Immigrant families sleep in front of the Wollaston MBTA station in Quincy
Dozens of immigrant families, many with young children and infants, slept on the ground outside Wollaston T-Station on Monday, August 26, 2024.
- The Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network has been helping Haitian families find housing since August 6.
- According to an internal email, the group has since kept people off the streets more than 1,000 times.
- But by Tuesday evening, the money had run out, and the network’s organizers were faced with the unenviable task of explaining to families – including some with young children – that they had no choice but to sleep outside.
QUINCY – With nowhere to go, about 50 Haitians, half of them children, slept on the ground outside the Wollaston MBTA station Monday night, where volunteers from an immigrant advocacy group supplied them with blankets, tarps and other necessities.
According to members of the Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network, this was the first time this group had to sleep on the streets.
As Gov. Maura Healey tightened restrictions on immigrant families seeking shelter in the state’s overstretched facilities, the Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network stepped in to fill the gap, using grants from the United Way and the Boston Foundation to house people in hotel rooms and churches. The group has pulled people off the streets more than 1,000 times since Aug. 6, according to an internal email.
But by Monday evening, the money had run out and organizers were faced with the unenviable task of explaining to families – some with young children – that they had no choice but to sleep outside.
“Since there are no hotels, our best option tonight is to stay out here,” organizer Ashley Smith told the group, as recent immigrant Nahomie Brutus of Dorchester translated her words into Haitian Creole. “We don’t know what’s going to happen tonight. I’ll be honest. We can’t promise you’ll be safe. What we can do is give you blankets and make sure you’re comfortable.”
Brutus arrived less than a year ago and had no place to stay.
With the help of Milton Welcoming Haitian Newcomers, she has now managed to find housing and a job in the cafeteria at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Milton.
She spent most of Monday preparing a home-cooked meal of chicken, rice and soup for the nearly 50 people gathered in Wollaston. She was accompanied by Cynthia Guise, an organizer who said the Milton group had raised $25,000 to resettle three women and their children in the area.
“Crazy, inhumane policy.” Volunteer criticizes state government’s response to migrants
“It is the governor’s decision,” Judy Wolberg said of the situation.
Wolberg, a leading organizer with the Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network, told The Patriot Ledger that the families preparing to camp outside Wollaston Station would now be at Boston’s Logan Airport if Healey had not taken away that option on July 9.
The state has sent the majority of Logan refugees to the Family Welcome Center at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Wolberg said. A second welcome center at the Brazilian Worker Center in Brighton is smaller and offers less space to store needed supplies, she said.
Because the state’s accommodation system is capped, newly arriving families have to wait about six months for semi-permanent accommodation, Wolberg said.
If they choose to stay in one of the four “temporary recovery centers” for a maximum of five days, Wolberg said they have to wait six months just to get on the waiting list. That means it can take a year for a place in the emergency shelter to open up.
“This is a crazy, inhumane policy,” said Wolberg.
Wolberg stressed that the families sleeping at Wollaston Station are staying there legally.
They applied to Customs and Border Protection to schedule an asylum application and then waited up to seven months in Mexico for an appointment, Wolberg said.
They then received an I-94 card, which allows Haitians (and other nationalities with “temporary protected status”) to enter the country. In short, they are here legally, Wolberg said. “They followed the damn rules.”
Haitian woman undertakes 5,000-mile hike through 9 countries and 2 continents
A Haitian immigrant named Rosala told the Patriot Ledger through a translator how she, her husband and four children ended up at the T-Station.
She fled Haiti due to the extremely poor security situation in the country and first came to Chile, where her husband worked as long as there was work.
From there, she traveled north on foot through Central America to the Mexican border, where she waited seven months for her asylum appointment.
During the long journey, Rosala slept in empty buses, on river banks and in any other place that offered at least a minimum level of safety.
As Rosala spoke, her 2-year-old son was sleeping on the sidewalk. He was suffering from diarrhea that he contracted in Mexico due to a vitamin deficiency, Rosala said.
When asked what she wanted, she replied through translator Nellie Sanon: “I just want a place to stay, nothing fancy. I want my children to go to school in September and have a proper place to stay. Then we won’t have to sleep on the streets.”
Quincy has taken another option off the table by closing a church asylum
In early August, Wolberg, along with Faith Lutheran Church on Granite Street in Quincy, set up seven tents in a secluded garden on the church grounds. After about a week, the Quincy Board of Inspectors ordered the camp to be cleared, citing building codes.
“(The city’s actions were) stupid and unnecessary,” Wolberg said. “It was so private – a locked garden. No one could see anything.”
Wolberg expressed concern that the city’s closure of the outdoor shelter could set a negative precedent for other churches or charities that are also considering doing so.
More: Why did Quincy close a church camp for refugee families? Here’s what we know
“At least then they know that someone is taking care of them.” Serious volunteers do what they can
The first volunteer to arrive at Wollaston Station on Monday evening was Sam Kohler, a Weymouth resident who works at Trader Joe’s in Hingham during the day.
“I bought a hundred bananas,” he said, greeting the Haitian men, women and children he had met over the past few weeks. His rudimentary Spanish enabled him to communicate well with immigrants who had spent a lot of time in South and Central America.
Kohler is a magnet for children of all ages running around the station. In between work, he plays soccer with the older boys and hide-and-seek with the younger ones.
Although Kohler kept his cheerful face, he and the other volunteers showed signs of stress and disappointment, knowing that their new friends would be sleeping on the streets tonight.
“We’re doing what we can,” he said. “At least they know someone is taking care of them.”
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Reach Peter Blandino at [email protected].
