begins in January, Fournier said she will be part of the Portland City Council’s delegation that meets with state lawmakers. She hopes to impress on state lawmakers the need for the state to play a bigger role in resettlement.

“It can’t all fall on the shoulders of Portland and the surrounding communities,” Fournier said. “This is something that we really need to address as a state because the responsibility needs to be fully shared.”

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