They Gave Us Their Tomorrow

It began with two babies in my arms.

In early 2021, our family was in the process of adopting a child from foster care when I received an unexpected phone call from an organization we were working with. They needed help. A mother had come to their office with two very young children, and they needed someone to sit with the children while they helped her. So I went.

The little ones were babies, one around a year old and the other perhaps two. I held them, played with them, sang to them, rocked them, and kept them occupied. Somewhere in the course of that day, I began to hear pieces of their mother’s story. She had fled Central America with her two babies. During the long and dangerous journey north, she had endured horrific violence. By the time I met her, she was pregnant with twins and facing overwhelming medical and personal circumstances.

I don’t remember everything about that day. But I remember holding her babies, praying over them, and wondering what kind of circumstances would lead a mother to leave everything she knew and make such a dangerous journey with two babies in her arms.

Something shifted in me that day.

It is easy to talk about immigration in categories: legal and illegal, migrant and refugee, border crossings, policies, and statistics. It is much harder to do that when you are holding someone’s baby. I began to understand something more clearly. Before we decide what we think about people, perhaps we need to get close enough to hear their stories.

That day made me want to know more. I began reading, researching, asking questions, and paying attention to the experiences of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in ways I never had before. Eventually, it changed our family too. We began fostering unaccompanied migrant children. Immigration was no longer something happening somewhere else. These were children sitting at our table, playing with our kids, sleeping under our roof, and becoming part of our lives.

I didn’t know it then, but that encounter with a mother and her two babies would become the beginning of a year that changed the direction of our family.

In August 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban. Two months later, we partnered with BLEND FXBG as a “Welcome Family” and walked into a hotel room to meet a newly arrived Afghan family, a mother, a father, and five children who had barely escaped Kabul.

We sat together on the floor. Our children played while our friend from BLEND interpreted. We learned names, shared food, and heard pieces of what they had left behind. They shared photographs and stories of their life in Afghanistan and of work done alongside the American military. Everything about their future was uncertain.

And still, they fed us.

They had so little to spare, yet they shared it freely. They gave us their tomorrow.

What began as one meal became friendship. Soon there were more Afghan families, more meals, more stories, and more people we came to know and love. I began volunteering as an ESL teacher, primarily with Afghan women in our community. Twice a week, we gathered to learn English, but over time those classes became much more than lessons in grammar and vocabulary. We celebrated babies and birthdays. We shared meals, laughed, cried, prayed together, navigated paperwork and appointments, and slowly became part of one another’s lives.

Our community grew too. Other teachers, more transitional foster children, advocates, attorneys, churches, and neighbors entered the story.

Again and again, I found myself learning the same lesson I had learned while holding those two babies. Proximity changes things. Immigration looks different when the person affected is no longer a category or statistic. She is your student. He is your friend. They are the children you rocked asleep until they could be reunited with their mother.

Then, in 2025, the needs changed dramatically.

The husband of one of my students was detained by ICE. He had come to the United States through the legal evacuation process after the fall of Kabul and had spent years building a life here. Suddenly, his wife was navigating life with young children while her husband sat in detention. The legal costs were enormous, the system was bewildering, and the stakes could not have been higher. Their story would eventually be told nationally by The Washington Post.

Our community rallied, but soon there was another family. And then another.

Women we knew were facing the detention of husbands and fathers. Families needed attorneys they could not afford. Some needed help keeping food on the table or paying their rent. People needed help understanding a system that could change the course of their lives before they even understood what was happening. Quality legal representation can cost thousands, and for families already under tremendous strain, meaningful access to legal representation could simply be out of reach.

And the same community that had grown around meals, English classes, foster children, and friendship began responding. People gave. Attorneys stepped forward. Advocates helped. Churches and neighbors came alongside families.

Somewhere along the way, it became clear that this could no longer simply be a group of friends passing the hat whenever someone was in crisis. Our neighbors needed something that could endure.

Fredericksburg Immigration Justice Fund was born from that need. We exist to stand alongside our immigrant neighbors, help remove financial barriers to quality legal representation, and support families through the practical crises that so often accompany detention and immigration proceedings.

For me, founding this organization is a response to relationships and to my faith in Jesus, who calls us to draw near, to love our neighbors, to seek justice, and to show mercy. We don’t ask whether someone has the right immigration status before deciding whether they are worthy of dignity, compassion, friendship, or love.

Long before there was a nonprofit, there were simply people who allowed us into their lives. Sometimes seeing begins simply by getting close enough to someone that you can no longer look away.

That first Afghan family welcomed us in and fed my family.

They gave us their tomorrow. And it changed ours.

Esther Jones, Founder & President