SPOKANE, Wash. — Spokane’s Manzanita House is looking to be the region’s leader in giving refugees a place to get the help they need.
Manzanita House said there is about 1,000 refugees coming to the Inland Northwest every year from dozens of different countries.
These refugees need plenty of legal assistance when it comes to getting a green card or citizenship.
“It’s so satisfying to see them be able to achieve that goal that they’ve set for themselves,” said Samuel Smith, the director of immigrant legal aid. “To be able to fully participate in the community that they’ve chosen to call home.”
Manzanita House’s immigrant legal aid team, or MILA, has been working since 2022 to help people and families move toward their goals of living and working in the Inland Northwest.
The MILA team helped over 1,000 clients in 2023, but there is still more demand for affordable legal help than they can handle.
“Our wait list for new appointment right now is about 3 months and my understanding is that other agencies aren’t too far off from that as well,” Smith said.
Smith said MILA is working to add more people to its legal team to serve more people in the future. He’s proud of the work that his team is already doing to help immigrants across the region.
“I have some clients now that when I first met them, they had no status in the United States and we were able to get them permanent residency, reunite them with family and then help them apply for citizenship,” he said.
Manzanita House wants to go beyond offering legal help. It has plenty of other resources to help empower immigrants and get them settled into their community.
That includes offering language classes to keep immigrants and their children connected to their native languages.
“We do heritage language classes and we also support the service providers doing cultural competency training, and we also do events,” said Pat Castaneda, the executive director of Manzanita House.
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