As State Resources Strain, Houses of Worship Fill the Gap To Host Unhoused Immigrants

For the past four months, an immigrant mother from Uganda and her two children have slept in the basement of an Episcopal church in the Greater Boston area.

The woman, granted anonymity by The Crimson due to deportation concerns, left Uganda after her husband was killed for his membership in the opposition party. She fled the country with one of her six children, giving birth to another child during her journey to the United States.

“I lived in Belize for some time, and then I had to continue to Guatemala, from Guatemala to Mexico, then to America,” she said.

After arriving in Massachusetts, she was immediately placed in a Temporary Respite Center in Cambridge — a state-run shelter for Emergency Assistance eligible families that could not be immediately placed in a traditional EA unit.

But after two months, she and her children were forced to leave as the TRC shut its doors. As state funding for temporary centers expires, TRCs across Massachusetts are closing — leaving families without state housing support.

The Ugandan woman eventually received housing for herself and her children through the Episcopal City Mission — an organization that connects families with congregations who can offer housing and basic necessities.

As the state works to adapt and find alternative solutions to divert families from shelters, a network of nearly a dozen churches in the Greater Boston Area has collaborated with the Brazilian Workers Center — an immigrant support and advocacy organization— to fill in the gaps.

“We began working with the Brazilian Workers Center, which runs one of the family welcome centers, to identify when there were families falling through the cracks,” Hannah Hafter, an organizer at Episcopal City Mission, said.

‘The Beginning of the End’

In 2023, Massachusetts Governor Maura T. Healey ’92 issued a State of Emergency, citing the state’s diminished capacity to meet the needs of the increasing population of unhoused individuals.

“I would say that that was the beginning of the end of the guarantee to the right to shelter for eligible families,” Andrea M. Park, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute director of community driven advocacy, said.

As a result of the state of emergency, Healey limited Massachusetts’ right to shelter by imposing a cap of 7,500 families in the state-run Emergency Assistance program, leaving dozens of families on waitlists for shelters, without a place to stay.

The TRCs were created after advocacy groups, including MLRI, pressured the state to provide families on the waitlist with alternatives in response to the cap.

“If you’re going to have a waiting list, you have to have a place people can stay in the meantime,” Park said. “They can’t just be sitting outside on the sidewalk with their children.”

TRCs are not traditional shelters. They are large congregate sites, like gymnasiums, not originally designed to house families. During her time in the Cambridge TRC, the Ugandan woman and her children showered in exterior mobile bathrooms, which served the 80 residents of the shelter.

“It was extremely hard because the weather was cold, taking children outside to take shower — and when they come back, they will be coughing, sneezing,” she said.

But in July 2024, the situation became more challenging for families after the state limited stays in TRCs to five days. This policy has since been changed to 30 business days, with the option to apply for an extension.

“Whatever situation you are in, if you reach the time limit and you don’t get an extension, you are exited from the shelter,” Park said. “If you do not leave on the day you are supposed to leave, then you cannot come back for, I believe, a year.”

With the cap on the number of families in EA shelters and the 30-day limit on the TRCs, many families with children were forced to sleep in Boston Logan Airport.

The number of immigrant families eligible for the EA program has declined due to the nine-month stay limit on EA shelters and changes in federal immigration regulations — many of which were introduced by Former President Joe Biden in June 2024. Despite the decrease, advocates are still concerned about the reduced capacity.

“I can’t over emphasize how big a deal this is,” Park said of the reduced capacity.“We’re saying that you’re going to be found eligible, but you’re going to have to stay in a large room on cots with other people.”

‘A Safety Net’

As families struggle to find housing in the state, the BWC created a network of nearly 200 “host families” — including churches and individuals — to house immigrant families in the Boston Metro Area.

The BWC Host family network has operated since the fall of 2023, and was created as a “safety net” for families who were waiting for a call from a local shelter.

“Previously, there were a lot of families sleeping at Boston Logan and South Station, and the state was recognizing that, ‘Oh, hey, this is an emergency, we need to create resources for these families,’” Safi Chalfin-Smith, who runs the BWC Host family program, said. “That’s where the concept of the family welcome center was born.”

The BWC receives funding from the state government, and only aids families that are Emergency Assistance eligible — meaning the families are unhoused through no fault of their own. The majority of families in the program are immigrants.

While the majority of hosts are individuals, BWC has seen increased participation from churches in the last several months due to changing shelter policies.

“People are looking for ways to get involved as a community and building community is one way to really fight back against injustices,” she said. “We really just look to harness this interest and increase in wanting to help, into positive change, into actually helping.”

ECM learned at least 40 people, including children, were sleeping outside the Wollaston MBTA station, and they started working with the BWC to identify families without a place to sleep.

“Many of our grassroots partners asked us, as an advocacy organization that worked with churches, if any of our churches might be open to providing shelter,” Hafter, the ECM organizer, said.

ECM then contacted various houses of worship in the greater Boston area to ask them if they could host families. Nearly a dozen churches said they would help — including the church that currently houses the Ugandan woman.

According to a volunteer at the church, the congregation was moved by their faith to help the families. The church provides housing, as well as coordinating donations, providing translators, and helping source resources and food.

“The host family program is one way that we’re able to rapidly stabilize and house families when there might not be capacity in a shelter or a family might not have yet received a shelter placement call,” Chaflin-Smith said.

The Healey administration continues to work to address the problem by helping immigrants get work authorizations and dedicating a team at the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development to help shelter residents find jobs.

Though these efforts have tripled the number of successful exits from shelters in the state, Chaflin-Smith said that the host family program still plays an important role in helping EA eligible families.

“It’s a really important system and a safety net for these families who are trying to get into the shelter system,” she added.

Correction: April 8, 2025

A previous version of this article incorrectly described the Temporary Respite Center where the Ugandan woman stayed on one reference. The TRC is located in Cambridge, not Quincy.

—Staff writer Diego García Moreno can be reached at diego.garciamoreno@thecrimson.com.

—Staff Writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at summer.rose@thecrimson.com.