Essentials for Reunited Families

Update: Hi everyone! Thank you so much for your support and encouragement! The families are so thankful for all of your kindness. To make any future donations, please see our sister GoFundMe for tax deductible donations: https://www.gofundme.com/ngtxn-support-reunited-immigrant-families


August 10, 2018 Update:
Hi everyone! Your continued support will help 150 families in 30+ cities! Your donations make this possible. We have also officially incorporated as Together & Free and are working to obtain our 501(c)3 status so we can continue assisting families like these. While we continue to work on obtaining our 501(c)3 status, one of our co-founders, Alice T,  will be withdrawing the money to distribute to our volunteers around the country this week! The needs continue to evolve as we learn about the long legal and health journey ahead for the families.  Please support them.

UPDATE:

Your donations have already helped meet essential needs for 60 families, with more on the horizon every day -- thank you! 

And we have exciting news to share: we are now assisting families on travel by coordinating with the Flights for Families Fund within the Families Belong Together campaign to cover the cost of ALL their flight needs.  This means your contributions are being leveraged many times over.  With the cost of tickets no longer being the most urgent need , all of your personal donations will go to meet the many other essential needs  - clothes, medicine, food, health and hygiene needs, legal support - our newly reunited families have.  Your donations will support these and other expenses. 

For accounting reasons, donations made on this page are not tax-deductible. If you need to make a tax-deductible donation please click here  to contribute to our account in partnership with the Open Avenues Foundation, which will provide you with an automatic tax receipt for your donation.

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More than 2900 immigrant children have been forcibly separated from their parent, mostly at the border, since April. You may have seen the headlines. The good news is that thanks to action by the courts, most of these families are being reunited. But once they are, who is there to help them with the essentials – food, clothing, a shower, medicine for their child, transport to their extended family somewhere in the continental US?

This is the need we are serving. We are a group of women with professional backgrounds, many of us with young children ourselves.   Originally based in Brooklyn and Boston, we now have a volunteer network in 46 states, who in recent weeks have been answering the call from social service organizations, immigration lawyers, and detainees themselves.  We pick up reunited families from shelters, take them to places where they can shower and rest, make them food, buy them new clothes to replace the ones they were given in prison, provide medicine for a cough their child picked up at the shelter, give them a phone, drive them to the airport, help them through security and onto the plane, and pick them up on the other end when their relatives can’t, to make sure they get to their final destination. The New York Times  recently wrote a story about some of the families we've helped.

To date we have worked with nearly 30 families and funded it all ourselves, with the help of family and friends. As the trickle of reunifications has increased to many hundreds of families, we are now asking for your help.
 
These are the kinds of costs we want to cover for every family:

-       $50 for a new clothes for a parent just out of detention
-       $10 for basic toiletries
-       $20 for a meal for the family
-       $20 for gas to drive the family from the detention center to a place to change, on to the airport and home on the other end
-       $25 for bag check fees
-       $60 for a cell phone and one month of service
-       $50 in cash for the trip
-      $50 for a car seat

The children are often discharged with donated clothing but most of the parents arrive to us with nothing. All of their personal possessions are typically confiscated at the border and/or in detention. In the short term, all of these families will need some legal support. Pro bono resources are limited to non-existent in many of the families’ destinations – legal fees can run into the tens of thousands of dollars per family.

Every person we encounter has their own story. The three-year-old who woke up every fifteen minutes at night screaming “Mami! Mami!”—until she realized her mother was right there. A 13-year-old forced to clean bathrooms and a 9 year old forced to mop floors in detention before they were permitted to eat breakfast. A man who was transported from El Paso to New York over the course of three days, without food, only to throw up his first meal in front of his three-year-old. Siblings who were in the same shelter, but kept forcibly apart. Many of the mothers we've encountered were told when their kids were taken from them that they would never see their children again. The stories are horrific, the trauma is real and enduring.

We coordinate with established organizations – RAICES, ACLU, Immigrant Defenders, Lutheran Services, Annunciation House, and others. We let the experts be the experts and we fill in the gaps. We have partnered with Jeff Goldman Immigration in Boston, one of the most prominent law firms representing separated families, to raise money to help more families in more places. We are all volunteers and there is no overhead. 

So many lives have been upended, so many families ruptured, so many children pushed to the limit of what they can bear. Every day we meet people with a need for clothes, transportation, mental-health services, checked-baggage fees, a meal, a way to call their relatives. We have so much work to do.

Please join us.

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Carmen, pictured above, gave her enthusiastic consent to our use of her photo so we can help other parents like her.

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