Business Innovators Radio - Richard Villasana: The Sherlock Holmes of Foster Care Connecting Children with Relatives and Forever Families

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Richard Villasana Helps Reunite Foster and Immigrant Children with Their FamiliesIn this episode, Dr. Tami Patzer talks with Richard Villasana, the founder of Forever Homes for Foster Kids. Richard is a leading international authority on immigration issues and foster families, with more than three decades of experience.Richard has been featured on CNN International, Associated Press, ABC TV, Costco Connections, and in the Washington Post. He is a columnist for Foster Focus Magazine, an international speaker, and the international award-winning author of the best-selling book “Do No Harm.”Richard’s nonprofit has tirelessly worked with government agencies across the country to find families for foster and immigrant children, creating permanent homes for them. He specializes in locating relatives in Latin America to reunite children with their families, even in challenging cases where others have failed. Richard shares stories of his successes, including finding a father in Argentina in just five days when other organizations had searched for over four years.This episode is a must-listen for anyone concerned about the plight of foster and immigrant children in the United States. Richard’s insights and dedication to these vulnerable populations are truly inspiring. Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the complexities these children face and how Richard’s organization is making a difference.To learn more about Richard Villasana and his work, visit the Forever Homes for Foster Kids website at ForeverHomesForFosterKids.org.You can also purchase Richard’s book, “Do No Harm,” on Amazon or any bookstore to support his nonprofit’s efforts.Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/richard-villasana-the-sherlock-holmes-of-foster-care-connecting-children-with-relatives-and-forever-families

Welcome to Business Innovators Radio, featuring industry influencers and trendsetters, sharing proven strategies to help you build a better life right now. Hi everyone. This is Dr. Tammy Patser, and today we have the honor of speaking with Richard Viasana. He is the founder of Forever Homes for Foster Kids. Richard is a leading international authority on immigration issues and foster. family with more than three decades of experience. He's a proud Navy veteran, and he has been featured on CNN International, Associated Press, ABC TV, Costco Connections, and in the Washington Post. He is a columnist for Foster Focus Magazine, an international speaker, and the international award-winning author of the best-selling book, Do No Harm.

Richard's nonprofit has tirelessly worked with government agency across the country to find families for foster and immigrant children, creating permanent homes for them. Richard, welcome. Thank you for having me. As I was talking to you before we started, obviously foster children and then immigrant children. and I think I want to ask you about immigrant children, since we only have a short time to focus, just because immigration has been such a hot topic, and we don't, I think as a whole, we don't really understand what it really means for these children who are trying to come to the United States. So tell me more about what you actually are doing with Forever Homes for Foster Kids.

And then let's go into the immigration, the immigrant children. So forever homes for foster kids, we have been doing this work for three decades. So what happens is when a child comes into foster care, however they come into it, If agencies don't have a relative nearby they can take in the child, then they do something that's called family finding. Now, this is a very simple process. It's a three-part process. Number one, they make a huge list of all the relatives that a child has.

Number two, they get the contact information. And number three, they notify those relatives hoping that if they notify enough relatives, someone will step up and say, sure, I'll take in little Johnny or little Morales. and hopefully the child does get taken and they can be placed in what we call kinship care. And it is under the foster care umbrella, but it's not foster care with foster parents, group homes, going to an institution, or sleeping in a hotel room, which is what a lot of foster kids are doing right now. So it's always preferable to get them with relatives.

Now, the same thing applies when a child comes across the border and if that child is alone we've all seen stories about children who are passed over without a parent, without an adult, or they were with someone who wasn't really their parent, and so they were separated for safety, and at that point, that child goes into our federal foster care system, and it also works pretty much the same way. They're going to look to see if there's a mother or father that's already in the U.S. Is there another relative that the child is aware of? Some of these children come across with a phone number.

or sewn into their clothing or they have a number that they can give. And that federal agency, just like with the counties, we'll make contact with that relative. And most times, relative, of course, will say yes and take in the child, job done. If that doesn't happen, then we have to do the family finding again. And that's where my nonprofit really specializes in that work, because our specialty is Latin American. finding relatives all throughout Latin America.

And can I tell you a quick story? Yes, I'm very interested in hearing everything you have to say. Well, thank you. So, for instance, I'll give you one that's about a foster child. This foster child was 15 years old, U.S. citizen born here, but both their parents were originally from the Dominican Republic. And the father was never part of the picture. the mother, something happened and she disappeared, and that's why the girl went in the foster care.

She'd been in there for several months, and all she could tell her caseworker is that she had the names of two aunts and two uncles, mind you, just the names, that there are 50-ish and they lived in the Dominican Republic. That's all the information she could give. No phone numbers, no address, no region, just the country. And that's why they came to my nonprofit. We closed that case. and found her favorite uncle in less than 48 hours. Wow. So you are, obviously you've been working for more than 30 years. You're an advocate to help these children find either their relatives or proper placement somewhere. And because of your resources, you take that burden. It sounds like off of the

government who might have lost this girl in the paperwork or something? Because it only 48 hours, is that, am I accurate in thinking that you're like the go-to person to help expedite this type of thing? I am. Actually, some people have called me the Sherlock Holmes of foster care. I'll give you another example why they've said that. So on the immigrant side, we had a child who was in the U.S. who had been separated from her father. And so the government, this is after 2017, when we had thousands of children being separated from their mothers and fathers. And just to be clear, we're not talking about people that were these adults who were suspected as being coyotes. No, these are mothers and fathers.

Many of them had birth certificates. They could prove clearly that the child was theirs. It was clear to officials that the child was theirs. This was not, as some people tried to blow it up for the group I worked with, that they were other than families coming across and that these children were separated because of zero tolerance under the last administration. So we still have more than a thousand of these children who have not been reunited. One of the cases I received is for to locate this father who is believed to have been living in Argentina. So we got the case. Now, to put this in perspective, several nonprofits had worked to this case for more than four years.

Organizations like the Red Cross, immigration nonprofits who deal with immigrants all day long. After four years, they had failed to find a father. And then after four years, I get the case. So I got my team together. We worked on finding this father. We found him a less than five days. So how is it that you are able to do this, I would call it a miracle, something that rapid when these other organizations and agencies can't? What's different about you and your organization?

Well, one thing is a lot of organizations, both county and at the federal level are what I call one-stop shoppers. They have one phone number, one contact. It might be a consulate. It might be one organization. It might be a legal organization in a country. Maybe a university. I've seen that. But that's it.

That's their one and only contact. And so depending upon the quality of the work that that organization does, that's it. If they come through, excellent. If they don't come through, it stops. Everything stops. Now, in our case, with my nonprofit, we may do five or six searches. We may try multiple organizations and nonprofits in that country to find this person and get the information we want. And we've had information that said, you know, the mother is here.

Well, we found out the mother's not wherever they thought the mother was. She's back in the U.S. That was actually part of the work I was supposed to do is to let them know. Are they in Guatemala, for instance? If not, let us know that they're into U.S. And there were a few cases where that was the case that we said, no, the parents definitely are not here in their country of origin, Guatemala, El Salvador, but they are in the U.S., and in some cases, although our focus is not the U.S., we got new addresses.

addresses, phone numbers, we are able to give contact information to organizations who specialize in finding people in the U.S. who did not find these people. So we've worked on both sides. We expect, we have 70% of the cases we work when it comes to foster children. Relatives are in the U.S. And it's because of the work we do, finding those relatives in Latin America that they will say, oh, by the way, this girl has two aunts. living in Los Angeles. And that's where the girl will go. Or we've got, you know, an uncle living in Dallas when the girl was in Austin, Texas.

So a lot of our work, it's very fluid. It's not so concrete that's Latin America only. No, it's U.S., Latin America is conversations, communication, to get an idea of where someone is that can help this child, mostly that they're here in the U.S. That's just so fascinating. And I want to go back to one thing you said about, you said that there's still about 1,000 children that were not reunited after the zero tolerance policy from about 2017. So where are those children?

Where do they live while they're waiting to get reunited, either way, with their family, mom and dad, or a relative. Where are they? So for the majority of children, when they got separated from their parents, there was another relative already in the U.S. And this seems to be a trend where someone will come and establish themselves in the U.S. Now, again, this doesn't mean that they have work papers. They are still what we call non-citizens, but they have some kind of roots here in the U.S.

And this is what prompted many of these families to come up, was that they knew that there was this other, in many cases, a mother or a father. And so the other spouse was bringing up the child so that they could be a family here in the U.S. And then they got separated. So the child was connected. Again, the federal foster care system did their job, very good at this for the majority of children, found that relative and got the child placed with them. Now, having said that, unfortunately,

There are children who we have no idea. The government has no clue where they are. There are no records in the raw data that tell us where that child was placed. They're gone. There's not a name. There's not a relative. Those fields are empty. And so we've said, and I'm going a little afar here,

but people may have heard about accusations that the government has abated in sex trafficking? Well, if you look at that, that you had a child in custody, and the child got placed with someone and you have no record of who you placed that child with, yes, you know, on the face of it,

yes, we could say that the government has aided in child trafficking because they can't keep records of a child. And that was actually one of the comments that I have in my book, Do No Harm from now Chief District Judge, Donna Sondon

who is here in San Diego, who said, it is shocking that the federal government can track a parent's backpack, watches, wallet, money, whatever else they came with. But you had no process to track their children. And it's terrible. That is, yeah, it's chilling to think about, you know, I mean, obviously because children are children. They're like the most precious cargo, I guess, that you can think of. And you would think that of all those things, you'd want to know, where are they and how do you keep track of them? And how do you, if you're going to separate them, you better know how you're going to reunite them in the process.

So tell me more about your book. Do you know harm? So I wrote the book because honestly, I got brought in in 2020 to work on cold cases. What had happened, children's separations, 2017, 18, June 2018. There was an executive order signed by then President Trump saying, we will reunite these children. That was in part because the court said the government had violated one of our amendments of due process. and so they were ordered to make this happen. So it took about another six months for an interagency task force to be put together.

So things really didn't get started until 2019. The government did a lot of things domestically. And remember, this is a rescue. This is not, you know, trying to find just anything. The government was told you need to get these children reunited. As a matter of fact, they were told to get children ages, five and under, reunited within 30 days.

And I, on ABC, when I was interviewed, I told them, that's not going to happen. The logistics, I don't care who was in charge, was not going to happen. But they found that they had this growing group of parents that were cold cases.

Nobody could find these parents. And so I and my nonprofit got brought in in 2020. We started working in these cases in 2021. It's been now three years. and that's how I got involved, but I saw that they weren't treating this like a rescue. You got a child missing in a town. You get the dogs out.

You get the infrared. You get the helicopter. You get the police. You get the sheriff. You get everyone looking for his child. We did not do that as a country for these children. What we did is we had different groups and said, you know what?

We're going to look at these parents domestically, but we're not going to do that internationally. We'll see how we can do this. maybe we can do it on the cheap, and we won't have to pay so much money to do this. That took time. And then they said, oh, okay, that's not working very well for all these parents. Let's look internationally. And as I mentioned in Argentina, four years, more than three agencies.

Why was I brought in before then? Honestly, I can't tell you why. Could it be finances? I honestly don't know why you would not pull all the stops, get someone in, get everything going, working at both ends to solve this. And that's why I wrote the book because I was so frustrated by that. And there's a lack of energy on both administrations. I like to call myself an equal opportunity offender.

I don't think anyone in politics deserves a pat on the back. I don't care what side of the aisle they're sitting on because they all failed these children and they're all failing our fostered children. And that's why I wrote the book because it talks about the cases we've worked with the immigrant children. and if we don't find their relatives, guess where they go? Foster care. Now, to county agencies who they're struggling to speak Spanish, to have someone who speak Spanish well, and now we've got children coming in from places where they're indigenous languages like mom,

Kichae, Akateko, words that no one has ever heard of. And now these county agencies, the people you see at the supermarket, that woman or man has to figure out, How am I going to find their relatives in Guatemala? It's a terrible, terrible situation. The book talks about that. So you mentioned both administrations, Trump administration, Biden administration. And I know that everybody's always talking about this immigration policies. Does the new, I think it was an executive order that President Biden signed, relayed to immigration.

How does that affect the children who are here or will be coming? Because what do they do if a child shows up at the border without anyone or anything? What do they do? Do they just turn them away like they wouldn't adult? So they don't. Again, children go into our federal foster care system. That's called the ORR, the Office of Refugee, resettlement. So even though we hear that word refugee, these children are in effect refugees

as far as our system. And so they are processed and protected. There are international laws that the U.S. is signed on to an agreement that we are to protect children. And so there is that process that we have. We just don't do it very well. And that's a little unkind because probably 70 to 80% of the time they get it right. It's the 20, you know, the 10 to 20 percent that they struggle with and that they need very, a lot of help, more funding to get this done right, to treat these children right, so they're not sex trafficked. They're not loose out there with no one knowing where they are. And unfortunately, whatever's happening on the federal side, it's happening with our foster children. Our U.S. born children here, they are also being sex trafficked. They are

being lost. So the whole system in altogether when comes to children, it has lots of holes and needs help. And one of the things I wrote at the end of the book, grabbing about a problem doesn't help if you don't give solutions. And I gave three very practical, not popular solutions, but practical solutions that will solve this problem. And also highlighted our heroes, people like judges, foster parents that are helping thousands of thousands of the people who are helping both the immigrant and foster children. So can you share some of those solutions that you've offered? Absolutely.

Number one's got to be budget. A lot of people think we put too much money into the system. We've got to have enough. Look, when you have a caseworker who's working 20 plus cases and any of those cases could have one to five children, that's a lot of kids. And just imagine, if they had 20 cases, that means 20 days is pretty much the month. They have to go to court with a child. They have to do a home visit once a month.

They're required to do this. That's not happening. They have to be in court. They can't get away from that because the judge will get after them. Then they have to do the paperwork. Then that's if everything goes perfectly. Then maybe they have siblings in other places that they are trying to connect and at least have the siblings see each other once in a while.

So anything that goes off of just those three is extra work. So we have a great teacher's union who says, we are only going to have 28, 30 children. That's it, maximum. Don't ask us for more, but they don't when it comes to social workers. And there are, I quote in my book, there was one social worker had more than 100 cases. It is impossible to handle that many children and to do it effectively and to protect those children. That's not having it.

So we need more bodies. That means more money. Now, here's the other part, though. We need more accountability because if we had accountability, they'd spend the money better. And we don't have any accountability when it comes. comes to this. Nobody gets called on the carpet. Nobody gets in trouble. There was one case where the woman was so proud about fact she never had to reprimand any of her people, even though they had a child disappear, and nobody thought to call the police. An adult did not think it was necessary

to call the police where they had a missing child because, as he put it, it wasn't in the manual to do that. We need accountability to get that kind of ignorance, omission, apathy out of the same. We need accountability. We need system, get those supervisors trained, and that's the third part is training. We need massive training because these people are seriously under-trained, understaffed. You don't do all those three together. Nothing's going to happen. Accountability without more funds to have the right people. It doesn't matter if you don't have the training.

Nothing's going to improve. And if you don't have the money to afford those two, nothing's going to happen. In my mind, I can't even fathom a lot of what you're saying because I, like I am a grandmother and I'm a caretaker for two little babies. And I just can't imagine letting them into that type of a system. So for me, I would put the call out if you are a relative of someone who needs foster care, step up. So who is it that contacts you to help? how do you end up getting involved in all of this?

So at the county level, when it comes to foster children, it is the counties who run everything, and county agencies will hear about us and bring their cases to us, so we'll get emails. I've got this child, the one from Dominican Republic. We've got this foster child. Can you help? That's usually the way the emails start. I hear you could do something in Mexico. I've got a child.

Can you look for their relatives? and then we'll get more formal and we'll get the information that they have on the child. And again, family finding, what's their list? Who are we looking for? And then we go to work to get that contact information. And then we give that to the agency. So at that point, they can pick the phone up, make the phone call, make the connection. And then they took over because you've got more than 3,000 counties.

Each one of them does things their own way. And so they're going to have their own questions they want to ask. they have to vet the parents. That's a whole other process. But that's what we do when it comes to foster children. And basically, same thing's true for the immigrant children. We are under contract. We have been working.

We have now closed more than 100 cases where we found more than 100 mothers and fathers who nobody else could find. And we have found them. And now they are all in the process of being reunited with their children. But we still have 1,400 more children at the last count who have yet to be. be reunited with their parents. And we're getting on to seven years now. I don't know. Like I said, it's, I think that this conversation is probably one of the toughest to hear and to learn about because, again, you're talking about people's lives,

little children whose lives have been changed forever because of circumstances that they weren't even involved in. So what is the best way if somebody wants to reach out to find out more? And can people donate to your nonprofit organization also? Absolutely. We're very active on Facebook so they can donate there. They can go to our website, Forever Homes 4, F-O-R, fosterkids.org, donate buttons everywhere. because we're so specialized,

that really is the best way for people to help is to donate so we can use that money for the teams we have in these countries that can get results in five days, 48 hours. Now, usually it does take us about three months in general, but we do have many of those quick cases where we're able to get in, get the job done.

That's one way. The book also, my writing of the book was as a way to bring attention to everything that's happening, what's happening to these children, get awareness, but also it's a vehicle for people to help donate to us. Because proceeds from the book do go to the nonprofit to help reunite a child with their family. So if somebody wants to find the book, where can they find it? Oh, Amazon. They could definitely go to Amazon. And if they want to go their favorite bookstore, they can ask for it. That would be wonderful if someone went into their local bookstore and said,

I'd like you to have a copy of Do No Harm. And we need to get more out because foster children are hidden. We only hear about them when the child dies, and that's not good enough. We need to hear about the children when they're alive, when we can do something for that child, get them better situations. And the same is true of these immigrant kids. Like you said, they're innocent. They did nothing except follow a parent, do what a parent told them to do, come with their mom, come with their dad. and now that they're here, they also need our protection because they are children and they are innocent.

And so no matter how that child gets into the system, we owe it to them to help them. It's the only humane, caring thing that we can do. And we are a caring country, despite what we may read or think of, you know, from the news articles, I really do believe that America has a heart and that we can do much better. Well, thank you so much, Richard. Again, like I said, it's hard to hear this, but I think it's something people need to hear. They need to understand, you know, that we have this situation with foster children in the United States and, of course, the immigrant children. So everyone, Richard's book is Do No Harm.

And the website or his organization is Forever Homes for Files. foster kids. So with that, Richard, I really appreciate it, and I'll let you have the last words. Well, of course, thank you for having me here, and thank you for giving me a chance to talk about these children and hopefully move someone to be one to help reunite a child with their parents and with their family. Well, thank you, everyone. This is Dr. Tammy Patser. Go make it a beautiful day. Thanks for listening to Business Innovators Radio. To hear all episodes featuring leading industry influencers and trendsetters,

visit us online at businessinnovators.com today.