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On 28 January, hundreds of protesters gathered near the Dilley immigration processing center in south Texas, where hundreds of children are being held. Days earlier, immigration lawyer Eric Lee filmed a video of detainees screaming and chanting “libertad,” or “freedom.”
Soon after, solidarity events arose in the state. “Community members saw the children and families crying out [and] having their own protests from within and said to everybody: we need to show up there too,” said Rev Erin Walter, executive director of the Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry.
Locally, more than 30 organizations, including Walter’s church, mobilized over the course of three days to amplify the voices of the people inside, with many organizers calling for an end to family detention altogether. Since Donald Trump took office, the daily number of children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention has grown sixfold. At least 3,800 people under the age of 18 have been booked into custody during that time.
Demonstrations like the one outside Dilley are part of a resurgent, faith-backed campaign to end family detention in the United States. While the movement has ebbed and flowed across administrations, it has gained new momentum this year following the arrest and detention of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was photographed wearing a Spider-Man backpack and blue bunny hat as he was detained during Minnesota’s ICE surge. Ramos and his father, who have pending asylum claims, were sent to Dilley. The child quickly became a symbol for many Americans of the cruelty of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown – and its impact on children.
“One of the attempts [of the protests] was to make sufficient noise so that the people inside would know that they were not forgotten by the outside world,” Amerika Garcia Grewal, who helped organize the event, said. “There’s just no acceptable time for a child to be in detention.”
In some sense, Dilley is a response to previous organizing efforts against extreme immigration enforcement. During Trump’s first term, his administration’s zero-tolerance approach included separating thousands of children from their families at the southern border.
Dilley, opened during the Obama administration then shuttered under Biden, was reopened early last year. Instead of separating families, children would be held with their parents. Still, the facility has been criticized by detainees, lawyers, and advocates for inhumane conditions, including a recent measles outbreak, lack of clean drinking water, and inadequate medical care. According to Representative Joaquin Castro, Ramos was not eating well while there.
Critics say these conditions violate a 1997 legal settlement that provides protections to children in immigrant detention, including a 20-day limit on time spent in custody.
Yet a broad swath of organizers say these protections aren’t enough and are calling on Congress to act. “The only reason that this is allowed to continue is because it’s currently legal,” Trudy Taylor Smith, a lawyer with the Austin-based Children’s Defense Fund, said. “[Congress] could pass legislation at any time to outlaw the detention of families.”
The Children’s Defense Fund is part of the National Coalition to End Family and Child Detention, a network of dozens of organizations first convened in San Antonio to connect what is happening on the ground in Texas with advocacy at the national level.
“The horror that we are seeing right now is happening on such a shocking scale. There’s no better way to describe it than state-sponsored child abuse,” she added.
Brian Todd, manager of public affairs for CoreCivic, the publicly traded company that runs Dilley, said allegations regarding access to clean drinking water are patently false and that healthcare is available to all detainees. “The health and safety of those entrusted to our care is the top priority for CoreCivic,” he said.
ICE did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
Destination abolition
Dilley is not the sole focus of activists – stopping the construction of new detention centers is also at play. Recently released documents outlined ICE’s plan to spend $38bn buying warehouses to turn into detention centers.
“I don’t know how much more explicit the administration could be about their intention to cruelly house people in inhumane conditions,” Smith said.
The cruelty on display seems to be swaying public opinion; in a recent poll, 65% of respondents across the political spectrum said ICE has gone too far in its immigration crackdown, up from 54% last June.
The New Mexico senate recently passed a bill banning ICE detention centers in the state, while Illinois has strict limits on private detention facilities – two examples of state-level efforts that could offer a path forward on a wider scale. Private owners have also declined such transactions after pushback.
While individual victories are applauded, many activists have their sights set on nothing short of full abolition.
“We really do believe that this is a profound moment of possibility and a moment of moral urgency, where people are waking up to the need for abolition … [of] the prison industrial complex as a whole,” Walter said, noting that the Unitarian Universalist denomination adopted abolition as a focus of its faith at a recent general assembly.
In the book Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a professor at the City University of New York and well-known prison abolitionist, argued the prison boom in California was driven less by crime than by the convergence of surplus land, labor, capital and state capacity, which made prison construction a so-called solution to rural economic decline and urban unemployment.
A similar storyline may be unfolding in Dilley, Grewal said. The town was once a major hub of watermelon production, but production has declined.
“There just isn’t the water for it,” she explained. “We hear about folks being displaced in South and Central America because of climate change. [In Texas] we have the government coming in and putting prisons in these areas because there’s climate change, because people have no alternate way of making a living,” she said. “And so they open themselves up to things that would be seen as abhorrent in any other time, in any other situation.”
Intergenerational trauma
Last month’s protest ended with teargas. Walter had to pause our interview to cough, despite not being in the group that received the worst of the chemical agents deployed by Texas state troopers.
Ramos, the five-year-old in the bunny hat, was released from Dilley in early February. Castro escorted them home. In granting their habeas petition, Fred Biery, a federal judge in Texas’s western district, questioned the government’s justification for detaining a young child with a pending asylum claim.
“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” he wrote.
And yet, the psychological toll of detention persists. “He’s not the same boy he was before,” Ramos’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, told Minnesota Public Radio. “He can’t sleep well at night. He wakes up three or four times a night screaming: ‘Daddy, Daddy.’”
“What we are putting these families through is going to affect the entire planet for generations to come. I really have no doubt about that,” Walter said. “We’ve got to stop this trauma and cruelty and death dealing as soon as we possibly can.”
“If we can get two people free, we can get everybody free,” she added.
“Even though Liam may be home and safe, where he always should have been, there are hundreds of other Liams [and] there will be thousands of other Liams as long as this continues,” Smith said.
At the end of his petition, Biery included the photo of Ramos in his blue bunny hat, with two Bible verses listed below. The first was Matthew 19:14: “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’”
The second was John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”
