A guardian angel on the border comes to the rescue
SAN DIEGO -- Confronted with heart-wrenching images of children snatched from parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, good people will feel as if there is nothing one person can do to make their sliver of the world a kinder and gentler place.
Robert Kennedy understood that feeling. And yet, at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in June 1966, the U.S. Senator from New York pushed back.
"First is the danger of futility," Kennedy told his audience. "The belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man."
One such man is Richard Villasana, a bi-national guardian angel who works to spare children the pain of family separation.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents often add to the pain. In El Paso, Texas, on Christmas eve, ICE agents played Scrooge by dumping hundreds of asylum-seekers in the parking lot of a bus station.
Villasana hates the thought of thousands of children being funneled into foster care. And whether those children come to the United States as unaccompanied minors, or come with parents who wind up incarcerated or deported, foster care is where many of these would-be refugees wind up. When they turn 18, they're released into the streets -- with no family, no home, and no hope. The first time they run across a predator, they wind up on the menu.
But not if Villasana can help it. As the founder of a nonprofit organization called "Forever Homes for Foster Kids," he spends his days trying to locate the relatives of some of these children who find their way into foster care in the hopes that the kinfolk will take in these kids and get them out of the system.
What a great idea. Simple but effective.
But there is a catch. Not just anyone can do this magic trick. We're talking about tracking down people in Third World countries with scant personal information to go on. Locating someone in the Mexican state of Oaxaca is not like finding someone in the midwestern state of Ohio.
Luckily, Villasana has a gift. It's a knack for finding people by putting information together, using just phones and people skills, following a paper trail and analyzing data until the bread crumbs lead to an aunt, cousin, grandma or parent.
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