CLEVELAND — Like many cities, Cleveland is preparing to welcome refugees flown to the U.S. from Afghanistan in the last month to escape turmoil there.
The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a nonprofit that helps settle refugees in Cleveland, told 3News that it has pledged to help 100 refugees.
Darren Hamm, the committee’s director, said a family has been “allocated” to the group and is arriving within the week.
The committee helps find housing, jobs and support services for refugees and has been helping those from Afghanistan settle here since 2002.
Hamm said they have lived quietly on Cleveland’s near West Side and in the inner-ring suburbs.
“Like many groups, they come here and they put their head down and get to work and succeed, building family and community around town,” he said.
Hamm said the committee has been overwhelmed by support from Clevelanders wanting to donate supplies and money to refugees from Afghanistan.
“About two weeks ago, we were scratching our head about how to engage volunteers and that was about the time Kabul was falling,” Hamm said. “Shortly after that we got 10 calls per hour for the next two weeks.”
Also helping is businessman Jason Lin. He escaped Vietnam on a U.S. military plane a week before communist forces captured Saigon in 1975.
After a month in an Arkansas refugee camp, Lin was placed with a host family in Cleveland.
“I don’t’ got nothing that time when I come,” said Lin.
In the decades that followed, he opened a half-dozen restaurants and developed properties in low-come parts of town.
Now, he’s helping Afghanistan refugees who escaped aboard U.S. planes by storing in one of his buildings donated supplies awaiting their arrival.
“I said, 'what can I do,'” Lin said. “They said, ‘we need some space to do it,’ and I said, ‘sure, come right over. No problem.’”
The committee, which has been helping refugees for decades under different names, is the same group that helped Lin settle in Cleveland.
“I said I’m in 100 percent,” Lin said. “Especially the agency helping me. Without them I don’t have today.”
Lin, who was a translator for the U.S. Army in Vietnam, said helping refugees is a matter of life and death.
“Refugees – we come from a place with no return. So we build up a better life what we can for our younger generation.”
The U.S. is vetting about 60,000 Afghanistan evacuees. Most of the background checks and interviews take places on military camps. Refugees are not released to any cities before they have been cleared by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Hamm said.
He said local groups say Cleveland has resources to accommodate about 300 of them. The nonprofit U.S. Committee for Refugees has been placing refugees from Afghanistan since 2002. They typically land in neighborhoods on Cleveland’s west side and in the Western suburbs, which is where the newest one are expected to settle.
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