Two years after thousands of migrants arrived in the District when governors bused them from Texas and Arizona, their access to vital housing and social services remains limited.
In April 2022, Texas Governor Greg Abbott started sending buses of migrants, who had recently arrived at the southern border, to sanctuary cities across the U.S. The decision was largely a political move meant to criticize Democrats’ policies on immigration and the border. Over the last two years, Abbott has bused over 100,000 migrants from Texas to places like D.C., New York, and Chicago.
In September 2022, the District created the Office of Migrant Services (OMS) within the Department of Human Services (DHS) to respond to the new migrants. OMS is tasked with providing respite, relocation, and case management services to migrants. The office was meant to “set up a system, distinct from the homeless services system, that is tailored to the needs of migrants and ensures the District’s response to this humanitarian crisis is consistent and well-coordinated,” according to a September 2022 press release.
However, that system has sometimes been unclear and unhelpful to migrants and their advocates, who say OMS has not done enough to ensure migrant families who stay in the city can find stable housing.
Once OMS opened, the office placed migrant families into shelters at three hotels in Northeast D.C. The hotels were only meant to provide families with temporary housing, but the barriers to accessing more permanent living situations mean many families have been living in the hotels for months. Currently, 345 individuals across 97 families are staying in OMS hotels, according to DHS.
One person, who has been living in the OMS shelter at the Quality Inn on New York Avenue for several months and asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, told Street Sense migrants have a hard time meeting landlords’ requests for financial information and personal documents, a barrier that prevents them from finding a place to rent. “They ask you for a lot of legal things. A lot of people here don’t have that,” they said. For example, landlords might ask for identification or proof of employment, a hurdle for migrants who do not have permission to work in the U.S.
The hotels reached full capacity by April 2023 with over 1,200 individuals from 370 families staying there, at which point OMS stopped accepting newcomers into the shelters unless they were facing “extreme cases of hardship,” according to the Washington Post. DHS wrote in an email to Street Sense that “migrant families who qualify for services are never turned away from the program,” and that “for families that do not qualify, [DHS works] on the appropriate referrals.”
The District closed one of the hotels, the Days Inn on New York Avenue, in March. Next year, OMS plans to reduce its capacity to operate a respite site for up to 210 people at the Harbor Light Center in Northeast and one of the two remaining hotel shelters for up to 130 families. Rachel Pierre, administrator of DHS’s Family Services Administration, which oversees OMS, says the office has been able to scale down because fewer families are coming to the District — buses stopped arriving in November — and many have been resettled through the office’s case management.
The D.C. Council established OMS through the Migrant Services and Supports Temporary Amendment Act of 2022, which gave the District access to emergency funding to finance the office. The council has repeatedly extended the legislation through emergency and temporary measures, most recently on July 2.
The law separates the services provided by OMS from the homelessness services provided by DHS’s Continuum of Care. Migrants are thus ineligible for many of the city’s shelter and temporary housing resources, such as transitional housing support and a guarantee families will only be placed in private, non-congregate shelters. Recently arrived migrants are also only eligible to receive case management through OMS, rather than through DHS.
When migrants first arrive, they can go to a respite center for meals and short-term shelter at Harbor Light Center, which OMS opened in June 2023 shortly after the hotels reached capacity. Migrants are allowed to stay at the Harbor Light Center for up to three days until they can find somewhere else to move, according to Alejandra Jolodosky, an organizer with Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid (MSMA). However, some families stay at Harbor Light for extended periods, though advocates say there’s no clear guidance as to who is allowed to do so or why.
“I don’t know how that decision is made at all,” said Jolodosky. “Some families were not even allowed to stay for three days.” The Washington Post reported that families who are in “dire need” were allowed to stay for longer periods at the Harbor Light Center.
When migrants have to leave the respite center, Jolodosky said they are not given any direction as to where to go next for long term housing or further support. Because the hotels are full, migrant families are not guaranteed placement in a shelter. In an email to Street Sense, DHS wrote that adults without children are referred to low-barrier shelters. However, D.C.’s homeless shelters for singles have been largely full for months.
“They’re basically let go,” said Jolodosky.
Mandi Rivera, who arrived in D.C. in November 2022 from Colombia, said in an interview with Street Sense she has been living in OMS facilities since then and is trying to find permanent housing for herself and her two children.
She explained landlords have asked her to submit four pay stubs to show that she will be able to pay rent, an impossible task without a work permit.
“I don’t have a work permit at all, I’m still waiting,” said Rivera. She applied for an employment authorization in December 2023, but has still not received it. Migrants can apply for an Employment Authorization Document if they are granted asylum protections — which requires another application — or if they have Temporary Protected Status, which allows people from countries facing political crises or other emergencies to stay in the U.S.
The process of applying for a work permit was costly, as Rivera had to pay over a thousand dollars between the application fee and the legal services needed to apply.
“I am a mother and head of household, I was thinking: ‘What am I going to do?’” Rivera said. Although OMS has social workers at its shelters to provide migrants with case management, Rivera said she did not get any support finding permanent housing.
OMS staff have also removed some migrants from their accommodations at the shelters, adding another layer of insecurity to an uncertain situation. In October 2023, MSMA tweeted a video of a resident at the shelter being evicted from their hotel room, and Jolodosky said migrants were given “no support” once they were told to leave the hotels.
Pierre, from DHS, said OMS only removed families staying in shelters if they violated the code of conduct they were required to sign at intake. In some cases, families were removed from the hotels without being connected to other resources, according to Pierre.
“Once individuals or families break the code of conduct that can definitely lead to a termination of services, even prior to achieving housing stabilization,” said Pierre.
OMS has removed 52 people from hotels and seven from the Harbor Light Center for code of conduct violations, according to DHS. Rivera said she was evicted from one shelter for having a glue gun and scissors, tools she uses to make piñatas for birthday parties.
“I told [the OMS official], ‘please give me a few days, give me a chance,’ no,” Rivera said. Rivera now stays at a respite center run by SAMU First Response, one of the nonprofit partners OMS works with to receive incoming migrants. She is still hoping to receive her employment authorization so she can find a place to rent for her family — but she said she is not getting the assistance she needs to do this from OMS.
“To have a stable house, pay taxes…but they aren’t helping to be able to do that,” Rivera said.
Pierre said the District has seen families “move on” from needing housing and support services from the office after finding permanent housing through the case management services. But those who remain have minimal access to the kinds of benefits for which longer-term D.C. residents are eligible.
D.C.’s homelessness service legislation defines District residents who are eligible to receive DHS services as people who are living in D.C. “voluntarily and not for a temporary purpose.” While migrants who came to D.C. before the busing began in 2022 can qualify for DHS services, the legislation that created OMS made it so those who have arrived since the busing started can only receive support through OMS, even if they have been living in shelters in D.C. for months.
“We’ve been having families who have been staying with OMS hotels for five or six months that are not being helped with navigating vital documents, that are not being helped with establishing D.C. residency,” said Sierra Barnedo, program manager for Rapid Rehousing and the Latinx Street Outreach Program at SMYAL.
Barnedo said many of the shortcomings in assisting the migrant population — specifically language and legal barriers for those who speak Spanish and are undocumented — extend throughout the homelessness services system.
“What happens when no one at drop-in centers, when no one at Permanent Supportive Housing case management, when no one at the shelter hotline, when no one speaks Spanish? Where is the accountability?” Barnedo said.
Many migrants had their passports and birth certificates confiscated by border patrol agents while in custody at the southern border, according to Jolodosky. Barnedo says that because some programs like SNAP and federally funded Permanent Supportive Housing only apply to D.C. residents or require a Social Security number or other identification, some undocumented migrants may be unable to access these programs at all.
Pierre said DHS does not deny services to people experiencing homelessness based on their immigration status. However, recently arrived migrants are only able to receive housing and case management through the separate OMS system, which Pierre says is because the migrant population has a distinct set of needs from other District residents.
“A family who has ties to the District, who don’t have a language barrier, who is either experiencing homelessness or is at risk of experiencing homelessness, those are very different needs than somebody who is very new to the country and may have been bused here, who do not have ties to the country and do not have ties to the District,” said Pierre.
Still, Barnedo and other advocates say the lack of integration between OMS and other DHS services has meant migrant families who are planning to stay in the District permanently are not getting the assistance they need to find a stable place to live.
“We need to marry the systems together, because there are people here and they’re not going anywhere,” said Barnedo. “We’re in D.C., at what point are we members in this community?”
Because of this, local advocacy groups have been working to create other legal protections for migrants in D.C.
Organizations like MSMA, Beloved Community Incubator, and Legal Aid DC have put together an Immigrant Justice Platform, which has lobbied for the D.C. Council to adopt legislation for migrants’ economic and political opportunities by protecting street vendors and migrant youth, as well as expanding voting rights.
So far, the collective has seen success in both funding existing laws and passing new legislation like the Street Vendor Advancement Amendment Act, the Vulnerable Youth Guardian Protection Act, which gives vulnerable immigrant youth access to legal guardianship, and the Local Residents Voting Rights Act, which gives noncitizens the right to vote in local D.C. elections.
Jolodosky said the District can also take steps to make it easier for migrants to get identification. In 2023, MSMA and other local organizations issued a letter calling on the District to make asylum-seekers eligible for Limited-Purpose Credentials, a type of I.D. available to people without Social Security numbers that other D.C. residents experiencing homelessness have access to.
Rivera, for one, sees potential for migrants to thrive in the District if they are given the resources they need to support themselves and their families: “As a migrant I can tell you, coming here is not easy, being here either is not easy, but it’s not impossible.”
Editor’s note: The interview with Mandi Rivera was conducted in Spanish, and quotes were translated by the reporter. Andrea Ho contributed reporting.
