From the border to Walmart

About 9 p.m. on a Saturday in early March, a caseworker from Bethany Christian Services in Lansing dropped two hungry kids from Honduras off at the home of their temporary foster parents, Elsa and Sebastian.

They walked in and said “Hola!” Elsa showed them their room and eased the culture shock with snacks.

The next two weeks were taken up with clothes shopping, climbing the rope webs at Patriarche Park, fast food adventures and ogling the fancy houses on Moores River Drive.

Dominic, 10, and Eduardo, 11, are part of a growing crush of unaccompanied minors overwhelming U.S. border crossings. They stayed with Elsa and Sebastian in East Lansing while waiting to be reunited with their mother in New York.

To protect the privacy of the kids and the foster parents, we are not using their real names.

Elsa said Dominic’s first English sentence was: “Please drive me to the park in your car.” She took them to Elmhurst Park to play basketball. Dominic loved Taco Bell, but Eduardo “turned up his nose.”

“They’re just normal kids,” Elsa said. “They get along fine. They’re brothers.”

By March 20, the U.S. government was housing about 15,500 unaccompanied migrant minors, including 5,000 teenagers and children housed in Border Patrol facilities not designed for long-term stays, according to CBS News.

Two local agencies, Bethany Christian Services and Samaritas, are working with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement to find foster homes for these minors while they are reunited with their parents.

Both agencies are beating the bushes for experienced foster parents as well as new ones. It normally takes months for new foster parents to be licensed, trained and checked out, but the caseworkers and their supervisors are working to streamline the process.

The average stay ranges from a few days to a few weeks.

Soon after the boys arrived, the temporary family made a rowdy run to a Super Walmart to pick out clothes and shoes. The two brothers came to Michigan with backpacks containing little more than underwear, socks, shorts and a T-shirt.

Elsa got out her measuring tape in the aisle while the boys did their best to stand still. Their garbled communications, using the Google Translate app on Elsa’s iPhone, added to the chaos.

“It comes out gobbledygook,” Elsa said. “We just cracked up and tried again.”

The boys haven’t talked much about their old life, and Elsa isn’t inclined to draw them out.

“They’ve only told me it took them six days to get from Honduras to the border,” she said.

Before the boys arrived, Elsa asked program manager Sandra Severo-Lopez what food she should have on hand. Severo-Lopez, Bethany’s transitional foster care site supervisor in Lansing, told Elsa to stock up on beans, tortillas and eggs, but the food sat on the shelf.

“They want pizza and chicken nuggets, chips and ice cream, American junk food,” Elsa said. “They ate so much Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

When the border crisis hit in February, Elsa and Sebastian hadn’t fostered any kids for a year. They first became foster parents in 2013 and have fostered about 25 kids since then, all of them domestic foster children. Elsa works two jobs and Sebastian has a full-time job.

“We were a bit burned out, but we were paying attention to what was going on at the border,” Elsa said. “Every day it gets worse.” They hustled through the training to foster migrant kids from abroad as fast as they could, and were good to go in a couple of weeks.

“We need as many foster parents as we can get,” Severo-Lopez said. Kayla Park, spokeswoman for Samaritas, expressed the same urgency.

“We are going to need a lot of families to meet this need, especially families for older kids,” Park said. “We’re seeing a lot of older youth, a lot of teenagers.”

Nationally, Bethany Christian Services has reunited over 9,000 children with their families since 2013. Statewide, about 100 families are active in transitional foster care at a given time. The 2-year-old Lansing program is one of the newest, with only 14 kids placed in temporary foster homes so far, but director Krista Stevens expects it to grow “rapidly.”

Samaritas launched a transitional foster care program in late 2019, but the program went mostly dormant when COVID forced a border closing in 2020. Now that the border is open, Samaritas expects to place about 100 kids this year, in the Lansing area and a new office in Ann Arbor, according to spokeswoman Kayla Park.

The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement expects the numbers of unaccompanied minors crossing the border to keep growing.

“If you have ever thought about it, now is the time,” Severo-Lopez said. “The numbers are historic and the need is immense.”

When unaccompanied minors arrive in the U.S., they are detained by U.S Customs and Border Patrol and processed by the Dept. of Homeland Security. A child is referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement within 72 hours of entry. ORR works with grantees like Bethany and Samaritas to find temporary homes.

The alternative to foster care is a temporary shelter that may have hundreds or thousands of beds.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Saturday that “a Border Patrol facility is no place for a child.”

“Foster care is the least restrictive environment, the closest you get to a home, and no child deserves less than that,” Severo-Lopez said.

Bethany Christian Services and Samaritas assign a caseworker to each foster family and arrange for medical care, mental health support and other needed help. Samaritas provides a 40-dollar-a-day stipend for foster parents, provided by contract with Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services.

The wild card is COVID-19. Severo-Lopez said there are so many kids at the border that some are “going to be coming to us without testing, and without quarantining, and the foster family would have to take on that process.” Park said Samaritas would arrange a COVID test “right before we place them in the home” if requested.

Dominic and Eduardo have had a lot of fun in East Lansing, but last week, after a phone call with their mom in New York, Elsa said they had an “emotional crash.”

“They even had a fight, which is not like them,” Elsa said. “All those emotions, they don’t know how to process.” She said they took the boys on a cruise along Moores River Drive “to look at the rich people’s houses” and went out for ice cream. “They just loved that,” Elsa said. “You can always redirect with ice cream.”

As of Tuesday, the boys were packed and ready to go, expecting a call from Bethany Christian Services any day, followed by a hastily arranged flight to New York and a reunion with their mom.

Park said foster parents sometimes forget to prepare themselves mentally for the moment of parting.

“It’s bittersweet, because you’re welcoming a child into your home, and making a difference in their lives, but they are going to leave at some point,” Park said.
But Elsa won’t have much time to pine. She expects another foster child, a 14-year-old boy from Guatemala, to arrive this week.

“We were going to take a few days off, but there’s 15,000 kids at the border,” she said. “It’s only getting worse.”