Here are some ways to help children who are immigrants and being detained.
What you can do right now:
Give to Bond Funds: The first step in helping reunite children with their parents and caregivers is to contribute to bail funds for detained adults. You can contribute to the local Immigration Bond Funds listed here, who are part of the National Bail Funds Network.
Donate to Advocacy & Assistance Efforts: Once parents are released, they will need help advocating for the release their children to them. This can take weeks or months. Here are some for local, immigrant-led organizations that are serving their communities: Annunciation House, Al Otro Lado, La Raza Centro Legal, Make The Road, Refugee Transitions & Grassroots Leadership. Team Brownsville assists asylum-seekers at bus stations, immediately following their release, providing them with essentials to help them on their journey. Angry Tias & Abuelas of Rio Grande Valley also do direct work at points of entry and at bus stations.
Donate to Legal Efforts: Lawyers are critical. This is and will continue to be a long legal battle. Sustained funds are needed to hire and retain the very best for the fight. Donate to non-profit legal centers that are local to your community. In LA, there’s Public Counsel and Immigrant Defenders Law Center. In TX there’s Texas Civil Rights Project and RAICES. In NY there’s Terra Firma, Central American Legal Assistance, Central American Refugee Center, on Long Island, and the Cornell Farmworker Program, upstate. The UC Davis Immigration law clinic is doing important work on the ground, as is the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights project.
Volunteer Directly: Figure out how and where your volunteer skills can best be put to use. Here is a great starting point for a robust set of opportunities to work directly with and on behalf of families at the border and locally, as well as remotely.
Leverage your Spanish language skills: bilingual translators and interpreters are critical (and not just for Spanish, though that’s the primary need). Here’s one way to help remotely.
