It’s a challenging time to be navigating the United States immigration system for resettlement agencies and refugees alike.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Laura Tillman to discuss her article, “A family of Afghan refugees arrived in CT. Here’s what happened,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Laura’s story here.
WSHU: Hello, Laura. You tell us the story of the Sayed Rahim Rahim family to illustrate the chaos that legal Afghan refugees trying to settle in Connecticut are now going through. How did you find the family, and what's unique about their story?
LT: I got a call. I wrote a story about refugee resettlement and the funding cuts that were coming through from the Trump administration in January, and the fallout of that in February. And I'd written about a woman who came from Nigeria years before, she'd been helped by IRIS to resettle. And so kind of the question, naturally, in a way, was, well, what would that whole picture look like now? Now that these funding cuts have come through, these organizations are laying off a lot of their employees and giving up office space. And so the head of IRIS let me know in February that this family had just come from Qatar. They are an Afghan family, but they had been living in a refugee camp in Qatar for a few months, and they had been anxiously awaiting the day of their flight to come to the U.S. They had their passports issued. They had special immigrant visas. And so, really, they were just waiting for the flight. And then one of the things that happened in January was the Trump administration canceled flights for about 1,600 Afghans in that situation, and so, just merely the way of getting from point A to point B was the only obstacle.
WSHU: They were actually living in a hotel room for almost a year, right?
LT: Before going to Qatar to the refugee camp, they had been living in a hotel in Kabul for about a year. In general, their lives had just become extremely restricted since the U.S. left Afghanistan in 2021. Sayed Rahim Rahim, along with his brothers and brother-in-law, had all worked with the U.S. armed forces, in his case, as an automotive mechanic. His brothers had worked as translators. And this implies, you know, putting yourself in a huge amount of danger for retribution from the Taliban. And when the U.S. left Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban took over the country, like almost instantaneously, their lives became very restricted. Sayed decided to take his son, who was then seven, out of school. And so yeah, they had been living, waiting, waiting, waiting to be able to come to the U.S. for a very long time in very difficult circumstances. So then their flight was canceled, and fortunately, his brother-in-law was able to use his savings to purchase plane tickets for this family. We're talking about seven plane tickets from Qatar to the U.S.
WSHU: Under normal circumstances, aren’t those plane tickets paid for once you've been cleared?
LT: Normally, yes.
WSHU: So now the burden fell on them to find the funds to pay for their own passage to the U.S.
LT: Yes. And very quickly, because their passports were going to expire. They had been issued these short-term passports that were going to expire. So they had this pretty tight time frame to find the money, buy new tickets and get here.
WSHU: So, when they get here, what happened?
LT: So normally, when a family in this situation would have gotten here a few months ago, IRIS would have been ready for them. And in the case of this family, you know, IRIS had been planning to resettle them before funding was cut and all these staff members were let go. But then, you know, they found out that their flight had been canceled. Everything was kind of up in the air. But under normal circumstances, they would have had an apartment ready for them. Really just a sense of things being a baseline for starting a new life, an apartment, clothes, a fridge full of food. An IRIS resettlement worker to help enroll the kids in school quickly, to be at the family medical appointments, figure out what the parents needed to do if the father was trying to get a job, different leads on that; all of these different things down to, you know, the organization kind of prided themselves on even having a home cooked meal of Afghan dishes ready for them the night that they would arrive in their new home. And really, the sense for a lot of people that this is like, like a very happy moment to come, you know, it's a difficult moment to leave your home, but at the same time, a lot of people who are coming, they're escaping traumatic situations. They're really waiting for this day to come and start this new life.
WSHU: How was their experience different?
LT: Yeah, so their experience was quite a bit different. Instead of the International Organization for Migration figuring things out with them at the airport and helping get them to Connecticut, Sayed Rahim Rahim’s brother-in-law met them at the airport. He brought them to his own home, which was already a pretty full house with his wife and three kids. They welcomed this family of two parents and five young children, and the mother is also pregnant. She is due later this month. So they didn't know where they were going to live. They didn't know if they were going to get any help from the resettlement agency or not. They kind of had to figure out a lot of stuff, thankfully, with the help of their family members. They do have quite a number of family members who are here, who did you know lend a hand, and Iris has done many things for this family that they're able to do, but it's just not the level of constant contact and just readiness that they would have had before.
WSHU: It's been a couple of months now since they arrived. How has it been for them? Have they been able to get a place? How do they pay for their upkeep?
LT: They did get their own place to live last month, and that was a real relief. IRIS helped them get that with the deposit and the first few months of rent. IRIS is also helping them get a car, a used car that's been donated. They've borrowed some money from the Afghan community in New Haven, there are some Afghan folks who have organized together to help out other Afghan families in situations where they might need to borrow money, for funeral arrangements or for something like this. In this case, they borrowed some money to be able to furnish one room in their apartment.
WSHU: The children have been able to register in school as well.
LT: Just last week, the oldest two kids started school. The youngest kids aren't school age yet. One of them, I think, might be able to start pre-K next year, but the other two are in school, and that was a really happy moment that I got to see last week, which was the son being able to go to school for the first time, essentially, in four years.
WSHU: What about benefits?
LT: They have signed up for HUSKY, and, you know, things like HUSKY and SNAP, as well as food stamps, are a couple of the items that are at risk right now with some of the federal cuts. So I think that's kind of a question mark moving forward for them. IRIS isn't able to provide as much help as they would need to supplement the help that the federal government can provide. However, how much help the federal government will provide to families in this situation as time goes on is still unclear. Fortunately, I think one stroke of good luck for this family is that the father is a mechanic, and you know, unlike his brothers, who were translators, there isn't as much work available in that field. I think that he has some good job opportunities as a mechanic. It's a skill you don't need to speak fluent English to be able to do. Some of the volunteers who work with IRIS have been trying to find him a job as a mechanic. So hopefully, you know, he will be able to start working soon.
WSHU: So bottom line, it seems that it's more the refugee community providing much of the help. And as far as IRIS is concerned, how have they been able to deal with the cuts to federal funding? Have private ones made up the difference? Is it even possible for that to happen?
LT: I think private donations have made a meaningful impact, but it's not really possible to make up for the loss of funding. For example, IRIS made the painful decision to give up its primary offices in New Haven. I think it is now sharing some space and resources with other nonprofits in New Haven. I think one of the things that has been impressive is that in the first story that I wrote about these federal cuts, I got to meet some of the people from religious groups and other groups who have become volunteers for IRIS over the years and are fairly organized. You know, there's this group that's been helping, Rahim Rahim and his family, who are primarily volunteers from a group of churches and a synagogue in Madison and Guilford, and they're the ones who found this car for him. You know, one of their volunteers drove the kids to their first day of school and helped to provide, you know, some help when they were registering the kids for school, and just to make sure everything went smoothly. My understanding is that there's a lot of manpower, of volunteers, and that's, you know, as significant as the financial contributions, it isn't the same, though, as the IRIS resettlement workers who speak fluent Pasto, who really have this skill set, and when they work with volunteers, it's terrific, but they also have to train those people they often don't speak the language of the people that they're helping. So it is more challenging, but I think that helps a lot of these families to, you know, make it through.
