Posted on 03/26/2021 5:59:27 PM PDT by llevrok
A plan to house migrant children from the surging crisis at the US-Mexico border will leave a Renton foster family with no place to call home.
Edmundo Serena Sanchez said he and his wife were notified in February that they would have to vacate the Renton house where they have nurtured and raised Washington state foster children for nearly seven years.
“It was just senseless. Everything they did was irresponsible,” Serena Sanchez said of the move-out order that came after a year of lockdown from the coronavirus pandemic.
The couple have fostered about 20 children over the years in the spacious house along Lake Washington.
The house is part of a campus of facilities owned by the Friends of Youth, a non-profit based in Kirkland with a 70-year history of providing services and housing for homeless and foster youth.
“Friends of Youth has reviewed our organizational goals this past year, and we have chosen to pursue a different strategic vision,” stated a January 29 letter from the organization.
The letter said the house would be used “…to provide a different scope of services in support of unaccompanied youth.”
Unaccompanied youth is the term the federal government uses to describe the more than 10,000 children who crossed the US-Mexico border in recent weeks without an adult accompanying them. Parents have been sending their children to the U.S. in hopes that the Biden Administration would be more accepting of migrant children than the Trump Administration.
DeAnn Adams, chief program officer for Friends of Youth, told KING 5 the organization saw a new funding source with the federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement and decided to use the Howard's House – where Serena Sanchez and his foster family now live – as housing for undocumented immigrant children.
Serena Sanchez said the decision had a devastating impact on the four children in his foster care who will likely be required to move to new foster homes.
He says one child has been to the hospital with panic attacks. Another teenager ran away and has not come back.
“I worry very much about him because he’s 16 …17 years old and he doesn’t have a job,” said Serena Sanchez.
He and his wife, Paual, are licensed “therapeutic” foster parents, meaning they are specially training to foster children with severe behavioral problems.
“We choose to do teenagers because they’re really hard to find places for them,” he said.
The lack of therapeutic beds in the foster care system forced the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families to increasingly house children in hotel rooms and state office buildings, as reported by the KING 5 Investigators in previous stories.
Serena Sanchez said he and his wife will be able to find a place to live, but he likely can’t afford a house to offer a home to foster children.
Serena Sanchez said he’s astonished that the Friends of Youth would remove Washington children who are making strides in a stable foster home and replace them with children from the border.
“I do have concerns about that,” Serena Sanchez said.
Washington State Rep. Michelle Caldier, who has sponsored various foster care legislation, is also disturbed by the Friends of Youth decision.
Caldier is also a foster parent, and a former foster child, who understands the trauma of being relocated into a new home.
“Why on earth are they allowing this to happen to our most vulnerable youth? It’s wrong,” Caldier said, pledging to look into the issue when contacted by KING 5.
Caldier said she suspects that the organization has found better funding opportunities from the federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is desperate to avoid the criticism that President Trump faces when he was accused of locking migrant children in “cages” at the US border.
“There’s a reason as to why they are choosing to go with the ‘unaccompanied minors’ and change their program,” Caldier said. “They tend to chase the dollars.”
DeAnn Adams, from Friends of Youth, said that while they saw a new funding source with the federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, Adams denied that money was behind the organization’s decision to alter its strategic vision. She said she did not expect any financial gain by contracting with the federal government.
Edmundo Serena Sanchez, who did *you* vote for?
“Dr. Zhivago comes to mind.”
I have thought about that several times myself. I wonder how long it’s going to be before Dr. Zhivago is banned. The woke crowd might claim that it’s an unfair portrayal of communists.
I was going to give sympathy. But it’s not their home. It’s a private organization who is going a different direction.
It is probably only a matter of a few years before they start taking privately owned homes for this, or forcing homeowners to share with the invaders.
I might leave, but there would be a chard hole in the ground where my house was.
Does the third amendment protect the owners of private homes and institutions from the quartering of foreign mercenaries by the government?
Some evictions are more acceptable than others.
As more illegals make their way into this country our tent cities explode.
People in the bottom strata are competing and losing in the competition for limited housing in their price range
This may be legal, but it is just evil.
Yes, wouldn’t be surprised to see that myself.
I think it is legal. The non-profit owns and opeates the homes.
But why would they be so cavilier and send the foster kids to vacant office spaces (which they are) or empty school buildings with minimal supervision.
I do think the money from the Feds has some bearing on why.
I am merely stating situational facts, since most of the sheeple do not care about, or are not aware of, the situation we (as a country) are in...
I've been in this fight against communism for 70 of my 87 years both militarily & politically...
It is time for the grazing dildos to get their heads out of their asses and take meaningful action... Although, short of violence, it is, most likely, already too late...
IAC, for those like yourself, the best course of action is to follow your master's three simple rules:
Bow down!... Obey!... Snitch!...
I don’t intend to bow down to them or to you. I haven’t and I won’t. I’ve been in the fight most of my life. That said you still propose no solutions only accusations. Solutions are difficult I get that, but to tilt at windmills ain’t it. One man is not going to get far and getting organised has logistical hurdles of it’s own. We’re boxed in, there’s very little wiggle room.
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