Miami faith community strains to help new exiles, migrants

In the last 18 months, an estimated 250,000 migrants and asylum-seekers, mostly from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti, have arrived in the Miami area, often only on temporary legal status that doesn’t allow them to work. That has strained beyond physical and social capacity even a faith community accustomed to welcome and integrate those escaping political persecution, lack of freedoms and basic necessities like food and medicine across Latin America for more than 60 years, since the first Cuban exiles arrived after the island’s communist revolution. Miami’s faith leaders remain steadfast in the mission to help, but they’re sounding the alarm that the need is becoming unmanageable, with little federal help for migrants to start new lives in the United States.