More than 100 asylum-seekers are living in two hotels in South King County. They have until Feb. 26.
More than 300 are living at a DoubleTree in SeaTac. They have until June or July.
Groups of 20 or so are living together in a handful of Airbnbs, covered until the end of the month or until fundraising wanes.
About 100 more are in a block of rooms at a hotel in Tukwila. The rooms require $100,000 a month in private donations.
Individual donations plus government funding — a little from the city of Seattle, a little more from King County — and help from local homelessness nonprofits are currently footing the bill for people who are searching for a warmer, drier, cleaner space to stay as Tukwila’s Riverton Park United Methodist Church continues to exceed capacity of how many people can cram into its meeting rooms, the sanctuary and the lawn.
As the money runs out, though, many of the region’s newly arrived migrants and asylum-seekers could likely return to the place they first landed.
The Washington legislative session could provide some relief. There is money in the governor’s proposed budget for shelter, a bill to give the state more authority to help asylum-seekers and a growing urgency as immigrants and their advocates become more vocal about what they see as the local and state governments’ responsibilities to help them.
Still, the church, run by the Rev. Jan Bolerjack, is the only place that guarantees someone will try to help. But even Bolerjack is starting to see the limits of the church’s abilities.
“I thought we were just kind of holding it until someone else took it,” Bolerjack said. “No one’s taken it yet.”
King County’s migrant and asylum-seeker crisis has continued to slowly grow over the last year, estimated to exceed 1,000 people now. Almost all of them come through Bolerjack’s church doors. Seattle and King County have chipped in to help, and Tukwila officials are providing financial and oversight support to the church. But they all say their funds can’t last.
This splintering and limited funding for hotels means that more and more people are facing the threat of losing their shelter, again and again, and that’s adding stress to already harrowing circumstances.
“It’s so full of trauma to not have any assurance of where you’re going to be next week,” Bolerjack said Tuesday.
Since migrants first started arriving at Bolerjack’s church in December 2022, frustration has grown over the conditions. Many don’t want to be there. Neither they nor the church expected the church campus to be their long-term home, many for months on end.
As dozens of arrivals turned into hundreds — the Tukwila church sheltered up to 500 people toward the end of last year — more families with women and children were left to sleep in tents on the church’s grounds. Rats have become a growing problem, and Public Health – Seattle & King County has recorded cases of chickenpox and hepatitis A at the camp.
Bolerjack, too, is unhappy with the conditions. She said she was hopeful that after government leaders convened at the church more than 4½ months ago someone would step in to take the brunt of the work off the church’s shoulders.
The church has finally started to turn away single adults. Bolerjack estimates that happens about 15 times a week on average.
Still she finds room for families, like Rodeivis Blanco’s.
Blanco and her family of nine showed up to the United Methodist church by midmorning Tuesday requesting water.
It was not the first city in which Blanco, her sister, her brother-in-law and their seven kids looked for help after leaving their home country of Venezuela about six months ago, she estimates, where she was earning $8 month.
But after finding an overloaded emergency system in Denver — around 40,000 migrants have arrived in Colorado’s capital as of last month, according to The New York Times — that forced them to sleep on the streets, the family set out for a place they heard about while journeying through Mexico: Bolerjack’s church in Tukwila.
It is a small mystery how Bolerjack’s and Riverton’s names are on the lips of advocates, migrants and social service agencies on the Mexico-U.S. border.
On Tuesday afternoon, sifting through coats in the church’s free clothing bank, Blanco said, “This is the best place I’ve been.”
Currently, the county’s asylum-seekers have received free legal aid, donations and English-language classes through volunteers and some advocacy groups, but there is no guaranteed funding to help people afford housing while they await their asylum trials. And due to federal regulations, asylum-seekers have to wait months before receiving their work permits, leaving hundreds without any way to support themselves.
State Rep. Mia Gregerson, D-SeaTac, has proposed House Bill 2368 to give more power to the state’s Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance to manage a coordinated, statewide response to the crisis and support migrants and asylum-seekers even if they don’t qualify for federal aid. The bill was passed out of the House this week and will need to pass out of the Senate by March 1 to make it to Gov. Jay Inslee’s desk.
Inslee proposed $8.4 million in his supplemental budget — a one-time infusion of $5 million for the Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance and $3.4 million to extend hotel stay, food and services, said Mike Faulk, spokesperson for the governor’s office.
However, advocates and service providers say that’s not enough. They are pushing for $25 million in the state’s operating budget.
“We’re really encouraging people to talk to their legislators to support asylum-seekers who are escaping very dangerous situations in their home countries and are now finding themselves sleeping outside with their kids on the streets of America,” said Jon Grant, chief strategy officer for the Low Income Housing Institute, which is providing shelter to 52 migrants using its tiny houses.
The Senate is planning to release its budget Sunday afternoon, according to Olivia Heersink, spokesperson for Sen. June Robinson, head of the Ways and Means Committee.
Even if money is allocated for aid, it will take months before people working on the ground, like Bolerjack, see any of it.
In the short term, there are Band-Aids being applied to a growing crisis.
In December, King County announced it would use $3 million to pay for 100 rooms at a DoubleTree hotel in SeaTac. It took until Feb. 1, according to spokesperson Chase Gallagher, to fill every room.
About 350 people are there now. The county plans to keep people there until summer, with officials hopeful state aid will appear by then.
“More investments are necessary to create sustainable solutions for asylum-seekers, and that is expected to come from state partners,” Gallagher said.
The city of Seattle recently agreed to temporarily pay for the hotel stays of more than 100 people, largely from Venezuela, who were picked up in Tukwila before severe weather hit last month by an organization called Save the Kids and promised long-term stays at a Quality Inn in Kent. But that group quickly stopped paying the hotel bills, which forced the hotel’s owners to threaten eviction at the end of January.
Using $200,000 that its City Council allocated last year in anticipation of issues facing migrants and refugees, the city first extended the migrants’ stay at the Kent hotel before transitioning families to two new hotels, which it is paying for until Feb. 26. Seattle had avoided taking a lead role in the response up to then because the majority of asylum-seekers have landed outside its city limits.
Hamdi Mohamed, director of Seattle’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, said her team is educating hotel guests about homeless services offered throughout King County in the hopes that people don’t just exit hotels and return to Bolerjack’s church.
If other government assistance doesn’t appear to help people in hotels, Mohamed said, “people could return to the church for short-term accommodation.
“It’s not ideal.”
Many of the hotel guests spread across South King County have turned to social media to advocate for better shelter and ask for help. People showed up to a Seattle City Council meeting on Jan. 30 and later talked to Metropolitan King County Council members.
This sentiment rose after the region experienced severe weather in mid-January that dropped into the single digits, forcing Bolerjack and government leaders to bring into shelter about 200 people who were living in tents.
After that severe weather episode, a group of migrants — many of whom are single adults and are last on the priority list for shelter — refused to return to the Riverton Park United Methodist Church where they’d been staying.
One of them, who asked to not be identified for safety reasons after fleeing Angola, said in January: “We’re not going back there. … We had finally gotten out of the very bad situation to living in a better place, and then it was taken away so quickly.”
“They were constantly around,” Adriana Medina said through a translator of the rats on church property. “Sometimes they walked over you.”
She’s currently living in a temporary hotel funded by the city of Seattle, and she’s one of the leaders of Comunidad sin Fronteras, which is advocating for more government and private support to ensure people in hotels don’t end up outside again.
Since the first family showed up to Bolerjack’s doors in December 2022, more than 800 people have stayed on her property, she estimates, and, so far, only one family has been granted asylum status, she said, while up to three have received their work permits.
Mary’s Place, one of the largest homelessness service providers for families, has slowly welcomed more and more migrants into its shelters. Currently, 63% of all families in its shelters — 121 out of 191 — identify as refugees, migrants or asylum-seekers, according to spokesperson Linda Mitchell.
But because people seeking asylum have to wait months until they can work, it’s leading to longer shelter stays and, in turn, reducing the number of families Mary’s Place can serve, Mitchell said.
“These families, through no fault of their own, are not able to work and find housing,” she added.
That means the Blancos could rely on the Tukwila United Methodist church for shelter for months.
On Tuesday afternoon, after finding free coats and blankets, Blanco starts assembling a wide orange camping tent outside with her sister and brother-in-law. They carry pallets and old folding tables onto a patch of brown land on church property. The grass has all worn away.
They set up a pack-and-play for her sister’s youngest, so the parents can work.
And she sends her oldest son, 9, and his cousin to retrieve their luggage from the church’s entryway.
The two boys roll the suitcases outside. One is wearing a backpack with a yellow lion strapped on the outside of it. Together, they bop across the parking lot to their new tent home.
Staff reporters Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks and Manuel Villa contributed to this report.