When Iman Alshehab arrived at JFK Airport in 2016, she did not have anyone she knew to meet her there. A caseworker from the International Rescue Committee picked up the widowed Syrian grandmother, emigrating to the U.S. alone, and dropped her off at her new, temporary home in Dundalk.

“It was getting dark on the four-and-a-half-hour drive,” recounts Alshehab in Arabic and some English. “I kept crying. My second full day in Maryland was Thanksgiving, and I decided I will make my neighbors dinner. I used Google Translate and knocked on everyone’s door to invite them. I was brave. I was worried people would say no.”

A former chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus, she made hummus, rice, chicken, and tabbouleh pasta salad. More than 20 neighbors, including several refugee women from other countries and her caseworker, came over. Each departed, hands full, with leftovers.

Fast-forward two years. Just before this past Christmas, Alshehab—today a founding member of the Mera Kitchen Collective, a worker-owned initiative supporting refugee and immigrant women—helped cook for more than 500 people as part of an arts feast at Charles Village’s 2640 Space. “I sold out everything,” she says.

So did women from Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, El Salvador, Eritrea, Nigeria, and Sudan. The name Mera, explains Aishah AlFadhalah, a Kuwaiti immigrant and founding member, is derived from the Greek meraki, which means “to do something so passionately you leave some of yourself in it.”

Alongside Alshehab and AlFadhalah, who came to the U.S. to attend college and works at Kennedy Kreiger, the collective was begun by Liliane Makole, who ran a cafe in her native Cameroon; Brittany DeNovellis of Baltimore City Community College’s Refugee Youth Project; and Emily Lerman, who has worked with Doctors Without Borders.

Before she began cooking at the Four Seasons, Alshehab mopped the floors at the luxury Syrian hotel to support her three children. Police had already killed her husband. After bringing her stuffed grape leaves and kibbeh meatballs with spiced yogurt to work one day, she was promoted to the kitchen. (“They told me to focus on grape leaves and meatballs after that.”) Later, she lost her 6-month-old granddaughter to the war when a bomb leveled her son’s home. She fled after her house was destoyed. Her children, now adults, and seven surviving grandchildren, all of whom she hasn’t seen since immigrating, have not received word on their visa applications.

All of Mera’s chefs are experienced cooks who had to leave their home countries and start their professional and personal lives from scratch. Alshehab worked at Blind Industries and Services of Maryland, teaching sewing to the sight impaired—taking two buses each way—before being able to redirect her energies to Mera. Mona Ahmed, who lives with her husband and five children in an apartment near Alshehab, will soon complete a food handling certification course. She spent 11 years in a refugee camp after fleeing violence in Sudan.

After first hosting fundraising dinners in their homes, the women organized pop-ups at Hersh’s Pizza, Alma, and Clavel. All have children and struggle with English, and none own a car. Despite these obstacles, the Mera women opened a tent at the Baltimore Farmers’ Market last spring. They’ve ventured into catering and offered cooking classes.

“Often, their children, who learn the language quickly once they are in school, are like, ‘Oh, my mother doesn’t speak English and doesn’t know anything,’” notes AlFadhalah. “But when they see people paying to eat their mom’s food—everything turns. You see the image of their mom change before your eyes.”

Having survived so much, the Mera women did not come here to survive. Or remain isolated. They want to thrive. “Food has always been the source of bringing people around me,” says Alshehab as she places falafel and pita with tahini sauce, pickles, eggplant with red pepper, and freshly squeezed lemonade in front of two visitors to her small apartment on a recent afternoon.

Over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has been under fire from opponents and allies following the images and sounds of more than 2,000 young children who were separated from their parents and being kept in cages in a detention center in Texas. Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order that ends the policy of separating migrant children from their parents who are detained.

“So, we’re going to have strong—very strong borders,” Trump said. “But we’re going to keep the families together. I didn’t like the sight, or the feeling of families being separated.”

These comments come after he earlier argued that “you can’t do it by executive order.” The President is now ordering that family separation will be replaced with the detention of entire families. It’s not immediately clear what will happen to the detained children or when they will be reunited with their parents.

Since May 24, when the “zero-tolerance” policy was enforced, there have been dozens of immigrant children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras in Maryland that were separated from their families after crossing the border into America illegally. While the President’s order will stop the future separation of child and parent, local organizations are concerned about the well-being of the children already separated. The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) that works with refugees and migrants openly opposes the practice of family detention.

“While children will no longer be ripped from the arms of their parents for the sole purpose of deterring immigration, they will go to jail with their parents,” said Kay Bellor, VP for programs at LIRS, in a statement. “Jail is never an appropriate place for a child.”

For the past two years, the Catholic Charities of Maryland’s Esperanza Center has been running a family reunification program that helps minors reunite with their families. The center has helped 243 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border—including eight who were forcibly separated from their parents—so far this year.

“We haven’t received any guidance from the [Trump] administration for how they are going to handle the children who have already been separated,” said Helany Sinkler, who runs the reunification program. “Although the children are being cared for and looked after in the shelter, there’s nothing better than reuniting a child with their family.”

Sinkler says that the reunification process is not an easy one and predicting how long it takes is tougher. Locating and approving a sponsor is a tedious process including finger printing, background checks, and myriad communication across borders given that most children arrive with nothing but a name and phone number for a relative. During that time, the child is placed in either a shelter or foster care, depending on the age, until a legal sponsor is appointed.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, and the American Psychiatric Association have all issued statements warning against the traumatic effects of separating families—representing more than 250,000 doctors in the United States.

“To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma,” the doctors wrote in a statement to President Trump.

In addition to the reunification process, director of the Esperanza Center Val Twanmoh says that they are working with children have suffered traumatic experiences both in the home country and once crossing into the U.S. She stressed a need for increased counseling and mental health workers to assist with the transition of the children.

“Finding bilingual mental health providers is extremely difficult,” she said. “We normally have to refer them out because we don’t have the workers to accommodate it. It’s extremely difficult.”

Sinkler is still planning to do all she can for as many children as she can with the current resources she has but is still in disbelief that something so “unbelievable and incomprehensible” is happening in this country.

“When you’re talking about family separation, there’s now this added layer on top of everything they’ve already suffered in home country,” she said. “We are essentially re-traumatizing the children that came seeking protection and fleeing already horrible conditions. It’s unreal that this is America that is doing this. This isn’t another country that’s notorious for not being sympathetic. This is not what we do.”

Update September 5: On Tuesday, President Trump announced, via Jeff Sessions, that the DACA program would be suspended.

“I am here today to announce that the program known as DACA that was effectuated under the Obama administration is being rescinded,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. 

The Department of Homeland Security will cease processing new applications for the program effective Tuesday, however the administration plans to continue to renew permits for those expiring in the next six months. No one’s status will be revoked before it has expired and many applications received on Tuesday will still be processed.

The move to end the program puts Congress on a deadline to come up with a solution that will protect DACA participants who—under this new ruling—begin losing their status March 5, 2018. 

If Congress does not act, nearly 300,000 people would lose their DACA status in 2018 and more than 320,000 more in 2019. 

President Donald Trump is expected to dismantle a program put in place by former president Barack Obama that allows hundreds of thousands of children brought to the U.S. illegally to live and work without punishment.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has been under scrutiny since its creation in 2012 by members of the GOP. For weeks, President Trump has been deciding whether to continue the program or face legal reprimand from several Republican attorney generals who deem the program unconstitutional. 

A decision is expected to come as early as today—four days before the September 5 deadline set by the attorney generals. If Trump opts to terminate the program, he will let active DACA cardholders remain in the U.S. until their work permits expire, allowing him to fulfill his campaign promise to terminate Obama’s signature initiative while also keeping his inauguration pledge to “show great heart” to the young immigrants in the program.

In Baltimore, Mayor Catherine Pugh and Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz have joined more than 100 civic leaders across the country in a Cities for Action campaign calling for President Trump to continue the program until a legislative solution is found.

“In Baltimore County, we are embracing the children who came here as youngsters, grew up as Americans, and are now contributing to the American dream,” Kamenetz said in a letter to the president. “We urge the President to continue our country’s support of America’s Dreamers.”

A September 2016 report by the Migration Policy Institute recorded approximately 17,000 DACA participants in Maryland. Catalina Rodriguez-Lima, director of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant and Multicultural Affairs (MIMA), says that there are currently 34,000 eligible DACA applicants waiting for entry to the program if it is not terminated.

“Our role in the mayor’s office is to use her platform to urge the president to continue DACA,” she said. “For us, it doesn’t only go against our most resilient professionals and students, it’s also an attack on our economy. A lot of these people have bought homes, go to school, are nurses, are lawyers, are business owners—they create jobs.”

All current participants of DACA have already been subjected to extensive background checks and pay income taxes. Without them, the economy would lose more than $460 billion from the national GDP and more than $24 billion from Social Security and Medicare contributions.

Hundreds of national business leaders—including Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and nearly 400 other companies—have also signed an open letter to Trump calling for him to preserve the program. 

“Unless we act now to preserve the DACA program, all 780,000 hardworking young people will lose their ability to work legally in this country, and every one of them will be at immediate risk of deportation,” the executives wrote. “With them, we grow and create jobs. They are part of why we will continue to have a global competitive advantage.”

“Trump must end DACA,” wrote the editors of the National Review. “If we are going to amnesty an entire class of people, it should obviously be done through the democratic process and, in our view, happen only in exchange for reforms to the immigration system. DACA contravenes the elementary principle that the legislative branch ought to pass laws and the executive branch ought to enforce them.” 

As the country awaits the president’s decision, Rodriguez-Lima and MIMA are encouraging local DACA cardholders to be proactive in the event that the program is suspended. She recommends applying for other immigration release programs besides DACA and consulting with legal professionals. 

“My hope is that if the program is terminated, congress can come together to develop a solution for these students who were brought to this country not knowing they were undocumented,” she said. “They shouldn’t be punished but accepted. The U.S. is the only home they’ve ever known.” 

On a blistering cold New Year’s Eve, the body heat is welcome inside the Creative Alliance. Dancers of all ages sway to the sultry, jazzy sounds of the Bumper Jacksons on stage with local beat-boxer Shodekeh, who layers the music with percussive hums and taps. As the show winds down, patrons peruse the diverse artwork of Amy Sherald in the lobby gallery before heading to an after-party just down the street at Snake Hill, a sausage and beer bar, where a DJ spins until closing time. In other words, 2017 in Highlandtown kicked off at one of the neighborhood’s anchor institutions and ended at a bar that’s less than two years old.  

Bookended by the old and the new, the trailblazer and the trendy, the evening reflects a neighborhood that has long been undergoing a revitalization and is now seeing those changes come to fruition. Thanks to strong community partnerships, and a heavy emphasis on diversity and the arts, Highlandtown is experiencing a renaissance—a case study in how to revitalize a neighborhood while keeping its character.

“Highlandtown would be a great example of how all of Baltimore can revive,” says shop owner Juan Carlos Nuñez. “We’re firing on all cylinders with the businesses, community, houses, art galleries. But this kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight.”

The impetus for Highlandtown’s growth can be traced back decades ago. As so many things do in this blue-collar neighborhood, it stems from U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a founding member of SECO—or the Southeast Community Organization.

Along with preventing a highway from forming in the middle of Fells Point, SECO is responsible for starting the Southeast Community Development Corporation (CDC), which has had its hand in many Highlandtown success stories since its inception in 1975.

“Community development organizations were created to spur investment in disinvested areas, encourage affordable housing, and try to bring everyone together despite their differences,” says Southeast CDC director Chris Ryer.

During the late ’90s and early 2000s, local organizers in Baltimore took a cue from thriving 36th Street in Hampden and started their own Main Streets programs to encourage new businesses along busy thoroughfares. At the same time, an organization called Healthy Neighborhoods was being developed for undervalued areas of potential in the city.

This happy confluence of groups all began swirling around Southeast Baltimore and, in particular, Hollandtown, as it’s pronounced by local residents. A few years later, an arts collective called the Creative Alliance decided to move from its home in Fells Point to the old Patterson Theater. 

“Even putting the shovel in the ground started a ripple effect of something positive in the neighborhood,” says Creative Alliance co-founder Margaret Footner. “Investors took notice and the rehab kicked in pretty quickly.” 

But as is the case in so many neighborhoods around the country, initial investment does not always lead to long-term growth. So what makes Highlandtown different?

“Walking to work here every day reminded me of Sesame Street.”

“I remember when I first moved here from Queens,” says Southeast CDC’s neighborhood programs director Kari Snyder. “Highlandtown had that same flair. I heard languages from all over the world, people were so friendly and community-oriented. It sounds silly, but walking to work here every day reminded me of Sesame Street.” 

While many people in Baltimore were setting up shop in more popular neighborhoods such as Canton and Fells Point, a subtle groundswell was taking place in Highlandtown.

“When I opened up, all the Latino businesses were basically on Broadway,” says Carlos Cruz, who’s owned sports bar Carlos O’Charlie’s since 2006. “But I saw a little bit of construction here and there and had a great idea that this would be the next big area. I immediately felt welcome in Highlandtown.”

Businesses like Cruz’s remain the backbone of the Eastern Avenue corridor. Maintaining them during the recession and 2015 Uprising was no easy feat and owners leveraged strong partnerships with Highlandtown Main Street and the Baltimore Community Foundation for assistance.

Even a seemingly simple program—like a facade grant that provides a $1-for-$1 match to improve windows, doors, signage, and other exterior work for small businesses—goes a long way.  

“I’ve had many conversations about how perception is so important,” says Highlandtown Main Street manager Amanda Smit-Peters. “We work really hard to make things look nice. But we’re also teaching business owners how to apply for these grants. We never just come in and do it for them because that’s not sustainable.”

Another thing that separates Highlandtown’s community from the pack is that there are many residents “doubling down” and buying places to both live and work, like the owners of Highlandtown Gallery, RoofTop Hot, Y:ART Gallery, Snake Hill, and Michael Owen Art. 

Of course, housing itself also had to recover from the recession. But that eventually started to bounce back, too. 

“Over the last five or six years, investors came back and—house by house, block by block—you started to see that change,” says Mark Parker, pastor of Breath of God Lutheran Church and board member of the Highlandtown Community Association. 

Now, according to Live Baltimore, Highlandtown is the ninth top-selling neighborhood in the city with 30 percent growth in the value of home sales just this past year. Similarly, the building vacancy rate has decreased from 30 to 9 percent in the last 10 years.

“The first half of the decade was more under the radar with housing and businesses. That’s when you saw the opening of mom-and-pop shops like grocery stores, five-and-dimes, and barber shops,” Ryer says. “When you think about it, the neighborhood hadn’t really turned over in 100 years. It was due.”

A vibrant mural on the corner of Bank Street and Highland Avenue—a stone’s throw from Cinco de Mayo grocery store, Little Morocco Cafe, and Hoehn’s Bakery—tells Highlandtown’s history as a melting pot in a nutshell.

On the left, artist Joel Bergner used hues of amber and gold to depict European immigrants, who populated Southeast Baltimore from the 1800s until the mid-20th century. The right side, adding cooler tones of blues and greens, celebrates the community as it looks today—diverse and full of Latino immigrants.

“This has always been a neighborhood of immigrants,” Smit-Peters says. “You don’t get your Matthew’s, Hoehn’s, and DiPasquale’s around for 100 years without remembering where we started and keeping that going.”

As the mural suggests, the latest census data found that 34 percent of Highlandtown residents are Hispanic, many hailing from Mexico, El Salvador, and Puerto Rico. More recently, there has been an influx of Middle Eastern and African immigrants and refugees. 

“Jambalaya is the best way I can describe it,” says Lynne Distance, branch manager of the Southeast Anchor Library, who has worked at every branch in the Enoch Pratt Free Library system. “You’ve got a mixture of everything here. When I look to hire people, I make sure they can speak at least one or two languages.”

The immigrant culture permeates nearly every aspect of the neighborhood, from the Hispanic-owned businesses to the diverse makeup of community leadership.

“Southeast Baltimore wouldn’t be growing if not for the immigrant community,” Snyder says. “It’s incredibly important that they stay here and we do a lot of things to encourage them to stay.”

Neighborhood Housing Services of Baltimore partners with the Southeast CDC to provide home-loan assistance to lower income families. Also, programs through United Way help counsel people at risk of eviction. 

The library turned a former cafe into a “creation station” where local families can take (or teach) classes in cooking, sewing, and robotics. The branch also provides video job interviews for people who don’t have transportation.

In addition, residents say, the community associations make it a priority to represent the demographics of the neighborhood so that no one feels left out of the conversation.

“Our goal is that the board of directors consists of longtime residents, immigrants, and people with different economic backgrounds,” Parker says. “Our association probably has 100 active members, and we need to make sure those 100 are an accurate reflection.”

While most residents and business owners admit that Highlandtown isn’t perfect, there is an overwhelming sense of pride in its diversity.

“The neighborhood hadn’t really turned over in 100 years.
It was due.”

“If you look at the history of Baltimore, there have always been pockets of segregation,” says Nuñez, who owns Tops in Cellulars on Highland Avenue. “But we’ve got every race and every culture here and we somehow make it work.”

One way they are making it work is through the arts, like Creative Alliance’s former SalsaPolkaLooza event that blended the old and new immigrant populations. Or Artesanas Mexicanas, a program started by Maria Aldana, in which Mexican women teach traditional arts, like piñata- and altar-making, to the community.

“This is a way to show and transmit my tradition and make me feel at home,” says master artist Yesenia Mejia Knight. “I am able to show my son how his mom was raised in Mexico. I have made friendships and feel like I have a new family here.”

It’s these kinds of connections that set Highlandtown apart, Footner says: “It’s not just build it and they will come. We have made it our mission to develop relationships with very different kinds of people in the community. And we’ve drawn in outside energy from people all over the state to come and visit Highlandtown.”

An emphasis on the arts can be seen in plenty of places outside the Patterson’s walls, too. After all, the neighborhood is an official Maryland Arts & Entertainment District and its blocks are lined with local galleries, colorful murals, and creative installations. 

“We invest a lot of money into what we call place-making projects,” Snyder says. “This has been a way to re-envision how we use our public spaces and create a new identity.”

This reinvention can also be seen in a crop of businesses that have opened in the last two years. There’s the Italian corner bar Gnocco, massive brewery Monument City, whiskey distillery Old Line Spirits, and sausage bar Snake Hill, just to name a few.

“We keep joking we’ll call it the Highlandtown circuit,” says Snake Hill co-owner Randy Coffren, who has been a local resident for 10 years. “For me, this is a proud neighborhood instead of a transient one. People want to stick around because Highlandtown has flavor—it feels like a city. I don’t want to live in a place where all my neighbors look the same and drive the same BMW.”

Adjacent to Snake Hill is the 500-pound gorilla in the neighborhood, Highland Haus, a six-story building with 65 market-rate apartments built by commercial developer Peter Garver and set to open this fall in the old Haussner’s restaurant space. 

“Now what you’re seeing take shape are anchor buildings that are bigger and harder to redevelop,” says Ryer. “There’s really been a process to get them in competent hands.”

The fact that the Haussner’s property sat vacant for more than 10 years is less a testament to a lack of interest and more a sign of the careful consideration Highlandtown took to make sure that the right developer came, one that would respect the soul of the culturally rich neighborhood.

“None of us want this to be a transition to something inauthentic or corporate,” Snyder says. “We want to make sure that this is forever a diverse, friendly, accessible place to live.”

This sentiment was on full display during a block party on a warm day in May. In classic fashion, the party was all about local groups coming together to transform a block. The Highlandtown Business Association wanted to clean up the alley, Healthy Harbor Initiative wanted to put up a mural and educate students about the environment, and Highlandtown Main Street was game for all of it. 

So they all threw a party on the 3500 block of Eastern Avenue to celebrate a new mural—depicting the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay.

With the vivid waterway as the backdrop, kids played on kayaks while parents drank margaritas and a mariachi band played in the background. 

“There’s a heart in Highlandtown,” Cruz says. “And Highlandtown is in my heart.”