The phone at Coalición de Derechos Humanos hasn’t stopped ringing. On the line are families desperate to find children missing in the desert, or caught up in a labyrinth of federal agencies and immigrant detention centers along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Tucson, Ariz.-based nonprofit is struggling to keep up.
“We don’t see an end in sight,” says Isabel Garcia, an attorney and co-founder of the group.
As a surge of families and children crossing illegally into the United States overwhelms government agencies and maxes out holding facilities, nonprofit organizations are hustling to fill in the gaps for services, coordinating everything from shelter to legal aid.
“It creates a really chaotic and crazy situation,” says Melissa Lopez, executive director at Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services in El Paso, Texas, which provides legal services to unaccompanied minors detained at the border. “I think some of the responses that we have put into place in our office and locally are sustainable up to a point, but if this becomes a long-term situation, I think we will all have to re-evaluate how we are handling things.”
Some 39,000 adults traveling with children were apprehended crossing into the United States between October and May, says Alejandro Mayorkas, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. As of June 15, 52,000 unaccompanied minors had been taken into custody, double the number of unaccompanied minors apprehended in fiscal year 2013, according to statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The influx of people—most reportedly fleeing violence in Central America—is exhausting the capacity of immigrant detention centers, especially in south Texas. Detainees are being transported to facilities elsewhere, including in other parts of Texas and in Arizona.
Unaccompanied minors are placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, where it is determined whether the child is to be released to a guardian in the United States or deported. And while efforts are under way to secure additional facilities, according to Mr. Moyorkas, a lack of existing infrastructure means that for now, adults traveling with children are mostly being released on recognizance.
That often translates to families left at bus depots without food, money, access to showers, or means of communication, say nonprofit leaders.
Long Days and a Flood of Donations
Annunciation House, an El Paso nonprofit that has provided hospitality services to immigrants for more than three decades, is just one of the organizations working to arrange accommodations.
The first two planes—carrying 135 adults and children each—arrived from South Texas on June 7, says Ruben Garcia, director at the organization. Two additional planeloads arrived on June 14, and Mr. Garcia says he has been advised there could be two more this week. He described his communication with local Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials as “utterly excellent” and the community response as “very generous.” The families stay only as long as it takes to make contact with relatives in other parts of the country and to come up with the money to travel, typically a few days, Mr. Garcia says.
Annunciation House has not made any public appeals for donations, and is accepting donated items only as existing stockpiles are depleted, so as not to overwhelm the organization.
“This has been 18-, 19-hour days for us,” Mr. Garcia says. “But the food, the toiletries, the shampoo, the bar soap, the feminine hygiene items, the used clothing, the volunteer cooks—that has spontaneously come. And it is coming in the quantities that are necessary.”
Cyndi Whitmore, founder of The Restoration Project in Phoenix, says she received a telephone call from Greyhound bus officials the day after Memorial Day. There were about 50 women and children, dehydrated and exhausted, sitting in their Phoenix station.
In subsequent days, scores more would follow before the influx eventually ebbed.
“People being released at a Greyhound station was nothing new,” Ms. Whitemore says. “What was different is we are not used to seeing parents traveling with young children. That, and the volume.”
She and others at Restoration Project set up an aid station on site. They provided food, water, and toiletries, while also helping those stranded to contact family members and make travel arrangements.
As the story spread through the local community, Restoration Project was inundated with donations, filling several storage spaces at local churches, Ms. Whitmore says. They are still trying to weed through all the items to determine what will be useful.
Gone Missing
Robin Reineke, co-founder of the Colibri Center for Human Rights, says she is worried about the number of people who may have died in the desert and haven’t been found yet. The Tucson nonprofit manages a database of people gone missing along the border, and works to match families searching for loved ones with unidentified remains.
“We are nervous about the current trend in unaccompanied minors crossing the border because trends don’t show up among the dead and missing until later,” Ms. Reineke says. “It takes time for remains to be discovered in the desert, and then identified so that we know the exact name.”
In an effort to drive public attention, the Colibri Center this month published a poster titled “The Things They Carried,” which features 72 thumbnail sketches of items found on children who died crossing the border between 2001 and 2013. They include a hair scrunchie and a napkin with names and numbers scrawled on it.
“What is happening with the kids is an indicator of crisis,” Ms. Reineke says. “When you have little tiny kids traveling by themselves hundreds of miles across an inhospitable desert in numbers like this, I really hope the attention doesn’t stop at the border.”
Foundations Respond
The current crisis has not gone unnoticed by donors. Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, or GCIR, which works to increase philanthropy around refugee- and immigration-related causes, has received telephone calls from grant makers across the country, says associate director Felecia Bartow.
The organization will host a webinar on July 9 that will focus on how donors can respond. In addition, GCIR is working with partners to assemble a list of philanthropic opportunities for donors who are new to the issue.
Tara Magner, a program officer at the MacArthur Foundation who is helping to assemble the donor resource list, says that unaccompanied minors passing into the United States is not new, and some organizations have long worked on the issue. The MacArthur Foundation, itself, committed more than $1-million through six research and policy grants related to unaccompanied minors in 2012.
Still, current events are intensifying the attention, Ms. Magner says.
“The curve upward is going steeper and steeper,” Ms. Magner says. “There is a lot to learn for everyone. Even donors who have focused on immigration before may not have focused in on this particular population prior to the last months when the numbers really skyrocketed.”
She declined to comment on any new grants or pledges from foundations born out of current events on the border, but says that “there is a very healthy conversation and a lot of information sharing” going on.
The Ford Foundation is exploring additional funding opportunities and working with other grant makers to develop a coordinated response to the recent influx of immigrants, according to spokesperson Joshua Cinelli. The foundation has invested extensively in related work for decades, including grants totaling $206,000 to support nonprofits doing forensic work on border crossing victims since 2010, Mr. Cinelli says.
Nonprofit leaders say they will plow ahead, with or without additional support.
On Saturday, Ms. Garcia of Coalición de Derechos Humanos toured a Customs and Border Protection detention center in Nogales, Ariz., that is housing about 800 unaccompanied minors detained at the border. She was part of a small group of leaders, including Arizona congressman Raul Grijalva, who had to fight to get access, she says.
Detainees were separated by chain-link fencing and razor wire based on gender and age, Ms. Garcia says. The youngest child she spotted was about four years old.
“It is really brutal,” she says. “All of us in this country hear about refugee camps here and there. We never expect one to pop up in our backyard.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated on June 26 to correct the sum of grants given by the MacArthur Foundation.
