A national foster care agency, Bethany Christian Services, plans to open a second facility in Charlotte that would process unaccompanied children, sent in large part from the U.S.-Mexico border.
The center would host up to 25 children, mostly teens and preteens, for around six weeks at a time.
Terri Bowles is the North Carolina state director for Bethany Christian Services, one of the federal government’s partner agencies for resettling refugee and immigrant children.
She manages Charlotte's only day center for unaccompanied minors. These are often young people who arrived alone from Central America or elsewhere.
“Instead of placing them in some of the things that we've seen previously that look more like detention centers or institutional care, I think we're trying to get them into situations with families where especially the younger children are in a better kind of environment,” Bowles said.
Around 200 unaccompanied children have passed through Charlotte since the city’s first facility opened in 2021, according to Bowles. Bethany Services did not provide pictures or a tour of the building.
Now they’re working to open a second center, doubling their capacity in the city to 50 children at a time.
“We have a site that functions in the daytime and really helps these children with different medical pains, psychological needs, legal services, educational services during the day, kind of a triage of those services when they first arrive here,” Bowles said.
At night, children stay with a state-licensed foster family. Bethany has been working to recruit and train more of those as well. Meanwhile, the agency works on tracking the children’s families.
“A lot of them have the person that they're trying to be reunified with. [They have] some type of telephone number or name or something,” Bowles said. “That gives us time to work on checking out who it is, that it’s a proper place, and that it's a member of their family. All of that is to try to ensure their safety.”
Immigrant foster care experience
Bethany Christian Services also did not provide an interview with any of their foster families. Charlotte, however, is home to many young people who have passed through immigrant foster care programs elsewhere in the country.
Bessy is a 19-year-old high school student from Honduras. She’s one of about 1,400 unaccompanied minors who reunited with family in Mecklenburg County in 2021.
But first, she spent 12 days at a government-contracted facility, run by another partner agency, in California. She says initially, she didn't know why she was sent there, instead of to her relatives' home in North Carolina.
“We arrived at a house. They gave us food as soon as we arrived. Then they gave us a backpack with new clothes,” she said. “Then we had to wash our hair in case we had lice. They cleaned and searched our hair. Then we got stuffed animals and were divided, I think by age.”
She also had access to a psychologist, something Bessy enjoyed, in part because she’s interested in psychology as a possible career. And it was her first chance to speak with a trained therapist.
“I was able to get a lot off my chest. Then she gave me a paper and told me about a website where I could subscribe and learn about studying psychology,” she said.
Attorney Rebekah Niblock says the immigrant children currently entering government care are often cases like Bessy’s, teens who arrived in the United States alone. Unaccompanied children placed in short-term care in Charlotte, for example, shouldn't be cases of children taken from parents, she said.
“Now when family units come, they should all be together. They shouldn't be separated," Niblock said. "If they're going to be detained, they should be detained together, as long as they can prove you're either a parent or a legal guardian. You might be separated from your uncle or aunt because they're not your parent and they're not your legal guardian.”
The policy is a contrast to the Trump administration’s "zero-tolerance years" when thousands of children were separated from their parents. That included the seven-year-old son of Niblock’s former client, Oscar.
“That was a very ugly, very difficult moment,” he said.
When they arrived at the border six years ago, Oscar says agents almost immediately took his son. Instead of telling Oscar where he would be sent, he says agents taunted him.
“They said he would be given to another person and that there are older people who want children,” he said. “It was a way to torment us mentally.”
Oscar didn’t know his son was actually at a care home in New York. When the child returned after 15 days, he was confused and afraid.
His son told Oscar he didn’t want to be apart again and that they should return home to Honduras. Oscar says the threats of violence and extortion mean they can’t return, however.
Once in North Carolina, the family was able to access legal services at the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy. Through a successful class-action lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, they established a temporary immigration status and access to counseling.
Years later, Niblock says they are still suffering the effects of trauma caused by the separation, including memory loss and nightmares.
Homeland Security estimates around 1,000 children separated from family during the Trump presidency have yet to be reunified with them. Meanwhile, nearly 130,000 new cases of unaccompanied minors were referred to the government in 2022 alone.
WFAE is not using Bessie's or Oscar's last names or photos because their immigration statuses are vulnerable.
