As hyperinflation ravaged Venezuela, Franklyn Casar’s earnings driving tanker trucks for the state petroleum company had become practically useless. A year and a half ago, he said, he and his family sold everything and left their world behind. They flew to Mexico City and hired a guide at great expense to get them into the U.S.
They were terrified they’d be turned back, but border officials let them in, pending the adjudication of their political asylum claim. They came to Chattanooga. Then a new set of challenges emerged.
While their case awaits adjudication, asylum seekers exist in legal limbo. While he’s waited, and waited some more, for authorization to work, Casar has had to rely on irregular jobs like landscaping — an industry that goes largely dormant in winter. Meanwhile, his family life has been strained; he and his longtime wife split up.
Early this year, the nonprofit La Paz got Casar some help from the Chattanooga Times Free Press Neediest Cases Fund, which helped tide him over until work picked up again so he could pay rent on the room he shared with his son. Yet, now sharing an apartment with seven others, he feels an urgent need to find a home for just him and his son, so his three daughters have somewhere to stay when they visit. And he said he’s ashamed to ask for more help.
“I’m not used to it,” he said in Spanish on Wednesday, on a couch in the living room of an apartment at the foot of Signal Mountain.