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Strong winds and cold rain battered the streets of Portland, Maine, where Louisma Dosou, his wife and two children huddled outside a shelter for their family last week.
“They have no place for us,” Dosou, 40, said Wednesday morning. The family had been in the small coastal town for about a week and still had nowhere to lay their heads. Every place they try is full.
“We’ve been sleeping on the street, in the airport,” he said, shaking against the wind coming in from the Atlantic. “I don’t have a home, I don’t have a place to rest with my wife and children. They are sick, they have a fever.”
Dosou’s wife, Rodeline Celestine, covered their four-and-a-half-year-old daughter with a thin blanket as they knelt behind Dosou. The girls wear socks over little pink flip flops.
The family was among a group of asylum seekers who stopped at the Chestnut Street Family Services shelter that morning before trying to find somewhere else to sleep for the night. One woman was in labor for two or three weeks, her husband said.
Dosou and Celestine fled the chaos in Haiti, traveling north from Brazil for the past three years in search of a safe new home. Their goal is to get to Canada. Today, they are among about 1,500 asylum seekers in Portland, population 68,000, where services are increasingly being used by migrants, many of whom hope to continue on to Canada.
“We can no longer guarantee shelter,” said Kristen Dow, director of health and human services for the city, about 230 kilometers southeast of the US border with Quebec. Quebecers vacation on nearby beaches in the summer.
Save for a few exceptions, asylum seekers cannot cross into Canada on foot, following changes to the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) with the US earlier this spring.
Speaking in her office behind a waiting room filled with asylum seekers, Dow said the city and local organizations are using almost every empty space left to keep people from sleeping in the cold. However, in the past few weeks, Dow realized that something had to be done.
He remembers the night in February when he was called at 8:30 pm – the family shelter and overflow area with carpets for 36 people was full – and there were 40 people waiting outside in -10 C weather.
Dow asked if the 40 people could get in if the workers took the mats and put them all on the seats. “I said, ‘Then let’s do it.’ There are kids who go to school and sleep on the couch at night. I mean, it’s really heartbreaking,” he said.
In mid-April when the local basketball team’s season ended, the city set up 300 beds in the stadium, known as the Expo. Within a week it was full.
When CBC News visited the Expo last week, a crowd of about 20 people gathered outside to talk to reporters and photographers, asking when Canada would let all the asylum seekers go again – saying their children were showing signs of malnutrition because they were eating only bread. , expired bread and milk.
Almost all of them said they wanted to cross into Canada on the Roxham Road, an unofficial border crossing between Quebec and New York in the north near Plattsburgh, a town 100 kilometers south of Montreal.
The crossing was effectively closed on March 25, after STCA renegotiations closed a loophole that allowed asylum seekers to simply walk across the border before handing themselves in to authorities. Quebec has pressed Ottawa to replace the STCA, saying its resources are running low after 40,000 people crossed Roxham Road over the past year.
CBC News has been following the impact of the closure, which has resulted in many asylum seekers stranded in the US– after a week, a month or even years of traveling through as many as a dozen countries to find a safe place.
Portland is a popular stop on the way to Canada for French-speaking asylum seekers because of its small Central African community, the country’s refugee settlement history, and the word that Mainers are kind and friendly.
Since the STCA changes, “we haven’t seen people move forward,” Dow said.
Alex Mbando, 41 years old, Angolan father of four, clutched his one-year-old daughter Allegria outside the Expo.
“We hear Canada is looking for immigrants, but we come here and now they don’t want immigrants?”
Mufalo Chitam, executive director of the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition, an umbrella organization of 100 groups, said he knew of 11 families who had arrived in the previous 24 hours. The coalition is working to get it sent to neighboring municipalities that have recently volunteered to help.
“We’re constantly trying to play,” Chitam said in his office.
Dow and Chitam would like to see more help and funding from the federal and state governments, and some support or collaboration from Ottawa.
And with the end of Title 42, the pandemic-era US rule that blocked many migrants from crossing the southern border, even more people will reach northern migrant destinations, including Portland, Chicago and New York.
The church has allowed people to sleep indoors, squeezing and between the pews and in the basement. The pastors of the local African congregation have hosted many families in their homes. A soup kitchen at one Catholic church has served more than twice as many people as usual, trying to provide provisions to meet their needs.
The Salvation Army has housed 77 people, or about 20 families, on the gymnasium floor.
Mireille, a 39-year-old Congolese woman, has been sleeping there with her 12-year-old son since winter.
He postponed his trip to the northern border after his 14-year-old nephew was detained at the US-Mexico border.
“I regret living here and not being able to go home because I ran away from my country and I can’t go back,” he said. “How can you sleep like this? Every day, you wake up in pain.”
CBC News agreed not to use her last name because she fears repercussions for her safety or that of family members in Africa.
Exhausted children ran around him, screaming from the yellow cement wall. Outside, his son was playing with other children in the fenced parking lot. A boy, dribbling a basketball behind his back, his father told him that “when we have a house, he will put me in the basketball team.”
Across the street, the small office of the Maine Congolese Community Association fills every day with asylum seekers who want to escape the wind and ask for help with their immigration files.
“At the end of the day, we cry because we can’t sleep here and we know we have nowhere to go,” said Mardochee Mbongi, president of the association. Mbongi, 38, himself fled persecution in Congo in 2014 while working as a lawyer. He currently works as a supervisor at a pharmaceutical manufacturer but took a six-week leave to deal with the migrant situation in Portland.
A similar scene has played out in New York City and Chicago, which declared a state of emergency this week to ask for help from the National Guard to protect migrants. About 8,000 asylum seekers are in Chicago, which has a population of nearly three million.
“Per capita, Portland, Maine, has more asylum seekers than any other city in the country,” Dow said.
The local library has been running a program several times a week that allows asylum seekers to print documents and use other services for free.
Sarah Skawinski, director of the adult services library, said that, while she and her colleagues were overwhelmed, she understood why Canada was closing the STCA loophole.
“Sometimes you have to have boundaries to keep everything from falling apart,” he said.
For Chitam, the head of the coalition, the situation is part of history. She came to Maine from Zambia after her husband got a US green card in the early 2000s. He points to previous waves of migration to Maine beginning in the 1800s — Irish, even French-Canadians seeking temporary work that eventually stalled.
“Migration is not new. We only find ourselves in this era that is happening on our watch. So what should we do? We will be part of history to respond,” he said.
History, and life, said to come in circles, stories were looping and returning. But the wound remains, like a scratch on a record. Maxwell Chikuta, an entrepreneur with many ventures including a small African grocery store, came to Portland 22 years ago from Zambia after fleeing civil war in the Congo as a child.
His story was a success, but when this reporter asked how old he was, Chikuta’s voice tightened. Actually he wasn’t sure. His brother died in the war and his date of birth is confused.
He pulled up his pant leg, revealing shiny skin where a stray bullet had hit his bone as a child.
He wasn’t sure if he was eight or nine years old.
The Chikuta store offers asylum seekers housing. They can take a low price and fill, like corned beef and kwanga, a thick cake made from cassava flour.
“Not only selling food, but also mental health,” he said.
Migrants CBC News met in Portland said they will work to build a life in the U.S., but they all hope to go to Canada. “If you tell me [the border is] Open now, I’m going. I’m ready. Are you going to take me?” said Mbando.
A spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said the STCA is now working “as expected” following the changes in March. Asylum seekers must file a formal refugee claim online or at the port of entry.
Canada has said that with the new border agreement it will open up 15,000 places to immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, but has yet to provide additional details.
But that choice doesn’t apply to many in Portland right now.
For others, it is not known how long refugee claims last.
During the next few days in Portland, there was no sign of Louisma Dosou and her family.
CBC News was able to reach him later and learned that he had been taken to Sanford, a Maine town between Portland and Boston.
“Ça va bien,” Dosou managed a poor phone call, though he said he was still struggling to find food and a place to stay. The next day, he called to say that the organization had found a hotel room.
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