Nearly 200 Children Who Fled Afghanistan Without Family Are Stuck in U.S. Custody
Seven months after the fall of Kabul, shelters in the U.S. caring for children evacuated without their parents are experiencing unprecedented violence while workers at the facilities have struggled to respond to the young Afghans’ trauma.
This account is based on law enforcement records, internal documents and interviews with nearly two dozen people who have worked with or have talked with the children in facilities across the country, including shelter administrators and employees as well as interpreters, attorneys and volunteers. It’s unclear how or when children will be reunited with their families. The State Department is working to obtain travel documents for parents who remain in Afghanistan, a spokesperson said, but coordinating departures from Taliban-ruled Kabul has proven challenging.
Employees at the shelter had heard that they might receive Afghan children but thought they’d have two or three weeks to prepare for their arrival. “The Afghan kids were a completely different story,” said a former worker at a Pittsburgh shelter run by the nonprofit Holy Family Institute. “I felt so sorry for them. They’ve been there three, four months, and they still did not know if they would ever see their families again.”
Employees at several shelters described the trauma among the youths as more severe than anything they’d seen. Children are desperate to call home to check on their parents and other relatives, some of whom worked for the U.S. government or for contractors and are now potential targets for the Taliban.After the Afghan children arrived at Samaritas, Grand Rapids police responded nearly every other day to calls for incidents like missing persons, suicide threats, fights and assaults.
In Chicago, ProPublica reported last fall on how the challenges involving Afghan children at a shelter operated by Heartland Human Care Services were exacerbated by the lack of on-site interpreters.and Heartland received interpreters. Starr Commonwealth, the emergency intake site in Albion, seemed to get off to a better start. It offered a welcoming setting with residential cottages on a lush green campus when Afghan children arrived last fall. Unlike Heartland, it had Dari and Pashto interpreters on site from the outset.
As the children remained long past the short stays Starr was designed to accommodate, the local sheriff’s office started fielding calls about fights, runaways and suicidal behavior. A volunteer who often visited the facility — and asked not to be identified to avoid the risk of losing access to children in ORR custody — said children would tell her they “were crying all night long” and ask for prayers to help with depression.
A spokesperson for Starr said the nonprofit “did share a number of concerns” with both ORR and PAE. But Starr was “purely serving as a landlord,” she added, and “the government, not Starr, is solely responsible for programming and caring for children through its ORR program.” Workers and others at several facilities said they heard children say they’d been told that if they misbehaved, they’d be sent back to Afghanistan.
Less than three months after they arrived at Samaritas, the Afghan children were on the move again, transferred to new facilities. Employees made it a point to prepare the children by taking them on virtual or physical tours when possible. The last child left the Samaritas shelter last weekend.
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