Opinion | How Regular Americans Can Help Reunite Migrant Families

In recent days, heartbreaking news reports and photographs have brought to light the fact that the United States government hasn’t stopped separating immigrant families at the border, despite a year-old executive order.

It feels like a sick sort of déjà vu. At this time last year, like many other Americans, I watched in horror as details of family separation emerged: Children in cages, audio recordings of detained children sobbing, begging to call their relatives, as government officials laughed.

I found myself unable to separate the crisis from my own life, the way we tend to with most horrifying news. Otherwise pleasant parenting tasks became painful reminders. Every time my son cried, I thought of the babies whose mothers weren’t there to comfort them.

I wanted to help in some meaningful way, but was unsure how. Then a friend sent me a Facebook post written by Julie Schwietert Collazo, a mother of three in Queens. She was crowdfunding to raise bond for a mother from Guatemala named Yeni González. Ms. Schwietert Collazoand others organized a caravan of volunteers to drive Ms. González from Arizona, where she had been detained in ICE’s Eloy Detention Center, to New York, where her children had been placed in foster care. Days later, the family was reunited.

The government has made it close to impossible for journalists and elected officials to enter detention centers. Just Wednesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren was barred from the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children, in Florida.

Ms. Schwietert Collazo’s group, Immigrant Families Together, had early success at reaching detained mothers because of Ms. González. As soon as she knew she was going to be freed last summer, she began collecting contact information from fellow detainees. That was how Ms. Schwietert Collazo and a growing number of volunteers, including me, located the second, third, fourth, and fifth moms we helped get released.

Bonds for detained immigrants start at $1,500, and can be as high as $80,500. It’s an impossible sum for a recently arrived migrant to pay. The first step once we’ve identified a family is to post bond as quickly as possible. Speed is essential for more than just reunification: Securing bond increases the odds of winning an asylum case in court. To date, Immigrant Families Together has reunited 73 families and helped dozens more. Our organization also provides them with ongoing support — everything from housing to legal representation to medical care to groceries.

One of the mothers Immigrant Families Together bonded out has already been granted asylum. Another was elected president of the PTA at her child’s school. A fifth grader was serenaded by his class in both English and Spanish on his birthday. A teenager once detained became the star of his high school soccer team.

These victories buoy us through the far more common horrors we have encountered. Clerical errors have put children who were very much wanted by their guardians on a list of adoptable, unaccompanied minors. When they were separated, many of them were told that they were only being taken to another room for a few minutes, before being transported to another state. One little girl, who recently reunited with her father after 326 days apart, was asleep in his arms when agents took her.

Once released, most of the mothers we work with have to wear tracking devices in the form of painfully tight electronic ankle monitors. It is yet another way in which the current administration tries to liken them to hardened criminals, when in fact they are women who crossed the border at great personal cost to seek asylum and flee certain death.

Last year, President Trump said of immigrant children: “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.” In January, Mark Morgan, head of Customs and Border Protection appeared on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and declared, “I’ve looked at them and I’ve looked at their eyes, Tucker, and I’ve said, ‘That is a soon-to-be MS-13 gang member.’”

The antidote to so much hateful rhetoric is bearing witness to the truth. Take for example, Samuel, a 10-year-old from El Salvador who, last summer, fled the gangs that were pressuring him to join. His mother left her other children behind and risked everything to bring him to America, where she believed he would be safe. When Samuel was released from detention he asked me if I would take him to the zoo. He loves penguins. His favorite movie is Kung Fu Panda.

On my fridge hangs a picture my son made one night before dinner. Yellow construction paper covered in bright blue finger paint and pink stickers in the shape of a strawberry, a flower, an ice cream cone. An immigration lawyer I’d been trying to get on the phone all day to discuss a complicated case happened to call as he was painting it. The lawyer started talking fast. Without thinking, I took notes on the only available paper. At the bottom of that cheery painting, scrawled in Magic Marker, are the words, “Prosecutor told him it was one of the most egregious things he’s ever seen, the people in the basement in chains.”

Nothing could better encapsulate this last year of my life. It feels better to act than to look away. If you feel outraged now, stay outraged until every last child is reunited with his or her parents and family separation is abolished. We have the power to make this country what it ought to be: to welcome and aid the most vulnerable, to vote out those who would do them harm. So much can change in a year.