Mexico would be a start. Click photo for video.
Via Dallas News
More than 50 staffers from churches and social service agencies met Tuesday for an initial meeting with Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins to discuss their roles should temporary housing be established here for Central American migrant children.
The four-step review process by the federal government hasn’t been completed, Jenkins said. In Washington, the U.S. Health and Human Services had no comment on the private contractor or contractors who would be awarded the contract.
“Children need to know they are valued,” said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, at a news conference at the Red Cross.
The migrant children need to know “that the community understands what they have been through and sees them as people not problems that is very, very important for these children.”
Jenkins turned again to the story of his own 8-year-old daughter, who told her father the migrant children needed help.
“I don’t want my child or her friends or any child to think that when children are in crisis that we turn our back on them in crisis because of their nationality or the language that they speak,” Jenkins said.
Tuesday was the first meeting of the local chapter of the national Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, which will coordinate its activities with federal agencies involved in assisting an unprecedented surge of migrant children travelling without parents. Among the groups meeting were Catholic Charities of Dallas and the Texas Baptist Men. Both organizations were singled out by Jenkins for “phenomenal” work at the border, and in Dallas in finding legal representation for juveniles and their families.
Others attending came from Jewish Family Services, the Salvation Army and the United Methodist Church of North Central Texas, the North Texas Food Bank, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
Nikki Beneke, a leader in the volunteer agency consortium, said they were still trying to organize volunteers and duties. But the end goal, Beneke said, is “for children to be children again.”