A new fundraiser program that launched on Facebook broke many records after collecting more than $16 million in just one week.
The goal of the campaign is to bring back together children who were being kept away from their parents at detention centers.
The project organizers, Charlotte and Dave Willner, first thought of the idea when they saw a photograph of a 2-year-old girl and her mother being detained at the border.
The little Honduran child is crying, while members of the border patrol are going through their belongings.
Upon seeing the picture, Charlotte and Dave were so touched by its content that they decided to set up a fundraiser campaign to raise the necessary means to reunite the unfortunate families.
The name of the campaign was “Reunite an immigrant parent with their child,” and its goal is to distribute the means gathered to a nonprofit organization in Texas, called the Refugee and Immigration Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES).
The couple was astonished when they saw the amount of money donated had reached more than $6 million in a very short period of time.
The executive director of RAICES, Johnathan Ryan, opened up and discussed his surprise upon first learning about the collected money.
He claimed that even though members of the organization felt pleased, they also realized the great responsibility that comes with such an amount of money.
For the time being, it is decided that a part of the donation will be used to cover the bond of the detained parents so that they can be reunited with their children.
Another part of the money will be spent on attorneys to represent the children kept in the detention centers in Texas.
Over 250,000 people have donated to this charity. The people, who started it, were only hoping for $1,500 initially. The Trump administration is not showing any sign of backing down on the subject.
