Marin campus will be shelter for migrant youths
St. Vincent’s School for Boys in San Rafael will soon become a center to temporarily shelter unaccompanied migrant boys.
The transition is occurring as the number of undocumented migrants entering the U.S. continues to grow, as well as the portion of the migrants who are unaccompanied minors.
St. Vincent’s School for Boys was founded as an orphanage in 1853 following a cholera epidemic. It is one of the oldest institutions west of the Mississippi River dedicated exclusively to the care of traumatized boys.
Until recently, it was licensed by the state to operate a 52-bed short-term residential therapeutic program serving up to 60 youths a year age 7 to 18. The boys were referred from in-patient psychiatric centers and county agencies throughout Northern California.
Ellen Hammerle, chief executive of Catholic Charities San Francisco, said her nonprofit was forced to make a change after the state decided to convert short-term residential therapeutic programs into institutes for mental disease.
“With an institute for mental disease you’re not eligible for Medi-Cal dollars,” Hammerle said. “It’s more private pay. It changes our clientele. We just didn’t feel it met our mission to do that, and it was not financially viable to be honest. It’s very upsetting.”
As a result, Catholic Charities began to assess how it might reconfigure the program.
“As part of our research, we discovered that the Office of Refugee Resettlement was looking into expansion of their shelter program,” Hammerle said. “We applied and we were awarded funding.”
Hammerle said the boys St. Vincent’s will be working with will be similar to the youths the center is serving now.
“Kids who have experienced one type or trauma or another,” Hammerle said. “We felt like we know that population, we know how to serve them.”
About two dozen youths who were being housed at St. Vincent’s are being sent back to their homes or to other centers. St. Vincent’s School for Boys will reopen in its new incarnation in December or January.
Hammerle said the school’s entire staff, which includes therapists and case managers, will be staying on. She said the school will be able to accommodate up to 40 migrant boys ranging in age from 9 to 17 in most cases.
When unaccompanied minors are taken into custody they are housed initially in detention centers run by the U.S. Border Patrol. By law, they are supposed to be moved to the shelter system operated by the Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours.
Many migrant minors have a family member or friend in the United States who is willing to serve as their sponsor, and they are typically allowed to leave the shelter and live with that person while they await immigration proceedings.
Hammerle expects the migrant boys coming to St. Vincent’s will remain there for only about six weeks. During that time, they will receive educational assessments, immunizations and instruction in English. She said many of the boys who will be temporarily housed at St. Vincent’s are likely to have sponsors in California.
The number of people eager to leave their countries of origin to enter the United States is enormous. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, by the end of June border officials had already detained people more than 1.74 million times, breaking the previous record of 1.73 million unauthorized crossings in fiscal 2021.
The Council on Foreign Relations reported in December that the United States is seeing a rise in apprehensions of unaccompanied migrant children, most from Central America, along its southern border. The report stated that immigration authorities encountered nearly 150,000 unaccompanied minors at or near the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2021 fiscal year, a record despite a dip in October.
According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, between the beginning of the federal fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2021, and the end of August, 118,486 migrant children were released to sponsors in the United States. During that period 358 were released to sponsors in Marin, up from 246 in fiscal year 2021.
“That’s record-setting,” said Lucia Martel-Dow, a former Canal Alliance immigration lawyer and a San Rafael Board of Education trustee, responding to the Marin number.
While the boys being sent to St. Vincent’s will be dispersed to sponsors all across the state, the minors placed with sponsors in Marin place new demands on local schools and often need extra help in adjusting to living in a different culture and coping with psychological trauma.
Neither San Rafael City Schools nor the Novato Unified School District were able to supply data Monday on the number of migrant youths who registered for classes this fall.
Between 2011 and 2020, San Rafael City Schools, which includes the San Rafael Elementary School District and the San Rafael High School District, added 1,045 migrant teenagers to its high schools and another 1,208 migrant children to its middle and elementary schools.
Between the 2017-18 school year and the beginning of this school year, 1,081 migrant youths enrolled in the Novato Unified School district.
In the past, additional support has been provided to migrant minors by North Marin Community Services and Bay Area Community Resources. Last month, Marin supervisors increased to $308,000 the sum the county is paying BACR to address the emotional, social and physical health needs of migrant youths.
The contract funds a full-time “newcomers” services specialist at Davidson Middle School in San Rafael, mentorship for newcomer students and workshops for newcomer families.
Canal Alliance is also providing migrant youths with legal representation. Joana Castro Simonini, an attorney for Canal Alliance, said migrant youths who receive representation are commonly allowed to remain in the United States.
However, Simonini said that even with a staff that includes five attorneys, four paralegals, two legal assistants, an outreach coordinator and an operations manager, Canal Alliance lacks the capacity to represent the high number of migrant youths arriving in Marin.