Ilbouto Micheline began listing the countries represented by the little flags lined up on the mantelpiece of the former church rectory where she lives: Cameroon, Guatemala, Ethiopia. These are the places where Micheline’s current and former housemates fled from — immigrants who have won asylum from 42 countries over the past year.
Micheline pointed to the flag of Burkina Faso, the western African nation that she escaped amid life-threatening violence four years ago. Today, she lives in and manages this two-story home known as The Lighthouse, a temporary residence in Jersey City, NJ, for those released from immigration detention after seeking asylum to stay in the United States.
“When I arrived at the airport they asked me, ‘How long you want to stay?’” said Micheline, who had a valid visa to be in the U.S. for six months but instead declared she wanted asylum right then. “I said, ‘I’m not going back, my life is in danger, I need asylum.’ They said, ‘You need to go to detention.’”
Immigration agents, as part of a practice that began under the Obama administration but has since escalated, often incarcerate victims of persecution who walk across the border or land at airports. Micheline spent six months in Elizabeth Contract Detention Center, a privately run facility in an industrial park in northern New Jersey. “I didn’t know when people ask [for] asylum they treat them like criminals,” she said. “I was surprised.”
The bigger surprise for Micheline and so many other immigrants is what happens if they actually win their asylum cases and are permitted to live, work and collect benefits in the U.S.
Consider that at the four immigration detention facilities in New Jersey, which often hold immigrants who enter the country in New York City, those granted asylum are released at night, according to interviews with a dozen immigration activists and former detainees, often with neither bus tickets nor information on available housing. Those who don’t have relatives nearby or attorneys who can help them find housing sometimes end up in homeless shelters, or on the street. Others “come back to sleep in the detention” facility, Micheline said, to avoid wandering around at night.
Micheline watched one woman break down in tears when she found out she was going to be released from detention. “We ask her, ‘Why are you crying, you were in detention for like one year?’ She said she doesn’t know nobody in America, she doesn’t know where to go,” Micheline said.
Located in the former parish house of the Church of the Incarnation, The Lighthouse was created by a nonprofit called First Friends of New York and New Jersey to help fill this hole in the American immigration system, so new asylees without relatives or connections in the U.S. have that place to go.
Those fleeing persecution who are admitted and vetted while they are still abroad are considered “refugees,” and they have a whole system to help them settle in — representatives from federally funded nonprofits meet them at airports, place them in apartments with food and connect them to local welfare offices.
But “asylees” — who declare their fear of persecution only after they arrive on American soil — are viewed differently by the government. They’re offered some of the same benefits that refugees get, like cash assistance and welfare, but they often have to figure out what they’re entitled to.
A New Jersey church deacon, Jill Singleton, realized this problem when she started making visits to detained asylum seekers as a volunteer with First Friends. She met a man named Peter, who told her he was being released that evening.
“I asked him where he was going to go, and he said, ‘No idea,’” Singleton said. “And it just absolutely haunted me to think that… he had gone through everything he went through, got here, was put in detention… finally got out, and on the day he was getting out, he had no idea where he was going to go. He didn’t know another living soul in the United States.”
That night, Singleton had a dream about creating a “place of light” for asylees: The Lighthouse. “In my mind, every time I walk into the door here, I think of Peter and kind of think of this as Peter’s lighthouse,” she said.
First Friends opened The Lighthouse to provide a sanctuary for these asylees who are often doubly traumatized — both from the persecution suffered back home and their incarceration. Many don’t speak English or have much money.
So they’ll stay for days or months in this dormitory-like home. When The Lighthouse is full, First Friends places asylees in churches or private homes. First Friends also pays to house asylees at the YMCA in nearby Newark.
An asylum seeker who arrives at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City generally ends up in one of four facilities in New Jersey: Elizabeth’s detention center, or the jails in Hudson, Bergen and Essex Counties, which are paid millions of dollars a year to house immigrants. Each have different practices when releasing detainees.
About 2,000 people won asylum in New York and New Jersey in fiscal 2016, and many were detained while their cases were finalized. At the immigration court at the Elizabeth Contract Detention Center alone that year, 135 people were granted asylum — a 44 percent approval rate. But beyond fliers that First Friends posts in the detention centers, it’s difficult to get the message to the newly free asylees about who’s there to help once they’re released. Sally Pillay, program director at First Friends, said these asylees are at risk of homelessness because immigration officials and their contractors don’t provide information on housing upon release. “They just open the doors and out you go and that’s it,” she said.
The official policy on releases from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says detainees must be provided both “weather-appropriate clothing” and “a list of legal, medical, and social services that are available in the release community, and a list of shelter services available in the immediate area along with directions to each shelter.”
In practice, advocates and former detainees said, this does not happen with any consistency, and county jails in New Jersey that house immigrants have varying practices. At the Essex County Correctional Facility, those released are indeed given lists of shelters and bus passes, according to Pillay, but at the Hudson County Correctional Center, while asylees are told they can show their jail bracelets to get free bus rides, they aren’t provided lists of shelters or available social services.
A Hudson County spokesperson referred a question about processing released detainees to ICE, which oversees detention. Likewise, at the Elizabeth facility, which is operated by the company CoreCivic, a representative said its “government partner,” ICE, must answer questions.
ICE spokesman Emilio Dabul denied that detainees are released in this haphazard way and said the agency “ensures compliance” with its policy on releasing detainees. He said arrangements for release are made with immigrants’ families, sponsors or lawyers, but did not address what happens to detainees with no such contacts. And, in a written exchange, he did not respond to specific complaints that detainees are released at night, often without a bus pass or information on where to go, sometimes returning to the detention center to sleep.
Pillay said that for an immigrant without money, phone or a command of English, being released at night only compounds the difficulty. “Why can’t people be released during the day for safety reasons?” she asked.
A newly released asylee who makes it to the Lighthouse finds a bed, clothes and meals from all over the world. At The Lighthouse’s recent one-year birthday party, a banquet of food was laid out. A 56-year-old man from Ethiopia named Mesfin Wondmagegnhu made collard greens. He described being shot for writing an article back home against the government. He fled to two African countries and then to Brazil before traveling all the way north through Central America and then to the Texas border, where he was detained and sent to Elizabeth for a year in detention.
After his release, he spent five weeks living at the YMCA in Newark. Then First Friends moved him into The Lighthouse. “How do you live without First Friends?” he asked. “You don’t have family, you don’t have a friend, how do you live? It’s so difficult.”
Partnering with religious groups, First Friends served 110 people leaving detention last year, helping with housing, providing stipends for food and paying for transportation so asylees could move in with relatives elsewhere in the U.S. First Friends helps asylees get eyeglasses, English lessons and snow boots.
Asylees are also eligible for government help — medical assistance, food stamps and a few hundred dollars per month in cash, in amounts that vary from state to state and are supplemented by private donations. For example, New Jersey asylees enrolled with the nonprofit Church World Service are eligible for rental assistance and $50 per week in cash until they get a job — or for four months, whichever comes first. After that, they’re eligible for $335 per month in the federal Refugee Cash Assistance program for their first eight months as asylees.
But that money is not always doled out, because asylees aren’t aware it’s available to them. Ashley Freeman, president of the DASH Network, which aids asylum seekers in Texas, said she knows an asylee who showed up to get benefits but was told she only had three weeks of eligibility left. She had been granted asylum more than five months earlier, but didn’t know how to collect her benefits.
“Because there’s no system to let them know where to go, they’re just supposed to magically know that?” Freeman asked.
When Edafe Okporo was beaten by a mob back home in Nigeria for his work with a group that was aiding gay men with HIV/AIDS, he knew he had to leave. Okporo is gay, and same-sex relationships were criminalized in Nigeria in 2014.
“They broke into my apartment, dragged me out, beat me up in the streets, singing that I am evil,” he said. He was hospitalized for a week and then boarded a flight to John F. Kennedy International Airport, declaring asylum to the first uniformed federal officer he came across. He had a visa that allowed him to stay in the country for a few months, but with just $200 to his name, he couldn’t afford to live for long in New York.
Okporo’s declaration — proclaiming that because of his advocacy on behalf of gay and bisexual men, he faced death in Nigeria — did not afford him the warm welcome he expected. In fact, it got him handcuffed and shackled. He was taken to the detention center in Elizabeth.
“I was shocked,” he said. “I’m still shocked… The only thing I saw from that day to the day I was released from the detention center was just the George Washington Bridge on the way when I was being driven from New York to New Jersey… Before I came to this country, the narrative I got of America as a country [was that] the dignity of humanity is respected.”
After six months in detention, Okporo won his case. That evening, he was free to go. He was given the bag he arrived with, but no information from detention officials about where to go and how to find a place to sleep. He’d heard about First Friends, and called the agency’s toll-free phone number.
“When I was released that night, I was just waiting for a miracle to happen, and First Friends was the miracle that happened that night,” he said. In the days that followed, First Friends helped Okporo get his Social Security card, state identification and job permit. He also got welfare support — $79 a month in food stamps, for three months, he said.
Okporo is now a volunteer with First Friends, helping new asylees who need a place to live. And he’s working at a New Jersey foundation, still helping those with HIV and AIDS.
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The gap in the safety net for asylees after release is of increasing significance because asylees are being locked up for longer under the Trump administration. Those claiming asylum are increasingly being detained until they see an immigration judge rather than released on parole pending a future court date.
Asylum seekers filed a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security over this issue, but it’s part of a trend that began in the Obama years. Almost all detained asylees were granted parole in 2011 and 2012. That number dropped to half by 2015. And during a seven-month period last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement paroled less than 4 percent of asylum seekers.
During that time, the Newark, N.J. office of ICE, which has jurisdiction over the asylees who end up at The Lighthouse, rejected all 10 requests for parole, according to the consortium of civil liberties and human rights groups representing the asylum seekers in the lawsuit. Some asylum seekers are detained for more than two years, advocates say, as they wait for an immigration judge to rule on their cases or come up with money for a bond to make bail and get released on parole.
Conservatives who have long criticized the asylum system for being financially wasteful and a security vulnerability now have an ally in the White House. President Trump believes terrorists and gang members posing as refugees and asylees can sneak into the country and wreak havoc, all while collecting federally funded benefits.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions shares that view. “The system is being gamed, there’s no doubt about it,” he said last year.
At The Lighthouse, the view of asylum is decidedly different. At the recent “birthday” party for the home, former and current residents joined with volunteers to sing “Happy Birthday” and then “Amazing Grace.”
“Their first welcome was not a hospitable one,” said Singleton, the deacon who developed the idea for The Lighthouse. “And I feel a real sense of responsibility for letting them know that not all Americans are that way. And we are loving, good people. And we want you here among us, as our neighbors, and our family.”
