The social safety net for asylum seekers who end up in Ohio is inadequate, according to the people who work with asylum seekers everyday.
Scarce housing, complicated bureaucracy and many other barriers make it difficult for newcomers escaping violence and oppression to make a new home.
When a person is allowed to enter the country as an asylum seeker, that status comes with a lot of conditions and few resources.
Cities across the country are pressed to find answers in emergency situations, including Columbus. That’s where officials last year found themselves scrambling to find housing for hundreds of people, mostly from Haiti, after city officials found that the east side Colonial Village apartments wasn't safe to live in.
Aid workers complain about odd rules that make it hard for asylum seekers to get ahead — there's a 150-days waiting period after filing for asylum to get a work permit — which is also how asylum seekers get a Social Security number. Translators are scare and it's hard to find affordable, reliable and legal transportation.
So when a lot of people need resources all at once, like Columbus did during the Colonial Village situation, it really taxes the system.
"We are far from the only municipality who is wrestling with this, and just really living with the consequences of a fractured immigration policy," said Hannah Jones from the Department of Development in Columbus.
People who run the nonprofits to help asylum seekers and make sure people in the city have somewhere to live, report limited funding and a lack of access to public benefits curtails the amount of help available.
Stephanie Corcoran is an attorney who leads the immigration team at the Legal Aid Society of Southeast and Central Ohio. They help asylum seekers with the paperwork they need to stay in the U.S. legally. She said they developed the program when they realized what a need there was.
"This is very new to us. We started an immigration team in 2021. So we are trying to grow because the need is huge," Corcoran said.
The most outstanding problem all around is there’s not enough decent housing. It's especially hard for people without Social Security numbers or credit scores to secure their own housing. And rent is expensive.
"Housing is a nationwide problem. The lack of affordable and safe housing. It's really bad. The problem is really bad here, just like it is in the rest of the world. And it is even the harder problem for immigrants," said Mayra Jackson, executive director of the Immigrant and Refugee Law Center in Cincinnati.
The need for legal services and housing for asylum seekers exploded in Columbus last year.
About 500 households — more than 1,000 people, mostly asylum seekers from Haiti were lured by the former property managers with invalid leases to Colonial Village. They were paying rent for rooms in an already problematic property rife with code violations. It was shut down in November, leaving all the residents homeless.
The city has allocated to spend nearly $5 million on hotel rooms for the former residents of Colonial Villiage.
Corcoran speaks Creole and helps translate along with her legal work. She's talked to many of the Haitian asylum seekers.
"I think a lot of people have similar stories when it comes to the trip here, how dangerous it was to get here and how it took so much out of them. And then they waited and waited in Mexico to be allowed to come," she said.
Asylum seekers have to report to the border and wait their turn in long lines to enter the country legally. Corcoran recalls the story of one man who was a politician before fleeing Haiti. While waiting in Mexico, word spread that there was an affordable place to live in Columbus.
He sent money ahead to the property managers to secure housing for him, his wife and children.
"So he got here and there were other people living there, and he had the it was like, you have to share this apartment with all these people," Corcoran said.
Jackson said asylum seekers have similar experiences all over Ohio.
"Unfortunately, immigrants are easy victims for many types of a scam. Not only in housing, but also, you know, unfortunately, fake attorneys, immigration authorities that, you know, make them pay ridiculous amounts of money and they, they don't really do anything for them," Jackson said.
Advocates like Jackson and Corcoran said asylum seekers could be more independent with a few policy changes — like, advances should be made to make the process to get a work permit faster and lose the requirement they wait 150 days after arriving.
They want the government to modernize how people are notified about their hearings and argue asylum seekers should be able to get a driver's license after they're allowed in the country and get assigned a social security number.
Asylum seekers can be stuck in limbo for years, ineligible for many government benefits. Jackson knows of a man who’s been waiting 9 years for an interview.
