Justine’s Story

Justine Barawigira’s Tucson, Ariz. apartment is immaculately clean and well decorated. Justine, 26, is a single mother of three children: Joseph, eight, Kingston, four, and Queen Elizabeth, five months, a fact that makes the polished home even more impressive. While we talk, Joseph is still at school, Kingston sits next to me and draws with my pens and notebook, and Queen Elizabeth—truly regal in a white dress and headband—sits happily in Justine’s arms. She just nursed, Justine smiles, when I compliment Queen Elizabeth’s easy nature. 

Justine, like many people in the United States and worldwide, lost her job at a cleaning service company at the beginning of the pandemic. She balanced helping Joseph the best she could when schools closed, while caring for Kingston and welcoming her daughter during the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, Justine held a variety of jobs—working at Target, in hotel housekeeping, and at a computer cleaning service. She does not complain about these jobs, except to say that she is looking for something different, “any job,” she says, especially one with a fixed 8:00am–4:00pm schedule, so she can spend her evenings with her children.

Justine is especially proud of the family she has built because for much of her life, she has been an orphan. Originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, her family fled violence and poverty when she was a baby, landing in Uganda. Her father died when she was four years old and her mother died when she was just 11, each from different illnesses. When her mother died, she and her three younger brothers dispersed in different directions “because of life. Our life was hard in Uganda.” Five years ago, UNICEF helped Justine and her then three-year-old Joseph resettle in Arizona.

There is often an expectation that refugees owe the public their stories—to invoke sympathy and to inspire with their remarkable resilience or to convince their audience that they were worthy of refuge in the first place. No doubt, Justine had to narrate her obstacles to UNICEF agents and U.S. officials, who deemed her hardships significant enough to warrant her relocation. Justine does not provide a harrowing account of her youth in Uganda without any family members. Rather than depending on Justine for details when she says, simply, “Our life was hard,” you might imagine your own daughter or sister caring for herself at the age of 11 in Uganda—what dangers might she encounter and what abuses might she endure? Where did she sleep? Which is louder—loneliness or fear—when the sun sets each night?

Contrary to popular belief, the United States does not give money to refugees who resettle here. Instead, the State Department’s Reception and Placement program provides refugees with a loan to travel to the United States, which they are required to repay after they arrive. That money pays for rent, furnishings, food, and clothing, as well as costs of the agency staff case management and other integration services. Like many other refugees, Justine had three months to learn English and immediately started working—the federal framework for refugee resettlement prioritizes rapid employment. She recalls wanting to run back to Uganda during her first year in the United States because the foreignness and loneliness seemed impossible to overcome, a sentiment shared by hundreds of immigrants I have spoken to in my decade-long research on U.S. refugees.  

As a single mother, childcare has always been an urgent issue for Justine. Current federal policies do not require resettlement agencies to address the needs of young children in refugee families. As a result, case managers are not trained on early education and care and view caring for young children as a “barrier to employment” to overcome in the resettlement process.

Justine has no choice but to be proactive about finding a solution, “Because I don’t have someone to support me, I need to push myself to do it.” She reached out to the Catholic Charities Community Services that resettled her, and an agent pointed her to “the government on 22nd street” to figure out a childcare alternative on her own. The Arizona Department of Economic Security agreed to subsidize her aunt, also a refugee living in Tucson, to watch her children. The arrangement allows her children to be with a trusted person who cooks familiar food and speaks her native language, flexibility with pickup and drop-off time, and close proximity to home (in the same apartment complex) that eliminates transportation conflicts.

Justine did not want to send her children to a childcare center. “My bus can be late and [the daycare center] can call police and take my child. Yeah, I cannot agree with that.” Indeed, buses can be unreliable in every city and her job can let her out a little late; however, underlying Justine’s decision to not use center-based care is both a cultural preference (many refugees are unfamiliar with early education and care) and a deep need for her children to be with someone she trusts. Additionally, at the root of her fear is a deep mistrust of the U.S. care system to sympathize with her as a Black refugee mother and protect her children.

Her skepticism is well founded. Justine and her children are a part of the fast-changing Black population: one-in-10, approximately 4.6 million Black people living in the United States, were immigrants as of 2019. Black children are far overrepresented in child protection services cases. Additionally young Black children are much more likely to be suspended from preschool than their white peers. People in the United States and around the world have also witnessed the abuse of refugee children by the federal U.S. government, such as separating children from their families and incarcerating toddler children as a strategy to deter fellow migrants and asylum seekers during the Trump administration.

Like the majority of children of immigrants, Justine’s children Kingston and Queen Elizabeth are U.S. citizens by birth. Soon, Joseph will be a naturalized citizen when Justine obtains her U.S. citizenship by passing a naturalization interview and English and civics test. Additionally, their hardships overlap with those of many other children of immigrants, including belonging to a low-income household, having an English-learning parent with limited formal education, and lack of access to good schools. Justine wants Joseph to attend another school because he’s not performing well at his current one; however, she does not know the application process for other schools and transportation would likely be a problem.

Joseph, Kingston, and Queen Elizabeth also experience trauma in addition to these material challenges. The word “trauma”—a term foreign to many immigrant tongues that instead say war, poverty, genocide, displacement, death, family separation—never comes up during our conversation. Justine names her memory as “too busy” and depends on her children to “make my memory different” and “clean [my] memory.” When asked about her hopes for her children, Justine pauses before answering, “You know, like, because I don't have any family. I'm happy to say that ‘This is my family.’ I'm being with my family, you know? Yeah. Because I don't have anybody. Now I'm happy sometimes from inside when I … think about them. When I'm talking with my kids, they make me to be happy. They make me without thinking wrong things. A lot of things. You know, they make me to be happy every time because I'm seeing them every time because they're my family.”

Although Justine does not elaborate on the “wrong things,” what is clear and significant is that her children play a critical role in helping Justine heal from her past trauma. Shouldering the burden of standing in for the family that Justine lost at a young age is tremendous pressure that her children must negotiate. Even if Justine does not tell her children about her trauma, her children experience her painful past—a phenomenon known as intergenerational trauma or post-memory. That is, the trauma that children of immigrants face is unique. In addition to the many barriers they face, the intergenerational trauma results in guilt and unmanageable pressure to succeed in a new country in order to make all the sacrifices and sufferings of the parental generation worthwhile. Many children of immigrants feel that their own struggles are not legitimate compared to their parents’ obstacles.

Moreover, as psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem explains, trauma may be passed down through parents’ actions and even DNA. Pediatrician Nadine Burke-Harris makes the comparison of the effect of trauma poisoning children’s brains to the exposure of lead. There are opportunities to help these children overcome this trauma, including evidence-based therapies like biofeedback and mindfulness and case management to help families get the resources that they need to overcome their circumstances and prevent children from being exposed to more categories of traumatic experiences.

Early childhood trauma has been associated with reduced size of the brain cortex, which is responsible for many complex functions including memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thinking, language, and consciousness. As a result, early recognition and interventions on childhood trauma is equally important to investments in tangible programs, such as housing, health and food services. Early education and care programs, where children spend extensive time, have the potential to intervene in the healing of the whole family.

There are millions of families like Justine’s in the United States, and promoting a more equal environment for them to thrive requires connections among organizations working on immigrant justice, racial justice, family justice, labor justice, and child welfare justice. This report provides a profile of young children of immigrants and an overview of the obstacles they face, many of which are the same struggles Justine’s family encounters. The paper names strategies to mitigate these challenges and aims to inform efforts to rebuild a more equitable way of life post COVID-19 pandemic that truly works for all children and their families. In addition to policy reforms, this report also aims to promote intimate changes in how early education teachers, case workers, doctors, neighbors, and friends interact with immigrant families, particularly with the children of immigrants. Individual compassion and vote, after all, underline democracy.