In Maryland, resistance closes refugee office

The Virginia Council of Churches, a non-profit organization, is one of a number of volunteer agencies that have contracts with the government to assist refugees in resettling.

An editor with the newspaper said Tuesday that staff does not do interviews about stories, and management had not contacted The Gazette as of this morning.

The Herald-Mail is located in Hagerstown and covers a trade area in Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Refugee incident

Ann Corcoran, who identified herself as a housewife who lives outside Hagerstown, is one of the residents who began questioning local, state and national officials about the resettlement after an incident in downtown Hagerstown last year.

The Herald-Mail mentioned the incident in the Sept. 29 article:

“Last October (2006), some residents and government officials discovered that refugees were being resettled locally when a Burundian woman experienced a severe case of morning sickness on West Franklin Street, where the refugees were living.

“Because the woman’s translator was unavailable, authorities thought she and the other refugees possibly had a communicable disease. Hazmat units were sent to the area, and the 12 African refugees were briefly quarantined,” the article stated.

A news article from the WTOP Radio Web site stated that almost 200 refugees were living in Hagerstown when the incident occurred.

“Emergency medical workers, lacking an interpreter, mistook a Burundian woman’s morning sickness for a chemical or biological threat and set up a decontamination tent on a downtown street,” the station reported.

Trying to get answers

Realization that refugees had been resettled in Hagerstown, and what appeared to be secrecy surrounding the resettlement, bothered Corcoran and other residents, she said.

“There was virtually nothing in the paper about refugees coming. There were just these little blips of ‘Would you like to help?’” Corcoran said in an interview earlier this month. “It wasn’t even that many people. Who was doing this?

“And it really got people’s dander up” to learn that the Virginia Council of Churches had brought refugees to a town of about 39,000 in Maryland.

“It wasn’t about the people. It was never about the individual people. It was about the feeling that we were being led down this path without having any way,” said Corcoran, who said she is the adoptive mother of two Vietnamese children.

Corcoran sent a letter to the newspaper to ask questions about the resettlement.

“And the paper just completely stonewalled it and wouldn’t look at it,” Corcoran said.

As other letters to the editor were published, the writers began contacting each other to try to gather answers to their questions. They wanted someone from the Department of State to come to Hagerstown “and try to put all of their facts out in the public,” she said. “Frankly, I thought by doing that, it would tamper down all this unrest. …

“I was just intrigued by ‘Who is doing this? Why is this happening? And, for example, how can a federal agency and non-profit groups bring refugees into a county without any connection with the local government?’” Corcoran said. “ ... The driving force is having the feds and volags (volunteer agencies) foisting this on us without consulting the community to see what they can handle, want, need.”

As time passed, she noticed that efforts to take care of the refugees were not succeeding.

Only three local churches signed up to take care of about 50 refugees, and many of the refugees did not want to become involved at the Saudi-backed Muslim mosque, where they were being taught to speak Arabic, she said.

When winter came, she noticed that the refugees didn’t have coats to wear; she heard from an English as a Second Language teacher at the local college that the Muslim men tried not to allow women to speak in classes at the local college. Other cultural clashes were reported, and rumors blossomed among both refugees and Hagerstown natives.

Refugees in Hagerstown heard that refugees in certain areas of Pennsylvania were being given cars, she said, giving an example.

“There’s some basis for some of the rumors, when you dig behind,” she said. The Turk refugees in Hagerstown wondered why they weren’t getting cars.

“There were all these tensions building,” Corcoran said. “I got into the middle of this, thinking I want to know how this is working. …

“I really, honestly thought — naively — ‘Just come out here and tell us how it all works.’ It seemed like a real solution to me.”

In the meantime, Corcoran said, answers to the questions were not forthcoming.

Corcoran’s group eventually convinced officials, including Barbara Day of the U.S. State Department, to come to Hagerstown for a meeting. Representatives of Church World Services, the Virginia Council of Churches, and other officials also attended and made presentations.

“There were a lot of deceptive answers, stonewalling,” Corcoran said. “Our congressman was extremely concerned about this.”

She said she felt that the presenters were patronizing and that residents who did not use precisely correct terminology when they asked questions did not receive correct answers.

Within days after the meeting, the church agency announced that it would close its Hagerstown office.

Dearth’s article in the Herald-Mail reported that the refugee resettlement operations manager for the Virginia Council of Churches, Edward Haurand, said that “it was the U.S. Department of State and not the Virginia Council of Churches that made the decision to close the Hagerstown office.

“Gina Willas, a State Department spokeswoman, said Haurand was mistaken. She said the Church World Services, a parent organization of the Virginia Council of Churches, was responsible,” Dearth reported.

City councilmen seemed to disagree on the refugee issue, too.

Councilman Lewis C. Metzner, disappointed by the decision to close the office, “said he believed a minority of people who spoke out against the refugees could have prompted the office’s closure,” the article stated.

Councilwomen Penny M. Nigh and Kelly S. Cromer agreed that the agency should have worked with local government bodies during the resettlement.

“Nigh said it was her opinion that officials from the Virginia Council of Churches exercised arrogance by bringing refugees to the area before seeking the input of local officials.

“ ... Hagerstown residents have a hard enough time trying to pay their bills and taxes. The last thing residents need at this point is to have their taxes go toward resettling refugees,” the article stated.

The church agency said in a statement after the meeting that the city was “unwelcoming” to refugees.

Cromer disagreed, according to the article, and “blamed the resettlement program’s failure on poor management. The refugees were dumped in the city without support and resources, she said.”

“If they want to come to this country and make a better life, that’s fine,” the Herald-Mail quoted Cromer as saying. “It’s unfortunate they were involved in a program that wasn’t run properly. The refugees are hurt most by this.”

WTOP’s Web site reported that the Rev. Richard H. Jewell, a Methodist pastor and leader of the Hagerstown Area Religious Council, stated after the announcement that he believed “there were a lot of misunderstandings on all sides,” and cited “increased fear of Middle Eastern refugees due to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

During the year-long battle to find answers to refugee resettlement regulations and benefits, Corcoran established a Web site, refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com, to monitor resettlement issues on a national basis. She posts information regularly to disseminate news of her findings and to monitor refugee resettlements in other parts of the country.

And she said she continues to encounter difficulties in gathering accurate answers to her questions.

The effort in Hagerstown “was all about ‘Why can’t you answer our questions?’” she said.

She likened laws governing refugees’ benefits and entitlements to environmental policy law, which requires public hearings and environmental impact statements.

“I think there needs to be such a thing for refugees,” Corcoran said. “Why would there be any problem to have public hearings and input? Input would be things like ‘How many jobs are available?’ ‘How many families would we support?’ ... ‘What will be the social impact?’ and what will be the added costs for education, court and law enforcement interpreters, adding signs in refugees’ languages, publishing brochures in their languages, affects on taxes and other related costs.”

Corcoran said that she wants the State Department to assemble a fact sheet to let citizens know exactly what refugees are entitled to when they arrive in the United States and how long they will receive the benefits, what their responsibilities are, what local and state governments’ responsibilities are, and what the costs will be.

She suggested that economic reports be done annually in each county where refugees are settled, and social and economic impact statements need to be done regularly.

“They should just have a decision point every year. ... Tell me they couldn’t put this together,” she said. “ ... Why can’t they do that and just have it all laid out for the public? Say, ‘100 workers will come with 200 children. Can we handle that?’”

Corcoran worries that the volunteer agencies have derived too much power in resettling refugees, and that power belongs more appropriately with the State Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which provide funding for the refugees through the authorized volunteer agencies.