Lucky Hollander: Finding families for unaccompanied youth immigrants
Every month PelotonLabs co-founder Liz Trice interviews a local community member. This month, Liz caught up with Lucky Hollander, a volunteer who is coordinating support for unaccompanied youth immigrants.
How do kids end up in Maine without their parents?
Several years ago there were a lot of kids that got out of Burundi and the DRC on student visas. Many had parents that couldn’t get visas to leave, but they were sometimes able to get student visas for their children.
Once the kids got here their living arrangements often fell through. If kids are under 18 and have a guardian, they can file under Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) status rather than asylum. So, there was a rush to get kids established in families so they could apply, and that was very successful. Lots of kids – most of them from stable families – got green cards and were able to finish high school and apply for college.
When Trump got elected, the US stopped issuing most visas, so we weren’t seeing many of those kids. Then with Covid, we started seeing kids that had lost or been separated from their parents on the trek through South and Central America as they tried to get to the US border. Once they were released from detention they had no place to go and no one to care for them. Now we’re getting kids coming up from the border that are older, have more trauma from trekking across South and Central America and fending for themselves for months. It’s been a challenge to house and settle them.
How are you matching kids to host families?
Right now there are two groups of kids. A lot are under 18 and need more than just a safe place. These kids need adults to play a parental role. So we’re trying to figure out how to give host families the support they need.
These kids are different than typical foster kids in the child welfare system. Their separation and trauma comes from a very different place than the local kids in foster care. Many of them have a lot of life skills and want to be settled, and safe, and in school, and usually don’t appear to be playing out their trauma. There’s no question they have experienced intense trauma and loss but are private and try to do their best to get settled in a new country and move forward.
There are some older boys that seem to have fewer life skills and have been fending for themselves for a while. They’re not oppositional or doing bad things, but basic expectations like showing up for school on time and catching the bus are challenging. But once they get somewhere, they’re delightful.
How is this organized?
Sadly, there is no formal system. No one is legally in charge. DHHS won’t take custody of these kids – even the younger ones.
We need more adult mentors who can have a significant presence in kids’ lives. We have been putting the word out through personal networks like faith communities and word of mouth. Immigration attorneys have cautioned us against using Facebook as a tool to publicize our need for mentors.
I work closely with Welcoming the Stranger, and the Maine Immigrant Resource Coalition is reimbursing her for small money to help kids get phones, reimburse host families for out-of-pocket expenses and legal fees.
How did you get into this work?
My last job was in the commissioner’s office at DHHS. When LePage was elected, we all exited. I had decided I wasn’t’ going to get another full-time job, and I got an email from the school social worker at Deering High School that she had a young student from Burundi that was losing her housing. We live across from Deering High School, so I called the social worker, and offered to meet and have her stay with us through the end of the school year. But by the end of the school year she was part of our family.
Two years later she had a full scholarship to Wheaton College, and then married a man she knew from Burundi that was also here. And now they have a two-year-old.
Through that process I learned that she was one of many immigrant youth in Maine. At the time they needed a guardian, but ILAP had no capacity to match people to guardians.
We also did the state part – going through state court to have the kids declared abandoned or neglected so they could legally get a guardian. My husband had worked as a guardian ad litem for years, so he helped recruit attorneys.
I had worked on the marriage campaign against discrimination, so I had a network to put out the word to. This was in 2013. We probably got seventy kids to get guardians and green cards, and then they could apply for FAFSA funds for higher education.
What types of help are you looking for today?
A couple of things have changed. The feds created the Special Immigrant Juvenile status in conjunction with the child welfare system years ago because kids who may not themselves have asylum claim could be in danger if they went home. In most states the child welfare system took custody. But Maine didn’t have [legal] language needed to allow kids to file until they were 21; they had to file by 18.
Now, we have kids who are 18 to 21 who we want to help through the system. So [Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project] ILAP created a unit to help those kids, so we send all the kids to ILAP first.
During Covid there weren’t as many kids coming in, and we couldn’t move kids to host families. Now, we’re starting to get families’ attention again, but in the meantime, these 18- to 20-year-olds haven’t been in school, and many have lost housing.
We have a bunch of kids coming from the border and are hard to house. The adult shelters aren’t a good place for them, and we are hustling to keep them off the streets. We’re desperate just to get safe housing. And the numbers of families and children are increasing, so ILAP is saturated. They can’t provide legal assistance for everyone.
How can people help?
We need money for legal assistance so that we can help more kids.
In terms of housing, we need two types of housing. Families who have room to house children under 18 and would consider taking guardianship so we can start filing. We’re also asking for families who have the availability to safely house kids even if they can’t take guardianship.
For kids over 18, most of them are still in high school. We’re looking for people who can just provide a space and are willing to live with a teenager. The kids have to know what the rules are. Most of the host families are happy to connect with the school social worker, but our most successful host families are people who either know teenagers and people who have enough room so that they have some privacy.
All the kids are eligible for General Assistance, food vouchers, and MaineCare, so most of them already have that. The host family has to fill out a form for their house to be inspected, and then they get reimbursed about $500 to $600 per month.
For more information, email Lucky Hollander at: lucky.hollander@gmail.com.
PelotonLabs is a coworking space in the West End of Portland, Maine with a mission to connect and encourage people working on their own to manifest their visions without fear.
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