Every day, 37,000 people leave their homes to flee conflict and persecution. For hundreds of reasons beyond their control, they leave everything familiar, navigate mountains of paperwork, learn new social and cultural norms and sometimes even a new language. Sometimes family members become separated in the process and have no financial means to ever reunite. After overcoming so many obstacles to find safety, this burden can feel like one more overwhelming hurdle.
Miles4Migrants (M4M) assists refugees who have been separated Drawing by 3-year-old Sofi given as a thank-you to Miles4Migrants for uniting her family. Border Patrol originally made her choose which family member could cross the border with her. M4M provided free flights for this family of five to reach relatives within the U.S. once CBP/ICE released them. Photos courtesy of Miles4Migrants from their families. The organization does this by providing refugees with free airfare to reach a safe home in a new location, after receiving legal approval to travel. It reunites families with fathers who have fled the homeland to forge a safe life in a new country, escaping recruitment by a terrorist organization. It reunites children with parents who have established themselves in a new country after being jailed and even tortured for political or religious beliefs. In some cases, gang violence and threats force them to flee.
How Do They Help?
Miles4Migrants partners with more than 25 nonprofit charities in the United States and worldwide. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Catholic Charities USA and Immigrant Families Together vet families who need flights to verify financial need, and assure that they have all paperwork and legal permission to relocate to the new location. Sometimes these families even receive legal assistance from the referring NGO – obtaining legal documents to travel, to help with bond if detained by U.S. Border Patrol, or to help find children if they were separated. Once M4M receives a request for a ticket from the NGO, the organization pairs a donor’s pledge of miles with a specific family or family member. This process circumnavigates the additional financial hardship for someone fleeing a seemingly inescapable scenario.
If you want to donate miles, you can do so on M4M’s website (www. miles4migrants.org/donate). There is no “pooling” of miles, so every donor’s pledge supports an individual case. Different scenarios require different quantities of miles and different airline carriers. For example, a flight for someone fleeing Afghanistan to Belgium will take 20,000 miles, but an adult and three children will require 80,000. However, a ticket within the United States usually requires only 12,500 miles, so this is where Miles4Migrants sets its minimum donation. M4M will book the flight once it has a case “match.” Donors can choose to be directly involved; M4M can provide flight information so they can make airline reservations themselves.
A New Purpose
Although overseas assistance was the bulk of Miles4Migrants’ work for several years, as the U.S./Mexico border crisis has escalated, the need to help families detained and separated at the border has increased. M4M receives multiple requests for free tickets every day, and several recent cases made national news: the 3-year-old girl asked by a border patrol agent to choose which parent should cross the border with her; the mother not allowed to cross the border with her child, who ended up alone for months undergoing cancer treatment in the United States; the mentally challenged man separated from his family at the border with no understanding of how to contact them until a nonprofit happened upon him in a shelter.
In each of these cases, M4M provided free flights to reunite families. These are just a few of the hundreds of successful family reunifications Miles4Migrants facilitated.
Donors Can Be Involved in the Process
U.S. border cases make up about two-thirds of the free flights that M4M provides. As of September, M4M provided more than 750 tickets in 2019 alone, and has supplied a total of more than 1,400 since its founding in 2016. If a donor holds a special place in their heart for international refugees and wants the pledge used only for those types of cases or if a donor wants miles used only for U.S. border families, Miles4Migrants will honor the request.
To pledge airline miles to help reunite families, visit Miles4Migrants. org/donate. If your company, church, or community group would like to set up a miles-raising campaign to help, email [email protected] for additional information.
