Solidarity campaign mobilizes as thousands of children like Liam Ramos taken amid Trump’s immigration crackdown
Alyssa Oursler at The Guardian:
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 the 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. Liam 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.”
‘State-sponsored child abuse’
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.
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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 had 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.
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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. Liam Conejo 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.
The horrors of the Trump Regime’s family separation policies are being felt again.
