More than 70 local volunteers, advocates and donors on Friday helped wrap presents and make cards for children and families who will remain in immigration detention over the holidays, or who will be separated from their loved ones.

Volunteers at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service’s Baltimore headquarters wrapped soccer balls, toy cars, horses, dolls, dinosaurs and more. Others filled out cards, using sheets that had sentences translated into Spanish and other languages to help.

“Stay strong,” one volunteer, Kenroy Hensley, wrote on his card. “Happy New Year, you’re very talented,” he added.

Some added drawings, poems or prayers to their cards, said LIRS network organizer Chelsey Johnson.

In total, the Baltimore-based nonprofit will deliver around 25,000 cards to immigrants in detention facilities across the country, or those who may be separated from family, according to president and CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah.

Vignarajah said recipients include kids in the organization’s transitional foster care system, as well those served by other LIRS programs.

The effort is part of the nonprofit’s 8th annual “Hope for the Holidays” campaign, Johnson said.

The organization will also deliver 1,900 presents to immigrant children, she said. It’s a way of “sharing joy and hope with kids who are experiencing a Christmas that might be really different than what they have previously, might be away from family members, might be looking for those opportunities to feel like a kiddo,” Johnson said.

The organization received cards this year from all 50 states, Johnson said, where people from churches, universities, volunteer groups, Sunday schools and more pitched in to write.

Those cards are sent to LIRS regional hubs, Vignarajah said, and will be distributed to detention facilities across the country where the nonprofit has established partnerships — often the hardest piece of the process, logistically, she said.

When Vignarajah first got involved with the annual campaign, “there was a part of me that feared that it would just feel like a token gesture,” she said. “Families that are in detention, kids that have gone through so much, the idea of receiving a card of a gift, it felt like it wasn’t enough.”

Vignarajah said she realized how impactful the efforts could be after receiving a letter in response from a man in detention.

“He just laid out how meaningful it was to feel a sense of humanity during a hard holiday season away from family, to get a thoughtful personal note, he said it made a world of difference,” she said.

The process, Johnson added, can also be impactful for those writing the cards.

“I hear from folks of every generation who are writing a card and knowing that the card that they’ve written in will be held in the hands of an immigrant mother, or her child, or who sees this card as the first token of hospitality that she’s received in the U.S.,” Johnson said. “It’s really transformational, for the people writing the cards, as well as the people receiving them.”

cadence.quaranta@thebaltimorebanner.com