In January, a woman named Sandra approached Price Hill’s Roberts Academy Welcome Center Director Antonio Fernandez with a pressing concern: Her two underage sons were fleeing Honduras to live with her in Cincinnati and would need to make a long, treacherous journey to get here.
Sandra, who asked that her real name be withheld, begged them not to attempt the dangerous trip. But they said gangs in their neighborhood had started pressing them about joining, killing a friend who refused. It was time to leave. They hadn’t seen their mother in eight years, they told her, and nothing would stop them from trying to get to her.
Sandra knew all about the gangs in Honduras. She fled the country eight years prior after one of her teachers there tried to recruit her to join a gang and threatened her if she didn’t.
She wanted to know: Could Fernandez help her keep track of them when they got to the border and turned themselves in to immigration officials so they could begin seeking asylum?
It was an intense test for an innovative new program running out of Roberts created by the Community Learning Center Institute (CLCI). Called the Immigrant and Refugee Law Center, the program provides free legal assistance for Cincinnati immigrants and refugees trying to navigate America’s complex immigration laws. The program, including staff salaries and other expenses, is funded by CLCI, a private nonprofit financially separate from Cincinnati Public Schools.
After Sandra told Fernandez about her sons’ impending trip to the U.S., he tapped incoming law center director Julie LeMaster to help him keep track of them.
A few weeks later, word came that both had made it to the U.S. border. But there was a problem. Sandra’s older son, 16, is very tall for his age, and authorities didn’t believe he was a minor. They separated him from his younger brother and sent him to an adult immigration detention center.
“I didn’t hear about my son for two weeks, and I was devastated,” Sandra says.
Fernandez and LeMaster made frantic phone calls to detention centers and authorities searching for the boy. Eventually, they found him and were able to prove he was underage. Two months after leaving Honduras, mother and sons were reunited in Cincinnati, thanks to LeMaster and Fernandez’s efforts. The morning after getting off the plane, the three celebrated with a gathering at Roberts.
“They’re angels to me for that,” Sandra says. “It’s very hard to find and pay for a lawyer when you’re an immigrant here and you don’t have the resources.”
The legal help hub is a new addition to the school’s already bustling community learning center, especially at a time when more immigrants are coming to the area and when rhetoric against immigration has gotten more intense.
The seeds of the center were planted last July, when LeMaster, a Cincinnati native who recently moved back home after stints doing international human rights work in Washington, D.C. and Spain, began talking with CLCI Executive Director Darlene Kamine. Kamine had been working on the law center idea for a while, and it seemed like an ideal fit for LeMaster.
The center was formally incorporated in August last year and opened its doors in February. Since then, the work has been steady. LeMaster says most cases so far have been asylum applications like the ones center is currently working on for Sandra’s sons. The center has also seen a large number of applications for so-called U visas, which provide documentation for victims of crimes. Requests for green card and citizenship application help have also been popular, LeMaster says.
Sandwiched between Price Hill — which has a growing population of people coming from Guatemala, Mexico and other countries south of the U.S. border — and Millvale, North and South Fairmount and other West Side neighborhoods that are increasingly home to refugees from countries in Africa and elsewhere, Roberts is an ideal location for the center.
[MORE: Refugees coming to Cincinnati often face new challenges when they arrive.]
“Roberts just made sense,” LeMaster says. “They have the space, and the International Welcome Center. They’ve built trust here, which is very important — having the trust of people in the community.”
Fernandez says the school’s student body is 65 percent immigrants — up from 30 percent a few years ago. The law center operates as part of Roberts’ larger welcome center, which provides families with help on a wide range of issues, from finding employment to dealing with housing issues to complaints about discrimination and harassment, which have been increasing in recent years.
Once a week, the center holds a meeting where families can get together and discuss issues in the community. Those meetings sometimes include the Cincinnati Police Department’s immigrant liaison officer Anthony Johnson, who works to gain trust that CPD is there to protect immigrants from crime and not to deport them. Many undocumented immigrants don’t report crimes committed against them because they’re afraid of deportation.
The center also has a number of other partnerships, including a partnership with Women Helping Women, which helps women suffering from abuse. Law students from the University of Cincinnati, where LeMaster also teaches, are serving at the center, as are undergraduates and a high school senior at Oyler School in Lower Price Hill.
“We’re always welcoming, and we try to make a safe place in the school where families can feel confident,” Fernandez says. “We’re trying to support them in any possible way to help them succeed. We have a pretty much open-door policy, with families coming in at any time of day.”
Cincinnati Public Schools Family Resource Coordinator Carlos Guzman says those needs are especially pronounced among the area’s undocumented people. Guzman, a kind of liaison between the school and community, is often the first point of contact when people come looking for help.
“The challenge that undocumented immigrants have is they’re getting zero help,” he says. “They don’t have government assistance for anything. They have to find ways to be independent. Our goal is to teach immigrants how to be independent, so they can start looking for their version of the American dream.”
Many of those people looking for a new life, like Sandra’s sons, have taken a rough journey to get here and face another long slog through America’s legal system.
The asylum process is a complex, difficult one for many fleeing violence in places like Central America. Many immigrants get to the U.S. border with Mexico in states like Texas and turn themselves in to immigration authorities. There, they are given an initial screening to determine whether they may be eligible for a visa because they are fleeing violence or political persecution. If so, they may be released, after which they face months or years of court appearances and legal filings. If not, they stay in detention awaiting a judge to simply order them to be deported.
The journey recently got a little more harrowing.
Last week, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he would begin prosecuting adult immigrants crossing into the U.S. without documentation. That’s just a misdemeanor offense — but it means that parents and children will be split up when they arrive. Sessions also said that he would prosecute parents who bring their children with the smuggling of minors.
Sessions also recently eliminated policies under which immigrants were entitled to hearings for their asylum claims. The move, he said, was a way to more quickly move through the 670,000 pending asylum claims in U.S. immigration court, which exists as part of the DOJ. But critics say he’s actually just working to make it harder for those fleeing horrific conditions to find safety here.
“A lot of people hear ‘undocumented’ and because of all the rhetoric, think these are just people coming across the border to get jobs,” LeMaster says. “Yes, there are people here just to find work. But there are also a lot of people who are really legitimately fleeing dangerous situations. These people are here to be hard-working, to make a better life, to put their kids through schools. They want to belong.”
In recent years, for example, Guatemala had the 10th-highest murder rate in the world. Simply crossing a border doesn’t offer escape: Honduras and El Salvador, to the south, have the world’s highest and second-highest murder rates, respectively, and Belize, to the east, has the world’s seventh-highest.
[MORE: The journey to Cincinnati from Guatemala is harrowing. Imagine making it at 16.]
Of course, the center doesn’t just help undocumented immigrants.
Sara, who asked we not use her real name, has been in Cincinnati for three years. She moved to Washington, D.C. from the Central African Republic when she was 19 to escape violent conditions there and to attend college. But she quickly found out how hard it can be to navigate the U.S. immigration system. When she arrived, she learned her expired student visa wouldn’t be accepted, as she was told it would be. She was held for three months in Virginia before an attorney worked to gain her release.
Mindful of the difficulties the immigration system can present, Sara is taking no chances with various immigration paperwork for her son. She’s working with the legal center to get it all squared away.
“I know (LeMaster) has been helping a lot of the parents and families here,” she says. “My son is one of the students here, and I’m not sure how to fill out some paperwork for him. We’re working on that. I need to make sure what I’m doing is right. It’s different legally than in Africa, and I want to make sure I’m doing the right thing.”
LeMaster says right now, the school is partnered with Evanston’s Academy of World Languages, which also has a large immigrant student body. In the future, she says, she’d like to have branch offices there and in other Cincinnati Public Schools like Withrow and Dater.
“Most immigrants can’t afford attorneys,” she says. “The agencies in town that provide services for low-income families don’t have enough capacity, so a lot of families have been falling through the cracks. It’s been great for me to be able to come back home and do work I love but do it to fill a need.”
This article appears in May 9-16, 2018.