From Teen Vogue authored by Isabella Gomez:
“Zoë Van Tieghem felt sick to her stomach when she learned that migrant children were being separated from their parents at the United States–Mexico border as a result of the Trump administration’s policy to criminally prosecute anyone crossing into the U.S. without official documentation. So the 20-year-old from New York City decided to step in — and now she’s reuniting families, one at a time.
Zoë, a third-year student at the New School, is the outreach coordinator for Immigrant Families Together (IFT), a newly established grassroots organization dedicated to reuniting immigrant mothers with their children.
More than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents since attorney general Jeff Sessions announced the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security’s new “zero tolerance” policy on April 6, according to The New York Times. The policy called for immigration violations to be treated as criminal rather than civil offenses, which meant parents were being sent to federal jails or detention centers operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while awaiting trial. Since children cannot be held in adult detention facilities, they were placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. The ORR then transferred them to sheltersacross the country or placed them in foster care.
Although President Donald Trump signed an executive order on June 20 calling for all children to instead be detained alongside their parents, there is still no effective reunification plan or process in place for those who have already been affected by the policy. That’s where IFT, and Zoë, come in: They raise money through GoFundMe to pay for the bonds of mothers being held in immigration detention centers.”
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