On a recent weekday morning dozens of asylum seekers from Venezuela gathered in the parking lot of a Quality Inn hotel in Kent, Washington. It’s busy. Everyone, however, seemed to be in a good mood.
They were headed to their latest home, a hotel by Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Gabriel Hernandez, 23, and his three brothers and dad stacked cushions and other donated items on a cart they wheeled into their new hotel room. Hernandez said they figured the long arduous journey to America was worth it, financially speaking.
"The economy doesn’t work at all. Here in one day, less than a day, you can earn $40 to $50. There you earn $30 to $40 in a week or month," Hernandez said in Spanish.
Not everyone said they were here solely because of the money. Some said they've been politically persecuted.
Earlier this month, asylum seekers, most of them from Venezuela, marched to Seattle City Hall and pleaded for shelter. Now, for the third time in recent months, they’ve been moved into a new space.
The people who are at this hotel are among the hundreds of Venezuelans who have been bounced around King County. Last year, King County designated $3 million dollars to house more than 350 people.
Gov. Jay Inslee is proposing $5 million more for the state Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance that would help people who don’t otherwise qualify for refugee assistance, as well as an additional $3 million for a grant program that helps counties support newly arrived refugees and asylum seekers. If approved, that money would be available this summer.
About 8 million Venezuelans, or a quarter of the population, have left the country in the last decade amid an economic crisis and President Nicolás Maduro's dictatorship.
Adriana Figueira has become one of the leaders of this group of asylum applicants. She said she has three kids — ages 19, 15, and 9 — and left them behind with their grandmother. Her husband died for the same reason so many others do in Venezuela: medical complications related to malnutrition.
His death was the final straw. She wanted a better life for her children and to have more financial stability.
"I crossed the southern border by myself. With millions of migrants but by myself ... and God, with the help of God," she said in Spanish.
Seeking asylum in this country is a right she and others have under U.S. and international laws, she said.
Several of the asylum seekers, like Hernandez, said they opted to come to the Pacific Northwest because they heard jobs here pay well and figured there wasn't as much competition for employment as there might be in places where more immigrants have landed.
"It’s not like in other parts where there’s lots of Venezuelans, lot of immigrants," he said.
But many of the migrants are still waiting to get work authorization. Legally, asylum seekers can’t apply for a work permit until five months after they’ve submitted their application for asylum. Qualifying for asylum itself can take years.
A number of the migrants, like Joxelen Martinez, have tried to get under the table jobs but said they’ve been victims of wage theft. Martinez said dozens of them helped demolish homes.
"We all think they’re not going to pay us because every day they say they’re going to pay us, but they don’t," she said in Spanish.
Some have heard the complaints made by certain locals about the tax dollars being spent on them. Others, like Hernandez, are aware of the current political climate in the United States, and the possible re-election of former President Donald Trump reigniting anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies.
"I imagine Trump and the possibility of him pushing the whole world out," he said.
Figueira has helped start a new organization called Comunidad Sin Fronteras, or Communities Without Borders. She’s hoping to organize a legal clinic so everyone can get their asylum papers and work permits sorted out.
"We need to march in Olympia but we start here. And thank god people already know about us because of everything we’ve already done," she said.
Seattle officials have told the asylum seekers they must check out of the hotel by February 26. She’s not sure what will happen after that.
But whatever happens, Figueira said, this is just the beginning.
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
