I am currently crocheting 1,500 hearts for immigrant children missing or in shelters. I have been overwhelmed by the amazing volunteers helping me over the summer. Over 20 volunteer fiber artists from the US to Hong Kong are contributing hearts to this project. I will have 1,500 of them displayed in a gallery and let them disperse in exchange for contributions to the ACLU. And then have my online platform to sell them for donations there afterwards and just keep making them.
I have been wracking my brain of how I could help in this tragic time in American history and hope I can show a visual representation of these children and their families and help fund an organization that will fight for them. I chose the number 1500 after reading a news story in which 1,500 children were lost after being taken from their parents at immigration detention centers.
Our immigration detention system locks up hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year, exposing detainees to brutal and inhumane conditions of confinement at massive costs to American taxpayers. Recently mothers and children who are mainly asylum seekers fleeing violence in South America, have been detained in family detention centers.
Many of ICE's removal tactics take away even the right for a fair hearing in court, as the government rushes to judgement and tries to ram people through a rubber stamp system that ignores individual circumstances. These enforcement programs pose a variety of threats to civil liberties.
If you would like to volunteer some time and materials to make some hearts for this cause please contact me at info@beccacookart.com and I will send you an address to mail them to and the crochet pattern I am using to make hearts. Feel free to knit, sew, felt or come up with your own way to make hearts. I am asking that all hearts be mailed in mid August so I can have a final count by late August.