‘Horror on a shocking scale’: resurgent US movement calls for end to family ICE detention | US immigration

OhOn January 28, hundreds of protesters gathered near the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas, where hundreds of children are being held. A few days earlier, immigration lawyer Eric Lee filmed a video of detainees shouting and chanting “libertad,” or “freedom.”

Soon after, solidarity events took place across the state. “Community members saw children and families screaming [and] They organized their own protests from within and told everyone: We need to show up there too,” said the Rev. Erin Walter, executive director of the Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry of Texas.

Locally, more than 30 organizations, including Walter’s church, mobilized for three days to amplify the voices of those inside, with many organizers calling for an end to family detention altogether. Since Donald Trump took office, the daily number of children detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has increased sixfold. At least 3,800 people under the age of 18 were detained during this period.

Protests like the one in front of Dilley are part of a resurgent, faith-based campaign to end family detention in the United States. While the movement has fluctuated across administrations, it gained new momentum this year after the arrest and detention of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was photographed wearing a Spider-Man backpack and a blue bunny hat while detained during Minnesota’s ICE surge. Ramos and his father, who have pending asylum applications, 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] “You had to make enough noise so that the people inside knew they weren’t forgotten by the outside world,” said Amerika Garcia Grewal, who helped organize the event. “There is simply no acceptable time for a child to be in detention.”

In some ways, Dilley is a response to earlier 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 and then closed under Biden, was reopened early last year. Instead of separating families, children would be detained with their parents. Yet the facility has been criticized by inmates, lawyers and advocates for inhumane conditions, including a recent measles outbreak, lack of clean water and inadequate medical care. According to Rep. Joaquín Castro, Ramos was not eating well during his stay.

Critics say these conditions violate a 1997 legal regulation that provides protections for detained immigrant children, including a 20-day limit on the length of detention.

Yet many organizers say these protections are not enough and are calling on Congress to act. “The only reason this is allowed to continue is because it’s currently legal,” said Trudy Taylor Smith, an attorney for the Austin-based Children’s Defense Fund. “[Congress] could at any time pass a law to prohibit 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 coming together for the first time in San Antonio to connect what’s happening on the ground in Texas with advocacy at the national level.

“The horror we are witnessing now is occurring on such a shocking scale. There is no better way to describe it than state-sponsored child abuse,” she added.

Brian Todd, director of public affairs for CoreCivic, the publicly traded company that runs Dilley, said claims about access to clean water are blatantly false and that health care is available to all inmates. “The health and safety of those entrusted to our care is CoreCivic’s top priority,” he said.

ICE did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

Deleting destinations

Dilley isn’t the activists’ only goal: Stopping the construction of new detention centers is also at stake. Newly released documents outline ICE’s plan to spend $38 billion buying warehouses to turn them into detention centers.

“I don’t know how much more explicit the administration could be about its intent to cruelly house people in inhumane conditions,” Smith said.

The cruelty displayed seems to influence public opinion; In a recent poll, 65% of respondents across the political spectrum said ICE had gone too far in its crackdown on immigration, up from 54% last June.

The New Mexico Senate recently passed a bill banning ICE detention centers in the state, while Illinois imposes strict limits on private detention centers — two examples of state-level efforts that could pave the way for a larger scale. Private owners have also refused such deals after receiving pushback.

While individual victories are applauded, many activists aim for nothing less than total abolition.

“We truly 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 noted prison abolitionist, argued that California’s prison boom 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 story could play out in Dilley, Grewal said. The city was once a major hub of watermelon production, but production has declined.

“There’s just no water for it,” she said. “We hear about people 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 is climate change, because people have no other way to make a living,” she said. “And so they open themselves up to things that would be considered abhorrent at any other time, in any other situation.”

Intergenerational trauma

Last month’s protest ended with tear gas. Walter had to interrupt our interview to cough, even though he was not part of the group that received the worst chemical agents deployed by Texas State Police.

Ramos, the five-year-old in the bunny hat, was released from Dilley in early February. Castro drove them home. In granting their habeas petition, Fred Biery, a federal judge in the Western District of Texas, questioned the government’s justification for detaining a young child with a pending asylum case.

“The root of this case is the government’s ill-conceived and incompetently implemented effort to set daily expulsion quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” he wrote.

And yet, the psychological consequences of detention persist. “He’s not the same boy he was before,” Ramos’ 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 doing to these families is going to affect the entire planet for generations to come. I really have no doubt about it,” Walter said. “We must end this trauma, cruelty and death as soon as possible.”

“If we can free two people, we can free everyone,” she added.

“Even though Liam is home and safe, where he always should have been, there are hundreds of other Liams. [and] there will be thousands more Liams as long as this continues,” Smith said.

At the end of his petition, Biery included Ramos’ photo 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 of such as these belongs the kingdom of heaven.” » »

The second was John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”