Congress OK’d the spending of trillions in pandemic relief to resuscitate the economy, part of it directed at lifting tens of millions of children out of poverty.
But money coming in advance child tax credits often doesn’t find its way to refugees in southwest Kansas, or when it does, they’re confused about what’s landed in their mailboxes or checking accounts.
Elama Mohamud, a Somali-American mother of two in Garden City, said people in her community don’t know what to do.
“Some people don’t watch news or they don’t understand the English,” Mohamud said. “So, abruptly, they just get this money, and it’s like, ‘What!?’”
She’s gotten several anxious calls from other people in local Somali and Congolese refugee communities caught off guard by the payments.
“There’s a lot of rumors going around,” Mohamud said. “There’s a lot of confusion here.”
Some of her neighbors are worried the checks could be some kind of scam. Others think the payments might be part of a low-income assistance program that’s separate from their tax returns entirely.
There’s also some confusion about how many monthly payments they’ll receive and if they’ll need to pay that money back at some point.
The payments are an advance on half of the child tax credit that families have historically received after they file their taxes each spring. The monthly payments are scheduled to run from now until December.
The problem, Mohamed said, is that many refugees haven’t seen information from the federal government about the child tax credit in their native languages.
The Internal Revenue Service’s website shows tax information in 20 languages. But Somali, Congolese and several other languages spoken in Garden City aren’t on the list. And the letters that families have received in the mail explaining the advance payments are written only in English and Spanish.
That has left a critical gap in these families’ understanding of a program that’s intended to help them care for their children.
“Most people in the community,” Mohamud said, “they don’t understand what this money is.”
Tower of Babel
This confusion goes well beyond Garden City.
