The Karnes County Family Residential Center outside of San Antonio was built to house families detained at the border, but in April, it switched to become a facility that housed single adult women instead. The switch was a disaster: families are typically released after soon processing, but adults are not, so Karnes, which was designed for short detentions, was now being used for long ones.
In August, volunteers for RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, which has been providing pro-bono legal services at Karnes for year, began to notice that women detained at the facilities were complaining about egregious medical situations.
The women, the organization came to believe, were being denied proper medical care. They documented the stories of a woman living with cancer and not receiving treatment, as well as that of a young mother who attempted suicide after being separated from her pre-school age son.
In an effort to bring attention to the problems at Karnes, in September, RAICES began collecting female detainees’ testimonies and sharing them online, calling on ICE to #shutdownkarnes. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Llyod Doggett and Veronica Escobar all tweeted their support.
Just as the campaign was gaining traction online, ICE did something surprising: On September 30th, ICE posted a notice on its website, advising the Karnes County Family Residential Center would be converted back to a facility for families, and any adult women who had been housed there would be transferred to other detention centers. In the meantime, the note said, “additional intake at the facility has been temporarily suspended.”
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