Someday, these three small rooms in Rockingham may hold the dreams of a family from far away. Someday, a family may return here after their day in a Boston immigration court, celebrating with their Vermont sponsors because they have received asylum in the United States.
For now, Steve Crofter works on the squiggle of pipes beside the shower. The important plumbing must all be in the heated space of the bathroom, because the basement of this barn is not heated or insulated. For now, Crofter’s partner, Laurel Green, sands molding on saw-horses in their living room across the road, where one wall is bare sheetrock.
“A friend said that some people would finish their own house before building one for someone else,” she says. “But having a painted living room is not going to save someone’s life. The safe haven will.”
For now, Sandy Martin, a volunteer, mills donated lumber for use in the rooms. When mutual friends told him about this haven for asylum seekers, he thought about his own Mennonite ancestors, who escaped religious persecution in Germany and were given sanctuary in Pennsylvania.
The United Nations says asylum seekers are people who have fled their home countries because of a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
Unlike refugees, who are vetted outside of the United States before they arrive, asylum seekers arrive in the United States and — at least ideally — immediately turn themselves in to authorities. Typically, they are taken into custody until a preliminary hearing. If their asylum application clears that first hurdle, they are released until their next hearing.
Crofter is building a safe haven for asylum seekers because in 2015, when he was semi-retired, he went to Texas to put his Quaker ideas about social justice to work. He volunteered with Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley to aid asylum seekers from Central America. His favorite job was cleaning the showers. Once, he handed a 10-year-old boy a towel and heard how the boy had been kept in solitary confinement away from his mother while in US detention. Once, he handed soap to a mother and heard how she was so sure her 12-year-old daughter would be raped on the journey that she put her on birth control pills before they left.
Even sitting at his kitchen table 2,000 miles away, Crofter’s voice grows thick and his eyes glint when he tells these stories. “These people are clearly fleeing for their lives,” he says.
Last summer, Crofter created the Community Asylum Seekers Project, Inc. (CASP), to bring a family of asylum seekers to Vermont while they wait for their day in court. He set up a GoFundMe page to accept donations. In January, two staffers from the Boston-based Refugee Immigration Ministry (RIM), which has been helping refugees and asylum seekers for 30 years, came to Vermont to train CASP’s volunteers.
Crofter made sure the Vermont Law School clinic would take the family’s case. According to data from Syracuse University, 93 percent of the asylum seekers who go to immigration court without a lawyer are denied.
Crofter knows that settling refugees in Rutland caused controversy, but is not expecting any for this effort. He believes that one family, likely a mother travelling alone with children, not receiving taxpayer support and likely from a Central American country that no one associates with terrorism, will be welcome in Rockingham.
Last winter, walls, windows, insulation and a shower stall went into what had been the Crofter and Green’s guest room in the barn. The bedroom walls were painted pale green. The bathroom and sitting room were painted shades of yellow. A new well was drilled, because the old one couldn’t handle a new bathroom across the road from the main house. That cost more than the couple expected.
The guest quarters will be as environmentally sustainable as the main house, so it will also have a composting toilet – a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat, its contents topped off with sawdust. The only kitchen is in the main house, twenty steps across the road and down a short driveway.
For now, Crofter, Green and Martin take a break from work on the safe haven. They join hands around the kitchen table to give silent thanks for the lunch Green has prepared. There is still work to be done on the rooms and money to be raised. Asylum seekers are not allowed to work while they wait for their hearing. The family will need food and clothing, toothpaste and soap.
Soon, the rooms will be ready. Then Crofter, Green and the CASP volunteers will wait until a family of asylum seekers aided by Catholic Charities or RIM needs a place to stay. It will be a family that is willing to travel to a place they have never been before, a place that is colder than they are used to, a place where almost no one speaks their language. But they will come because they need the sanctuary that they can only find in these three small rooms in Rockingham.
This article ran in The Rutland Herald on April 21, 2017. All rights reserved.
The Rutland Herald
4/21/2017
