Hanna Wolfe knew she would have bad empty nest syndrome when her son moved out of home. She considered becoming a foster parent. Instead, she opened her home - and her heart - to a pair of young asylum seekers who came to the United States in search of safety and opportunity.
It all started six months ago when Wolfe started volunteering with Team TLC NYC, a local organisation that provides support to migrants and asylum seekers in New York City.
Hannah Wolfe opened her New York home to migrants from South America Credit: SBS Dateline
“They're coming off the buses and they just get dumped spewed out on the mean streets with no direction, nothing,” Wolfe told Dateline. “Some of the people who ended up here had been turned away from three shelters. One of the team members I work with had found them crying and freezing on the street without proper clothing.”
One day, a team member at Team TLC asked her whether she could take someone in for a night or two.
“At the highest point, about two months ago, there were nine of us living here,” she says. “There was someone on the couch, and then there were three or four people sleeping in my son’s room, all crammed together on the bed. And then there were two more people in my office.”
Since last year, Wolfe has been living with Raulimar, 29, from Venezuela, and soft-spoken 20-year-old Kevin from Ecuador.
To make it to the US, Raulimar crossed the Darién Gap, a 100km-long overland path between Colombia and Panama that runs through mountains, rainforest jungle, and swamps and is considered one of the most dangerous migrant routes in the world. Unable to afford safe passage for her three children, she had to leave them behind with her parents.
“Obviously, I migrated for my kids,” she says. “Now it’s my turn to fight. There’s nothing else to do other than to miss them and to work to be with them soon.”
Kevin, 20, says he came to the US because of the crisis in his home country of Ecuador and in order to help his mother and younger siblings. Credit: SBS Dateline
The two are applying for asylum but they will join a queue with over 180,000 backlogged cases.
“I still have people asking, ‘Do you need socks? Do you need a casserole?’ I’m like, ‘No’”, says Wolfe.
“It’s [US]$15,000 ($22,300) a person for a lawyer. Where is that money going to come from? The lawyers are booked out for years. And without representation, no one will get their papers. The other [challenge] is finding work. They are separated from their families. They want to bring their kids over, their partner, their mother and that takes papers and money.”
She is determined to help Raulimar and Kevin.
“I would do anything for them in the same way that I would do anything for my son,” she says. “I really like them, and this is now their home. They can stay here forever. It feels like family, definitely.”
