Building Bridges, not Walls

COHI is proud to announce that we are taking another delegation to the Texas/Mexico border in November. This group is a special one; we'll have COHI Board and Staff plus a clinician and volunteers on the ground serving at the clinic. The most recent estimates are 175 people per day coming through the clinic we staff. Please stay tuned for more from our upcoming trip!

We're also still hearing news about the families who are not released and remain in custody. The amount of time children have spent in custody has nearly doubled since last year. The longer they stay in these tent cities, the worse the long-term effects will be. We are working to expand our medical and psychological support across the border – but the worse this gets, the harder recovery will be. The recent New York Times article describes the situation well.

Thanks for your support.

“The average stay for unaccompanied minors in detention, in Texas, is 6-8 weeks as they are processed for safe placement in the US, and 95% of them have somewhere they are going, either to a family member or host family. We all worried about these kids, their futures, and the trauma they are enduring,” writes Founder and CEO of Circle of Health International Sera Bonds.

COHI offers critical support to an immigrant clinic in McAllen, Texas with COHI clinicians and volunteers. COHl began our work keeping families together along the Texas/Mexico border four years ago this month, July 4th weekend of 2014. Since that time we've cared for tens of thousands of mothers, kids, and babies through the provision of clinical volunteers who've staffed the Catholic Charities clinic in McAllen.

Over the last four years we've

• Provided training to hundreds of social service and health care providers in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas to identify those who've been trafficked; and
• Provided food. health care, and medicine to tens of thousdands of individuals being released from border patrol in McAllen in the last four years in a clinic in McAllen, Texas. 

We are currently scaling our border response to: 

• Work with Texas-based legal aid agencies to provide forensic psychologists to support asylee request evaluations; and
• To provide clinical volunteers to emerging efforts to care for this population in El Paso and Laredo, covering an additional 800 miles of border crossing. 

This crisis is not going away-these families will need our care, our attention, our support for many years to come. COHI is in this fight for the long-haul and that is why we need your help. We are raising $25,000 to provide further valuable support to families being cared for at the McAllen clinic.

Links:

• An article detailing the clinical experiences of pregnant women
• How trauma impacts children and what COHI is doing about it