A Single Mother’s Longing to Belong in America

Ashley Miller – November 2024

Johanne Saint-Bien was four months pregnant when she paid Columbian smugglers to coordinate her 4,000-mile journey from the outskirts of the Amazon to the U.S.-Mexico border. The harrowing two-month trek entailed traveling by truck, bus, ferry and foot through twelve countries.

Today, Johanne, a 27-year-old Haitian refugee, lives with her 10-month-old son at The Row, a hotel-turned shelter in Midtown Manhattan.

In October 2023, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a 60-day stay limit for refugee families staying in the sprawling shelter system. Johanne and her baby boy Bidenly, named in honor of the president, face homelessness in the middle of winter as their limit expires on January 3rd.

“We don’t have anywhere to go,” she said while holding her son wrapped in winter wear. “Will Biden let Bidenly sleep on the street?”

Since the spring of 2022, some 145,000 women, men and child refugees have arrived in New York City. Nearly 65,000 of the new arrivals live in one of the 206 makeshift shelters across the five boroughs.

Like most of the newcomers, Johanne is eager to find a job and leave the city’s care. But she has not received her work permit from the federal government and risks deportation if she pursues employment without it. She applied ten months ago and has not heard word since.

Every morning, Johanne scrolls through Next Door, a neighborhood-based social media site, searching for under-the-table job opportunities while her son plays in a non-profit daycare down the street. She has heard rumors around the shelter that some women have found work as nannies and house cleaners on the site. However, she said, the market is competitive because everyone is willing to work for next to nothing.

Immigration advocates, city officials and elected leaders condemned Adams’s announcement. “Forcing them to leave and reapply for shelter after 60 days will only mean more disruption, anxiety and homelessness as winter approaches,” New York City Comptroller Brad Lander said.

But Adams stood by his statement. He said the new policy “is the only way to help migrants take the next steps on their journeys.”

Back in Brazil Johanne lived in a remote region of the Amazon with her parents, her brother and his wife. They were members of a large wave of Haitian refugees who had arrived in Brazil in the early 2000s because of gang violence. “Haiti will always be my home,” Johanne said.

Johanne learned she was pregnant during her first semester of nursing school. The baby’s father had another girlfriend and upon hearing the news threatened Johanne. “He told me, ‘I want nothing to do with you,’” she recalled between tears. He demanded Johanne get an abortion, a plea echoed by her parents. “I wanted to die. I wanted to die,” she said. Johanne attempted suicide twice. The second time she intentionally drove into oncoming traffic.

Her brother, whose name was redacted at his request, intervened and said suicide may hurt her own chances of reaching heaven. He knew friends who had received their green cards in America. Those friends offered to allow Johanne, her brother and his wife to live with them.

Johanne’s parents were sure she would not survive the route and mocked her for trying. “I risked my life because I did not have one,” Johanne says now.

Johanne singled out her seven days in the Darién Gap as the most dramatic and emotionally draining portion of her two-month journey north. The Gap is a 60-mile stretch of lawless jungle connecting Columbia and Panama and a looming obstacle for refugees en route to the U.S.-Mexico border, many of whom are ill-prepared or unaware of the dangers within the perilous overland pass (frequently used by drug cartels).

“You can’t imagine,” Johanne said, as she tried to find the words to describe her experience.

The roadless route meanders through dense jungle and steep mountainsides coated in slick mud. In the middle of the night, Johanne said, mysterious men would appear and point their guns at refugees on the trail while demanding their possessions. Johanne said the bandits may have been the very men paid to guide the people through.

As a result, refugees stole from one another during the day, she said, including food rations. “I was so hungry and worried my baby was too,” she said.

Johanne passed dead bodies and heard of babies abandoned on the trail by parents who could not carry the extra weight. She had close encounters with anacondas swimming in the Gap’s central watershed where people collected drinking water and went to the bathroom.

The journey included several brief stints in fuel-powered rafts, bouncing between rocky riverbanks, where she had to crouch down and squeeze inside the ragged inflatable boat. Johanne said she was in pain as her bulging belly was contorted and compressed against unfamiliar bodies.

After seven grueling days in the jungle, she arrived at a strained refugee camp in Panama. “I felt proud,” she recalled. She was determined to make it to the United States, driven by the desire to provide a future for her child in the U.S.

Johanne is grateful her brother was on the trip. Single women on the route face heightened risk of sexual assault. One in every four women has experienced harassment or abuse in the Darién Gap, according to the United Nations.

In Mexico there were no refugee camps. “I slept on the street and begged for food,” she said.

But some churches offered water and use of their electric outlets for passing people to charge their phones. She called to update her brother’s friends about their progress, they would be in the U.S. soon, she said. And their reassurance lifted her spirits. But, when Johanne and her brother finally crossed the border, those friends never picked up the phone.

Without solid contacts in the country, Johanne, her brother and his family were bussed to New York City. She remembers shivering as she stepped onto the street in Midtown Manhattan outside The Roosevelt Hotel, the intake center for all refugees entering the five boroughs. “I had never felt such cold,” she said.

Despite their protest, Johanne and her brother were placed in separate shelters. She was placed at The Row. But her brother and his wife were sent to a place in Brooklyn.

As Johanne entered her third trimester, she settled into her new single-bed hotel room and peered out over the unfamiliar urban skyline. She had seen elaborate TikToks from friends in New York projecting scenes of freedom, success and happiness. But her arrival was a wake-up call.

She did not expect New Yorkers to hug her on the street but did hope for safety and acceptance. “We just want to live and feel seen,” she said.

In January 2023, Johanne underwent a cesarean section at The Women’s Health Medical Center at Bellevue Hospital, part of the city’s public health system, where most refugee women are taken for OB-GYN care. The hospital has assisted with over 300 refugee births this year.

Johanne named her son Bidenly-Niklaus. The latter half of his name comes from a TV character whose father abandoned him at birth. “The nurses thought I was crazy,” Johanne said with a slight smile.

Back at The Row, she posted TikToks on motherhood. They showcased her curly-haired, smiling son dressed in patriotic American apparel while the national anthem played in the background. “I want him to be an American soldier,” she said.

Under the 14th Amendment, all persons born on American soil are subject to protection under U.S. law. Bidenly is thus afforded “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But Johanne is still at risk of deportation if her paperwork does not go through.

Johanne has 30 days left until her time at The Row expires. She heard families are being relocated to Floyd Bennett Field, a flood-prone former airfield in southeast Brooklyn, a 90-minute commute to Manhattan. Johanne said she would sleep in the streets before living at the semi-congregate site.

“We go through so much pain to live a life that never exists,” she says, placing a palm on her son’s small head.

Public Housing Residents Suffer as Hurricane Reconstruction Rolls On: ‘I’ll Die in This Dust’

Ashley Miller – October 2024

Four days after Hurricane Sandy swept through Red Hook, Brooklyn, Domingo Navarro waded into Dwight Street wearing his neighbor’s rain boots to assess the damage done to his 1993 Honda Civic. The 54-year-old union leader was distraught to find his vehicle, which he relied on for transportation to work in New Jersey, submerged in three feet of sludge.

Pushing against pressure from the flooded street side, Navarro managed to pry open the driver’s side door. The orange interior was damp and reeked of raw sewage. Navarro tried to start the ignition and was nearly electrocuted. “I could’ve been fried!” he said.

A decade later, Navarro faces a new car-related conundrum: The horde of contractors tasked with the ongoing Sandy reconstruction efforts in Red Hook routinely park in spots for public housing residents.

“It’s not just our spots,” said Navarro. “We get no respect, and we’re the ones who live here. This is our neighborhood!”

Blocks from an Amazon warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront, the New York City Housing Authority’s Red Hook Houses comprise 28 six-story brick buildings within a 60-acre perimeter. After Sandy pummeled the public housing development, FEMA proposed a $550 million reconstruction plan. The (historically slow) federal response agency estimated construction would end in 2017.

Five years later? The work shows no signs of slowing.

Scaffolding shades the concrete landscape. Walking through a maze of metal, it’s difficult to tell one building from the next. All green space has been excavated into mountains of mud.

When Hurricane Sandy touched down in 2012, water levels reached eight feet in sections of Brooklyn. Residents of the Red Hook Houses, the second-largest public housing development in New York City, were left without heat, power and water for weeks.

“It was like New Orleans after Katrina,” said Frances Brown, 72, president of the Red Hook East Residents Association, recalling the residual wreckage.

Red Hook is a Moses-era enclave on Brooklyn’s western shoreline. The neighborhood sits beside one of the most polluted waterways in the country: the Gowanus Canal. During Sandy, the sewer system overflowed and a salty surge of stinky flood water saturated the area. (Yuck.)

Brown said tenants on the first floor had sewage dripping from their sinks and bathtubs. “We still have mold and mildew around from the dampness and disease of all that flood water,” she said.

Sandy’s wrath affected 60,000 public housing residents at 35 NYCHA developments. According to City Comptroller Brad Lander, all the house are grappling with overdue reconstruction. “The lack of progress acutely affects public housing residents,” he said.

On the other end of the neighborhood, the high-income hub has largely recovered from the storm. Meanwhile, NYCHA residents suffer through dust while construction workers inch away at recovery efforts.

So far, they have raised the electrical systems several floors, brought in backup generators and resurfaced “some of the roofs in the development,” according to Hana Kassem, the head architect behind the blueprints. (But she would not provide the exact numbers.) She said they’re raising all the lawns between the structures to create water storage centers. “But the process is time intensive,” Kaseem said. And the timeline is out of her hands.

Some Red Hook residents say if the problem afflicted a more affluent area, the project would be complete and contractors would cause less of a disruption.

“If this was a different neighborhood,” said Navarro. “If we had more money and more of us voted, the city would’ve taken care of this by now.”

With a little over 11,000 residents in Red Hook, over half the population lives in the Red Hook Houses, according to data from the Red Hook Community Health Center. 47% of the public housing residents are Hispanic and 45% are black. Only 2% are white.

“The area is just crumbling as opposed to being built up,” said Chris Perez, a 45-year-old longtime resident. “We had big park patches, but they dug up everything. When I look outside, it’s just fences, dirt, dust, and bulldozers.”

Perez said NYCHA crews have removed hundreds of trees during construction. But they will not replace them because FEMA won’t cover the cost. “Trees, shrubs, and other planting are not eligible for replacement,” Sara Wengfield, a California-based FEMA representative told me.

Will Holland, an urban landscape adjunct professor at the University of Virgina, is concerned the NYCHA contractors ripped out too much of the natural landscape. “Trees have a root system that helps to stabilize the soil, and with no more roots, it’s bad, it leaves the area susceptible to runoff,” he said.

But Brown, the Residents’ Association President, contends that most of the trees were dead before construction began. “I was glad they cut them down because some of them were rotten before the storm, and they were leaning so far I thought someone was gonna get hurt!”

Brown said residents complain about not feeling included in the construction-timeline conversation. She tells them, NYCHA held multiple meetings with the community to discuss the project.

“NYCHA showed the plans of what they were going to do, you know, and I don’t understand why people didn’t bring their concerns to earlier meetings,” she said.

Navarro said some residents could not attend the meeting. “Some of us work,” he said. “Some of us are tired after we work all day. We can’t make every meeting. And then they hold that against you, telling us we can’t complain. It’s unfair.”

Amid the back-and-forth, aging residents like George Broughton, 72, who’s lived in the development since 1965, feel that “it’s a fight for the next generation because I won’t be around. I’ll die in this dust.”

NYCHA’s communications manager, Michael Horgan, said over email that construction will be complete this fall. But contractors on the scene scoffed at this suggestion and said the project is far from finished.

“Look, it’ll probably be another year,” said Randall, a construction crew member. He said he’s tired of fielding complaints from residents about the prolonged timeline. “They [residents] just don’t understand,” he said, adding any big project is bound to have delays.

“There’s always gonna be one side saying this and another telling us that, but where is the truth?” said Broughton. “We live here. Don’t we deserve to know the truth?”

Another Red Hook resident, Pedro Sanchez, 39, said NYCHA tried tackling too many projects at once. “They dug up all the lawns on the East and West side,” he said. “They should’ve done one before doing both at once. It seems like common sense.”

One disgruntled NYCHA contractor enjoying a smoke break under scaffolding beside Red Hook East said, “It’ll be done when it’s done.”