COLONIE — A family of asylum-seekers who were taken in by the clergy and parishioners at Newtonville United Methodist Church has been reunited in their native Colombia after the father was detained at a routine December immigration check-in and spent nearly two harrowing months in jails across upstate New York and, eventually, Louisiana.
In an interview last week, the church’s pastor, the Rev. Nick Bufano, his wife Joy, and Margaret Blanco, a parishioner who first came across the family of three and offered to help, explained how the congregation came to “adopt” them and described the ordeal that unfolded over the past two months.
Blanco, 86, is the type of person who will stop to help someone on the side of the road and is not the sort to take no for an answer. Those traits are evident in the way she first became aware of the plight of the Colombian family…