Immigrant families protested Saturday at a Texas detention facility where a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy and his father are being held after their detention in Minnesota this week. Dozens of families gathered at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, holding signs reading ‘Libertad para los niños’—‘Liberty for the kids’—and calling for freedom for children, according to aerial photographs obtained by the Associated Press.
The case has become another flashpoint in divisions over immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, with conflicting accounts from government officials and the family’s attorney on whether the parents were given adequate opportunity to leave the child with someone else.
Dozens of immigrant families gathered Saturday behind the fences of the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, to protest the detention of a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy and his father. The children and parents, clad in winter jackets and sweaters, held signs reading “Libertad para los niños”—“Liberty for the kids”—and other messages calling for freedom for children, according to aerial photographs obtained by the Associated Press.
Families chanted “Libertad!” and “Let us go!” outside the facility, according to Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who was there to visit a client. The children and their parents face indefinite detention at one of the nation’s largest family detention facilities, where hundreds of children have been held beyond court-mandated limits.
The 5-year-old, Liam Conejo Ramos, and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, were detained in Minnesota on Tuesday and transferred to the Dilley facility. Government officials and the family’s attorney, Marc Prokosch, have offered contradictory accounts regarding whether the parents were given adequate opportunity to leave the child with someone else before their detention.
Conditions and message
Maria Alejandra Montoya Sanchez, 31, who has been detained at the facility since October with her 9-year-old daughter, spoke about the protest’s purpose in an interview conducted from inside the facility.
“The message we want to send is for them to treat us with dignity and according to the law. We’re immigrants, with children, not criminals,” Montoya Sanchez said.
Families organized the demonstration internally, exhausted by prolonged detention and conditions that advocates say have included food with worms, constant illness, and insufficient access to medical care. When the demonstration began, guards immediately walked into the waiting area and ordered everyone out, Lee said.
“That children and their parents would risk retribution under these conditions to speak up is a testament both to how courageous they are and how abysmal the conditions of this place is,” Lee said.
Legal backdrop
A December report filed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an ongoing federal lawsuit disclosed that hundreds of children have been held at the facility beyond the limits established by court order.
The Saturday protest occurred the same day that a federal immigration officer shot and killed a man in Minneapolis, drawing hundreds of protesters onto the frigid streets and heightening tensions in a city already shaken by another fatal shooting weeks earlier.