NEW POLICY BRIEF: One Year After the First Buses Arrived, the DC Government Has No Long-Term Support Plan for New Migrant Residents
In a new policy brief, the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network (MSMAN) details the barriers to stability faced by migrant families living at DC’s Office of Migrant Services (OMS) shelters and provides policy and funding recommendations to overcome them. This brief comes just one month after OMS announced that they reached capacity at their hotel shelters and began denying shelter to migrants arriving in DC. As a result, around 30 families with young children have gone without shelter in the District. On April 26, 2023, when OMS said they reached capacity, they reported there were 370 families residing in the OMS shelters, some of whom have been there over ten months. As of May 24th, 2023, there are 359 families in the hotels, but OMS is still denying new families shelter.
“DC’s current system of serving migrants is based on the false premise that all migrants are planning on leaving the District eventually,” MSMAN writes in Residing but Not Residents: The Lack of Long-Term Support for Asylum-Seekers in Washington, DC. “With the end of Title 42, end of federal COVID relief funds and the looming housing crisis, the current, ineffective system of serving migrants must change.”
For over a year, Governors Abbott and Ducey have been busing migrants from the southern border to DC. Since then, hundreds of buses have arrived from both states carrying close to 10,000 people, including infants and children; hundreds more have arrived in DC by other modes of transportation. In late June 2022, the DC government began housing migrant families at local hotels managed by the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. In the Fall, management was taken over by the newly created Office of Migrant Services.
“A dignified welcome is more than just a roof and a meal,” said Madhvi Venkatraman, core organizer with MSMAN. “It should include providing migrants with the tools and resources needed to build stability and actually resettle in the community." In the brief, MSMAN identifies four key barriers that recent migrant’s cite as reasons they are unable to move out of OMS shelters: 1) lack of resettlement focused case management, 2) inability to obtain identification cards, 3) lack of adequate legal support, and 4) lack of childcare support.
Key recommendations outlined in the brief:
DC should invest in resettlement focused case management.
DC should immediately pass emergency legislation to amend municipal rules pertaining to proof of identity and residency requirements for Limited Purpose Credentials.
DC should allocate money in the FY23 Supplemental Budget and FY24 Budget to a grant program for immigration legal service providers, specifically to file asylum and work authorization applications for recent migrants.
DC should create a childcare voucher program for low-income residents who do not qualify for federally funded childcare subsidies.
“DC has the opportunity to be a national leader in how to effectively resettle migrants and asylum seekers by creating robust, welcoming, and supportive infrastructure in the city,” said Amy Fischer, core organizer with MSMAN. “Unfortunately, instead of stepping up to be a model of welcome, the DC Government is showing how to be a model of exclusion. This policy brief provides a realistic path forward to meet this critical moment.”
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