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.

“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.”

One year ago today, Governor Abbott of Texas sent the first bus of migrants from the southern border to Washington, DC as part of a publicity stunt aimed at Biden. In response, the DC community formed the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network (MSMAN), a group of organizations and volunteers dedicated to welcoming migrants arriving to the city. The Network stepped up in the absence of the local government and established non-profits — showing up to receive buses at all times of day and night, booking transportation, sorting donations, finding housing, and more. A year later, MSMAN continues to support the over 1,500 migrants who have chosen to make DC their home, as they continue to face federal and local barriers to resettlement.