I want to help reunite the lost immigrant children with their parents. I will volunteer. I will pay my own travel. I am not a lawyer, and I don’t speak Spanish. I am very good at cutting through red tape. I can be really nice. I can be really persistent. I can be really organized. I can pass a background check.
Anyone know of organizations looking for volunteers to actually help with the matchups?
This is a very urgent self-contained problem that must be solved now. I want to help solve this hopefully short-lived problem with feet on the ground action not donations or demonstrations.
Please don’t make this political and get the thread closed. I ask the mods to delete any political posts. Thanks.
Reach out to RAICES. They are really coordinating a lot of this effort.
I will warn that they may not want your help. It’s nothing personal but when you have volunteers who don’t have a specific, needed skillset, they can be more pain than they’re worth. Especially in chaotic, massive incidents like this.
Referring to @Ynotgo’s post, here’s what I saw in my Twitter feed: RAICES needs volunteer translators: who speak Meso-American indigenous languages (eg, zapotec, nahua, ma’am, quich’e, maya, mixe, mixteco-- not Spanish). They don’t need to be in Texas, or even in the US. They can translate remotely.
email volunteer@raicestexas.org
Your best bet may be contacting local organizations such as Lutheran Family Services which has been resettling refugees and immigrants in several states for many years, they may be able to direct you.
You can also check out
Immigrants’ Rights Coalition (they have chapters in many states)
The more difficult part will be reuniting the kids already separated. All kinds of things are needed to try and match a kid to a legal parent or relative. Many of the kids came over the border with adults other than their parents or a relative. So finding the parents in their homeland is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack. It is so sad.
Thanks folks. RAICES is handling the legal end which I am obviously not equipped to help with.
My understanding is that there is no mechanism to match parents with children, and in many cases, facilities housing the children don’t know which children came with parents, and which children are unaccompanied minors. There are also parents who have already been deported without their children.
It would seem to me that help is needed on both ends, even if it means taking photographs and creating photo arrays.
I’ve volunteered in this area for decades (I’m sure one could do a search to see my many posts on this topic). Reuniting families quickly is critically important, but more important that it is done right. My organization isn’t helping with this aspect, but I am writing letters supporting DNA testing for this purpose. In my own experience, human trafficking, particularly of children is a much more widespread problem than many realize.
CRD, have you considered working with general immigrant groups - there is very great need all the time, and as it was mentioned upthread many of the immigrants speak indigenous languages that aren’t commonly translated.
I applaud your willingness to help. There is so much to be done.
I think it unlikely any volunteer will get access to the children or to government records. You’d need a security clearance for certain documents or computer bases. Volunteering with an established agency in your own state may be the best. They may have a need for transportation, but again may find it easier to use a commercial service than to certify a private vehicle.
Yes DNA testing sure, however, many of the kids separated came with people who were not parents or relatives, children came with others who have left so it’s not as easy as matching up DNA with people that are somewhere here in the US. I agree the best way is to find out if any organization in your state is a contractor to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and see if they need any volunteers although most of the organizations don’t need volunteers unless they are licensed or approved as foster homes.Many of the organizations involved have been in various media articles. The kids are in multiple states (those that have been placed with foster homes)…here’s a local article from Maryland as an example:
In my opinion, the best thing that can be one is to lobby the Congress to get their butts in their seats and work out some better immigration policy. This has been going on through multiple president for multiple decades and frankly I’ve been mad about it for decades. It is ridiculous to have laws that every president, Democrat or Republican, has either ignored or written executive orders to get around the laws that got written in 1997.
@ClassicRockerDad – one suggestion I’ve read is that, because a lot of these kids are in or will end up in the foster system, volunteering with CASA --Court Appointed Special Advocates–is a way to donate your time and efforts into adocacy to help individual children while they’re in the system, and hopefully moving them out and back with their parents.
I don’t doubt that most foster parents do a good job, but volunteering with foster care doesn’t help reunite these kids, who do not need to be in foster care but should be with their own loving, desperate parents.
CF. Agreed. But CASA is not being a foster parent. It is representing and advocating for the kids in court. It is someone keeping track of where they are and what’s happening to them.
