Refugee youth find safe haven in Spokane through foster program

By Cassy Benefield | FāVS News Reporter

Updated: This story has been updated with the most recent numbers regarding how many children are in the care of the Federal Government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement program, as well as how many facilities they house these children in.

Beck Nickel remembers how much an “Introduction to Refugees” class impacted her a couple years ago, learning what they went through to get to the U.S. and what it was like for them once they arrived here. She took it as part of her training to become a tutor to Ukrainian teenagers assisting them in conversational English at Spokane’s International Rescue Committee (IRC) office. 

“That was really enlightening for me to understand fully what a refugee was,” Nickel said.

During that season of volunteering outside of her work as a naturopathic doctor, she saw a poster at IRC advertising the need for foster parents at Lutheran Community Services Northwest’s (LCSNW) Unaccompanied Refugee Minors (URM) Foster Care Program.

“After I saw that poster, it was just like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ Understanding what a refugee goes through and understanding how traumatizing it is for them to be reestablished in a new country,” she said. 

She had learned it was often more traumatizing coming to a new country than it was fleeing the hardship in their home country. Knowing these were minors on top of that, she was inspired by the work LCSNW was doing. So, in January she began applying to become a foster parent with her partner, Tom Flanigan — a mortgage banker, who has a soft spot for the underdog. He wasn’t as excited as she was about the program, remaining a bit lukewarm to the idea at first.

“She most certainly was the spark,” Flanigan said. 

However, the more they have gone through the process to become foster parents, the more excited he has become. They hope to foster an independent, older minor who they can help launch into adulthood.

He said, “If we could be a pit stop, like, ‘We’re going to fuel you up,’ helping them with some community,” they could also be their future home for holidays and just regular visits. They hope to be matched to someone in the fall.

Nickel and Flanigan are among a growing number of people interested in the program, which has seen increased inquiries recently.

Meeting urgent needs

Spokane’s LCSNW’s URM Foster Care program began in 2016, and since then they have served 76 youth, according to Shelly Hahn, LCSNW’s Inland Northwest district director.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the federal department that supports the URM Foster Care program, calls these children, “some of the most vulnerable minors in the world.” They represent 50 nationalities.

While the exact number of unaccompanied refugee minors awaiting foster placement is unknown, there are 1,999 unaccompanied alien children (UAC) in ORR care as Aug. 11. These children are defined as having no legal status and use 171 facilities and programs in 24 states, funded by the government. At least three of these shelters resided in Washington in 2018, reported Reveal.

Of these minors who are without legal status, some are granted the URM designation after their stories are told and qualify for this governmental foster care program.

“The kids that come through this program are insanely resilient,” Hahn said. 

There are also additional eligible statuses for foster care that Congress has established over time. As of May 2025, these include asylees, Cuban and Haitian entrants, certain minors with Special Immigrant Juvenile classification or status, victims of human labor or sex trafficking and more.

Those minors who have completed the paperwork, finished the assessments and met all the requirements are then added to a list LCSNW calls the “pipeline.” While on that list, they wait to be connected to what Hahn hopes will be their anchor in the U.S. that lasts over time, she said.

“If it’s not one of their caregivers, it could be an anchor in the program,” she said, explaining how some former clients will still call to chat or ask for advice once they’ve aged out of the program. 

Success, Hahn said, can also look like when clients have “the skills and abilities to support themselves long-term” and if they “feel confident and competent and [are] able to live a safe life here with connections.”

At the end of July, the program was serving six youth in an undisclosed group care facility and another six in foster homes. Another 18 young adults, ages 18-23 who have aged out of needing foster care, are also currently continuing on with LCSNW for further services.

A difficult journey

Most of the minors served come from Guatemala, Honduras and other Central American countries. In recent years, some have arrived from West African nations. These children have made the long journey across the ocean to South America before reaching the U.S. border.

The reasons they arrive without a parent vary, Hahn said. Early on in their program, they placed into foster care Rohingya youth from Burma whose parents were murdered under persecution, as well as Afghan minors whose families were killed in Afghanistan during war. 

Sometimes, the minors served come to the U.S. because they are fleeing persecution for being LGBTQ or because of a religious conversion outside of their family’s tradition. Sometimes it’s because they have been separated from their families by the U.S. government by a parent being deported and the child remaining or because they were lost when fleeing their home country, Hahn said.

The majority who make it to the U.S. who fit within foster care service qualifications are boys, with 25-30% being girls. Boys usually are more able to make the journey or are allowed to leave the family, LCSNW Foster Parent Recruiter Kelsey Doerr said.

Doerr and LCSNW Foster Parent Licensor April Gascon-Stricker said they have experienced an uptick of interest in the program the last several months since President Donald Trump’s second term began.

“We had 12 inquiries in July, which is a lot for us,” Doerr said. 

She and Gascon-Stricker compared it to the first year they started working together in 2023, when they received only one inquiry. They think it’s just been on people’s minds more in addition to wanting to find ways to help immigrants and refugees.

Doerr is tasked with bringing the families into the building, while Gascon-Stricker is tasked with expressing some of the harder realities that may come up. 

Since 2016, Spokane’s URM Foster Care program has received 543 inquiries with only 6% of those families moving forward with licensing.

“It’s not all sunshine and rainbows,” Doerr said. “It’s a big ask. It’s not a little donation. So, I feel like it’s a very niche group of people who are able to do this and are interested.”

The foster care process

Usually, those interested in becoming a foster parent will start with attending a Refugee Foster Care Info Session online. These take place on the third Wednesday of each month with two time options: noon-1 p.m. and 5-6 p.m.

Gascon-Stricker said those who do apply need to understand she or another licensor will be digging into their lives deeply wanting to know “everything about [them].” She also believes those who are the most successful in the program have some experience working with trauma, fostering children, working with other cultures or working with refugees. The realities these minors have lived through can be sobering.

She related a story about how the wife in a family who was about to be matched with a refugee minor just discovered in their paperwork that this minor was involved in a cartel for survival and had some serious trauma. They were overwhelmed thinking they could not handle this minor’s needs. Gascon-Stricker said she talked them “off the ledge” and gave them 24 hours to think on it before saying no.

“She emailed me later that day and she’s like, husband and I were talking, and we were just like, ‘OK, we understand all these things happened’ but dot, dot, dot ‘What if it could be really wonderful?’” Gascon-Stricker said, adding the family’s match has been great so far.

Despite what is learned about these minors and how shocking and intimidating their pasts may be to read, Doerr hopes people won’t be put off by making their decision.

“Every youth, no matter how big their challenges are, they deserve a loving home,” she said.

“It opens up your world”

Julie and Sam Hands agree. They have been foster parents with the program since 2021. They remember talking about becoming foster parents early in their marriage, but they put that conversation on the shelf until their youngest boys, twins, were in high school. They also have a son who is about four years older than the twins.

Julie Hands worked with international students at Spokane Community College when she met someone from LCSNW who told her about the program. 

“We were immediately interested,” she said. “I’ve always had a lot of interest in other cultures in the world and countries and languages and just the disparities between the luck of getting born here versus the unluck of getting born in Ghana or wherever.”

As a trilingual speaker of Swedish, Spanish and English, Julie Hands used to teach Spanish and English abroad in Sweden and Mexico and continues to help international students at her work.

Sam Hands, a self-employed contractor from Maine, said his wife thought it was a good time to foster when they were nearing the empty nest stage of their lives because they weren’t quite ready to have an empty house.

“I don’t quite remember it that way,” he said. “I think we both feel like we have a lot to give and want to give back, and it seemed like the time to do something like that.” 

The first youth they fostered came from a small, mountainous village in Guatemala with no electricity, Sam Hands said. 

“Working since basically from the time he could walk pretty much. Hard work. Watermelons. Corn. No running water. Drank from the river. Drank from the puddles,” he said describing the poverty that gave his foster child no future.

They fostered him for three years, and he’s since earned an associate’s degree and is transferring to Eastern Washington University.

Since then, they have fostered three more boys, one from Ghana and two from Honduras, all overlapping one another at one point. They still foster one of them who has one year of high school left.

When asked what they would say to people interested in taking steps toward becoming foster parents to URMs, they encouraged the journey. One reason was the support LCSNW gives to the parents and the clients in the program. 

Being a small and dedicated group, Sam Hands said, the staff are able to wrap around these relationships to provide the care and assistance needed to make these matches successful. The main reason, however, was because of the relationships themselves fostered over time between the families and the youth.

“Do it. It opens up your world. It opens up their world,” Julie Hands said. “It’s such a gift to give to a kid, and it’s a gift that they give to you.”

Sam Hands echoed his wife.

“Just do it,” he said. “You think you’re going to give something back, but we got a lot out of it.”