Pastor Amanda Calderon of the First Reformed Church of South River and Pastor Seth Kaper-Dale of the Reformed Church of Highland Park, where the two were photographed on Tuesday, April 1, 2025. Amanda Brown| For NJ Advance Media
When Amanda Calderon learned she had lost her nonprofit job because of a hold on federal funding, her first concern was for the immigrant children she would help with school enrollment and other services after their parents had sent them across the border on their own to live with relatives already in the United States.
“When we found out that 50% of the programs were about to be cut, people were asking, ‘What’s going to happen to our clients? Who is going to be taking care of these children,‘” Calderon said of herself and her 21 colleagues at Highland Park-based Accompany Now! who were laid off last month.
But it wasn’t long before the personal impact of the layoffs set in.
“That moment for me was at CVS,” Calderon said, recalling a recent trip to the pharmacy chain’s drive-thru window near her home in South River.
Calderon, who had been a community outreach and education coordinator with Accompany Now!, said she was handed an out-of-pocket bill for five times the amount she normally paid for the same medication because she he had lost her prescription drug coverage.
“I couldn’t get my medication last week at CVS,” said Calderon, 27, who later made arrangements for temporary coverage under the state’s COBRA program. “Aside from the money that we need for $15 eggs at the grocery, our insurance is also impacted.”
Amanda Calderon, seen here inside the Reformed Church of Highland Park on Tuesday, April 1, 2025, said the personal impact of losing her job at the nonprofit Accompany Now! hit home at her local CVS when she was handed a bill for her prescription medication that was five times what her copay had been while she had insurance. Amanda Brown| For NJ Advance Media
Funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, Accompany Now! assists unaccompanied immigrant children and teenagers who enter the United States and are briefly held at shelters near the border, then sent to New Jersey or other states to stay with relatives or other sponsor families.
Calderon and her colleagues would ensure the children could enroll in school and access ESL classes or other accommodations, healthcare, financial support and other basic services.
Accompany Now! has a client roster of several hundred families, mostly in New Jersey but also in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and Connecticut.
Calderon and her coworkers were laid off on March 14 after HHS put temporary holds on a pair of disbursements from a $103 million grant to the nonprofit United States Committee for Refugees & Immigrants, or USCRI.
The USCRI is a much larger, nationwide organization based in Arlington, Virginia, that works with Accompany Now! as a “subgrantee,” essentially a subcontractor, to provide services to unaccompanied immigrant minors.
Accompany Now!, whose subgrant is $4.9 million for 2025, is one of 10 USCRI subgrantees.
To receive cash to pay its workers and other costs, Accompany Now! submits requests for reimbursement to USCRI, drawn down from its subgrant. USCRI, in turn, submits its subgrantees’ reimbursement requests and other expenses to HHS for reimbursement from its grant.
But HHS put holds on a pair of reimbursement requests by USCRI in January and February, which each lasted about a month.
“There’s been no official cut in funding to us or them with the grant. It’s a cash flow issue,” said Matt Haygood, vice president of children’s services at USCRI. “Without the cash, we could not reimburse our partners like Accompany Now!”
Even though the funds were eventually released, Haygood said USCRI and its subgrantees agreed they could not count on timely disbursements in the future and imposed the layoffs.
Haygood said that USCRI and its 10 subgrantees laid off 325 staffers, including the 22 from Accompany Now! Haygood noted that two of USCRI’s subgrantees had to shut down entirely.
President Donald Trump has taken a tough stance on undocumented immigrants, and the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by Elon Musk, has aggressively reviewed spending by agencies across the federal government, in many cases resulting in cuts and layoffs.
But Haygood said HHS never indicated why the grant money was delayed for unaccompanied children’s services.
“I honestly couldn’t tell you if we were targeted or not targeted,” he said. “We honestly have received nothing official as to why a hold was placed on our account.”
HHS did not respond to requests for comment.
Haygood, Calderon and others say the impact of the layoffs will extend to the young clients and families served by Accompany Now! One way is that the agency will have to shift their cases to the workers who kept their jobs and will have to pick up the slack, though they won’t have as much time for each case.
That said, the service providers acknowledged that the long-term impact of the layoffs is hard to predict thanks to a dramatic decrease in the flow of unaccompanied children across the U.S. southern border with Mexico since the summer.
Experts have attributed the decline to restrictions by the Biden Administration and the Mexican government on border crossings, particularly on people seeking asylum status. Service providers say the situation that has intensified since Trump took office to the point that the flow of unaccompanied minors has virtually come to a halt.
“It used to be something like 350, 400 a day,” said Seth Kaper-Dale, the CEO of Accompany Now! “Now it’s, like, four.”
Accompany Now is one of several nonprofits created by the Reformed Church of Highland Park, or RCHP, where Kaper-Dale and his wife, Stephanie, are co-pastors.
Calderon is the pastor at the First Reformed Church of South River, a congregation affiliated with the Highland Park church. As the CEO of Accompany Now!, Kaper-Dale had the unenviable task of laying off Calderon and his 21 other employees.
Kaper-Dale noted that several of them had earned master’s degrees for their highly specialized work, which involved guiding traumatized children with little or no English skills through complex educational and social service bureaucracies.
“It’s just an awful feeling,” he said. “People who have spent their lives getting ready for this, and now you’ve got to tell them that the human service sector doesn’t really matter.”
Francy Martinez was one of those people. Martinez, 35, is an immigrant, having come to the United States nine years ago from Cali, Colombia, where she worked as a lawyer.
Before being laid off, Martinez was a case worker with Accompany Now!, managing a caseload of two dozen families totaling about 70 children, including siblings and children of the sponsor families.
“It’s really hard because I really connected with families, and I really tried to connect them with the services that they need, and when I needed to say goodbye, they were so sad,” she said. “They feel afraid of Trump and all the things that are happening now.”
For Martinez, who is married with a 16-year-old son, the loss of her job put financial pressure on her and her husband, a public school teacher and coach, after they recently spent much of their savings on a downpayment for a house.
“I need to pay a mortgage,” said Martinez, who’s now planning to go back to law school, this time in the United States.
Although the flow of unaccompanied immigrant children has slowed to a trickle, Martinez and others say the layoffs are likely to negatively impact services to children who have already made it across the border.
The 2008 federal law granting protections to trafficking victims and unaccompanied immigrant children requires that relocation services be provided for at least six months. For some, depending on an assessment of their situation, services are supposed to be available until they turn 18.
So, even though the number of caseworkers has been reduced, service providers say the number of children and host families requiring services will remain the same for several months.
“They faced many, many things to come here,” Martinez said of the children. Now, she added, “they feel alone again.”
Calderon’s compassion extended beyond the unaccompanied children to their parents, who are often judged harshly for the heartrending decision they made to send their children across the border alone or in the care of a “coyote,” or paid guide.
But, she said, no matter how dangerous their children’s journey may be from the violent, politically unstable, and impoverished places where they happened to be born, those parents were trying to give their children better lives or save their lives.
“These children are fleeing persecution, they’re fleeing violence, they’re fleeing poverty,” said Calderon, who harkened back to the Book of Exodus and a desperate mother named Jochebed, who floated her infant son to safety down the Nile.
“Moses’ mom, who puts him in a basket and sends him down river to avoid being killed,” Calderon said. “These children are in that exact same position.”
Seth Kaper-Dale, co-pastor of the Reformed Church of Highland Park and CEO of the affiliated nonprofit Accompany Now!, said it was "just an awful feeling" to have to lay off 22 workers at the immigrant children's services agency due to holds placed on disbursements from a federal grant. Kaper-Dale was photographed at the church on Tuesday, April 1, 2025. Amanda Brown| For NJ Advance Media
Stories by Steve Strunsky
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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com