USCRI Vice President AnnaMarie Bena’s proudest accomplishment is her work for unaccompanied children. When she began her position at USCRI three and a half years ago, opening the shelter for unaccompanied girls in Florida was one of her very first projects. In fact, her first day on the job was spent traveling to the shelter.
“Without question, I am most dedicated to unaccompanied children’s work. It has a place in my heart,” she said. “Having that shelter for girls, it makes such a difference in those girls’ lives.”
Bena has more than 20 years of experience working on refugee and immigrant issues, with the bulk of her career spent in the federal government as an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As an attorney, she focused on legal issues related to refugees, immigrants, unaccompanied children, and trafficking survivors.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and holds a law degree from the University of Notre Dame. In the early part of her career, Bena served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, but after law school, Bena worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), both in the D.C. office and in Zambia as a protection officer. She then worked for Catholic Legal Immigration Legal Network (CLINIC) and served as deputy director of Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition (CAIR).
Her career in federal service began when she started working as an immigration specialist at the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). When the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) was passed in 2000, Bena wrote the first policy guidance for HHS. She was also part of the first interagency team at the U.S. State Department to begin implementation of the TVPA. After over 10 years in the Office of the General Counsel at HHS, she went back to ORR during the years of the Obama administration, where she created the policy division, which included guidance on unaccompanied children. She left ORR as Director of Policy before joining USCRI in December 2018.
As USCRI Vice President, Bena is responsible for the overall management, growth, and quality service delivery of USCRI’s programs for unaccompanied immigrant children, including the shelter for girls, Central American programming, and home study and post-release services; refugee programs; legal services programs; trafficking survivors support programs and USCRI’s policy and advocacy team.
Women’s and girls’ empowerment plays a significant role in all of the programs that Bena oversees. For the unaccompanied girls’ shelter, special programming seeks to inspire them to see their potential. Even their classrooms are named after famous successful women from all over the world.
“For me, a lot of this month, I’ve been thinking about the girls at our shelter,” she said. “I think about trying to inspire these young girls to do the things we know they can do; despite the way their lives might have started. … We feel we are putting them on the right path.”
The shelter sees many survivors of trafficking and sexual abuse, and the programming is geared towards helping them heal and recover from trauma. Staff attorneys in USCRI legal services also assist women victims of domestic abuse by regularizing their immigration status and helping them get away from abusers.
“Every day our staff attorneys are helping women get to safety,” Bena said. “All of them are about uplifting women.”
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