In 2023, Massachusetts saw a significant influx of Haitian migrants seeking work and a place to settle with their families. Columnist Yvonne Abraham noted that they faced a hostile reception in the United States. Many of the immigrants had first arrived in Florida and Texas before heading to the Bay State.

“In Massachusetts, we have a right to shelter law that is the strongest in the country and goes further than any other state,” Abraham said. “And by law, every family with children has the right to an emergency shelter. The law is designed to protect children who, regardless of what you think about the choices their parents made, ended up on the streets through no fault of their own.”

That law applied to this group of new immigrants, the vast majority of whom Abraham said had legal status while their immigration cases were pending.

But then the system became overwhelmed, and in mid-October Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey announced that by the end of that month, the state’s emergency family shelter system will reach capacity. Healey cited the growing demand for emergency shelters to “the growing number of newly arrived migrant families and the slower exits of families into long-term emergency shelters.”

Abraham, a longtime award-winning columnist at The Boston Globe, wanted to know what would happen then. So he started calling advocates for the homeless.

“They assured me that I didn’t have to imagine at all,” Abraham recalled. “That even though we have a right-to-shelter law in Massachusetts, hundreds of families every year are being turned away from shelter that one would have thought would have been their right.”

Over the years, Abraham has written about many topics: national politics, local politics, immigration. Having tackled inequality several times, she said she is particularly attuned to the topics that illuminate her.

What Avraham heard from these advocates—that many families were being turned away from emergency shelters—surprised her. He met with the staff of a nonprofit organization called Family Promise North Shore Boston. The columnist said the organization’s energetic workers help families who fall through the safety net of emergency shelters in Massachusetts.

“So I sat down with them and asked them, ‘What are the most ridiculous holes in this safety net that we should have in this state?'” she said. “And they came up with a bunch, and I decided to focus on four.”

These areas included: income requirements; savings restrictions for those seeking emergency shelter; the eviction exclusion, which prevents someone from being able to access emergency shelter if they were evicted from public housing and the state decided it was their fault; and finally, the massive amounts of paperwork required to complete any application.

Abraham began working tirelessly on a series of columns. She spoke to many affected people before settling on four families. As a reporter, she said, you want the people you’re writing about to feel comfortable talking to you, comfortable using their name, comfortable being photographed.

“That’s quite a tall order. It’s a lot to ask of people and I don’t blame anyone for being reluctant to do that,” she said. “So in addition to being willing to expose themselves and potentially expose themselves to criticism from readers and others, their stories needed to be easily documented. So I had to have a paper trail to back up everything they were telling me, just to make sure everything was correct.”

From the start of Abraham’s reporting to the publication of the columns, it was a hectic two months. She worked alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning Globe photojournalist Jessica Rinaldi to document the families’ struggles.

The the first columnpublished at the end of November 2023, set the tone. It centered on Stacey, a woman who had been staying at a hotel in Woburn, Massachusetts, since late that summer with her 12-year-old daughter and their two dogs. She owed the facility $5,333.30 and had just received a letter telling her to leave the facility immediately. The announcement came on the same day that emergency shelters in Massachusetts reached their capacity limit, according to Abraham.

“In no rational, compassionate society would Stacey, 46, and her daughter be in this situation,” Abraham wrote. “They are exactly the kind of family this state’s national housing law seems designed for: desperate, unhappy souls who can’t afford to pay for housing — and for whom homelessness has triggered a cascade of disastrous and costly downsides. effects, harming their health and future. Yet here they are.”

A few days later, Abraham wrote, a manager showed up at Stacey’s hotel room door with a police officer. Stacey was told they had three days to go.

“This is an asylum state in name only,” Abraham wrote in the first column. “It’s a promise kept only for those families who manage to meet the strict — for many, ridiculously strict — requirements to qualify for state-funded emergency shelters.”

In addition to telling Stacey’s story, Abraham said she exposed the disaster to come. “I’ve always had very, very strong opinions on these matters, and all my research had just made me more certain that what’s going on here is unfair,” the columnist said. “And so I knew I had to make the case very strongly in the first story.”

Abraham noted that the recent arrival of thousands of immigrants in the state has put an unprecedented strain on the emergency shelter system. “But make no mistake — that system was broken from the start,” the columnist wrote. “And not by accident, but by design: To avoid exactly the kind of overcrowding our shelters are experiencing right now, the system has long been set up to ensure that not everyone who needs help gets it.”

According to Abraham’s column, Stacey’s mother sold the family home they were all living in in the fall of 2021 and died of COVID-19 in December. Four months later, Stacey and her daughter were evicted from the home.

Stacey, who is overweight and has diabetes, has not worked in years. Abraham wrote that the woman was also deeply depressed. “I’ve been in such a hole, such a dark place through this whole thing, I’ve lost the ability to care about anything,” Stacey told Abraham in the column. “Any energy I had to care had to go to my daughter. I don’t go out, I don’t talk to anyone, because it’s humiliating. I can’t interview for a job that looks the way I do.”

Abraham said emotionally that this was the hardest work she’s ever done in her career because of the time she and Rinaldi spent with Stacey and the other people in these columns.

“Especially with Stacey, who was so eloquent about her suffering, so eloquent about her pain and frustration. And she felt so lost, right? Abraham said. “So it was particularly hard to leave Stacey at the end of a day of reporting because of the pain she was in and how frustrating it was for her and how hard it was to witness it without being able to fix it .”

For other columns, Abraham followed a 65 year old woman living in a hotel room with his three teenage grandchildren, a 32-year-old mother out of two who lived in hotels for a year, a couple and their eight children who were denied emergency shelter and lawyer at the nonprofit organization that works to help families.

In preparation for the columns to appear on the Globe’s website, Abraham said he requested that the comments be turned off. He was afraid that readers would judge his sources and write hurtful things. She was glad she did.

“On the other hand, the emails I received were almost all very supportive and very eager to help the families,” she said, “and so I was able to direct them to nonprofits that could says best how to help families. “

Abraham said that what he hopes to achieve with the series is to give all four families he features “a humanity that immunizes them against snap judgments and people’s disapproval.”

“And to show all the ways that even if you try incredibly hard, even if you’ve done nothing wrong, even if you have kids who haven’t made any of the choices you might disapprove of, the system, the way our country is set up, the way even a well-intentioned state like Massachusetts is set up, sets them up for defeat after defeat after defeat.”

In April, Abraham was announced as the winner of the Poynter Journalism Awards for his series of columns on homelessness in Boston. She received the Mike Royko Award for Commentary and Columnist Writing—sponsored by the Chicago Tribune in memory of legendary columnist Mike Royko, who died in 1997—which recognizes excellence in writing by an individual expressing a personal point of view.