A House with Two Rooms - The Advocates for Human Rights

Refugees entering the United States through the United States’ Refugee Program have legal status
as refugees upon their admission. Refugees are authorized for employment and have limited access
to certain public assistance programs. Local resettlement and assistance programs, affiliated with
the national Voluntary Agencies and funded on a per capita basis by the federal Office of Refugee
Resettlement, provide short-term practical and financial assistance to resettled refugees in the months
immediately following their arrival. After one year, refugees are required to register for lawful
permanent resident status; five years after admission, they may apply for citizenship.
aSylum
My aunt left the children at the refugee camp and went into Freetown to call
my parents in the United States. My aunt discovered that my parents had
previously given a friend all their savings to come to Sierra Leone and find
the family and return them safely to the U.S. Instead, this person had used
the money to bring their own family members back to the US instead of me
and my family.
My parents were able to wire enough money to my aunt to get a car and bring
all of us children to Freetown. My parents were then able to successfully send
a member from their church in the United States to go to Sierra Leone and
bring us to the United States…once we got to New York, we immediately
claimed asylum. 305
While more than 30,000 Liberians were resettled as refugees in the United States, 306 thousands more
sought asylum in the United States based on their fear of return to Liberia. Like refugee status, asylum
may be granted to persons who have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of their race,
religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Unlike the refugee
resettlement process, however, asylum applications are made by individuals who are in the United
States. Those granted asylum receive similar, although not identical, protection from return to their
home country as refugees, while those denied asylum ultimately face deportation from the United
States.
I was already in America when Monrovia fell, and once the Liberians arrived
here in the United States shortly thereafter in large waves, the system was
not ready for them. It took almost four to five years for the processing of
asylum applications, and [Temporary Protected Status] (TPS) did not come
until maybe 1991. In the interim, the immigration service was not giving
people asylum and not making decisions, it was simply accepting people’s
applications, giving work authorization and then the files lingered. It
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