An uprising broke out at an immigrant jail in southern Texas on Saturday, with around 1,000 immigrants detained in the facility — many of them children — chanting “Libertad” and “Let us go,” according to an attorney who witnessed the event.
The protest took place at South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, which closed in 2024 but was reopened by the Trump administration this year to detain immigrant families.
On Saturday, facility personnel abruptly ordered immigration attorneys who were present to leave, saying “an incident” had taken place. Michigan-based immigration attorney Eric Lee, who was among those forced to leave, said he could hear shouting that sounded “high-pitched” and “urgent,” indicating that he believed there were “hundreds of children” taking part in the uprising.
Lee later said his clients told him the protest began in response to the treatment of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old from Minnesota who was abducted, along with his father, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last week. The two were transferred to the jail, more than 1,300 miles from home, shortly after being detained.
School officials familiar with the incident say that an adult living in Liam’s home had begged for ICE agents to let Liam stay after his father was taken into custody.
I’m so sorry and you’re right nobody deserves that.
I didn’t mean to imply that anyone was being detained for commiting a crime. Just pointing out that the same groups that were making insane amounts of money via private prisons (which also often detained innocent people thanks to a broken justice system) are now making even more insane amounts of money by using their privately owned prisons as detention centers.
They believe that profiting from unnecessary suffering is just being smart business men.
Private Prison Contractors Spend Millions on Lobbying, Get Billions in Immigration Detention Contracts
It’s a bleak and miserable time because some selfish people have intentionally made it that way, but I hope you know that plenty of people definitely care outside of Lemmy. The people who profit from this shit will never understand the strength of humanity because control and corruption through money is the only source of strength they’ve ever known. It’s why they fear equality and democracy. Fuck fascism, fuck oppression, and fuck the oligarchs who enable it!