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.
Detention centers aren’t even jails. You can be there even if you didn’t commit any crime. Also conditions are far worse than jails.
In my case it was a cramped room with no beds or such, about 40 people at certain times, and one single toilet without any door inside that room. “Crime” was being an asylum-seeker
You stay anywhere between 2 days to 6 months and your family members may stay a different amount of time.
Closest picture I could find later was this and google search is so bad nowadays I have to check my message history to find it again.
That was the conditions in 2018. I don’t want to think 2026.
I keep posting this picture here because it’s inhumane and nobody fucking cares outside of lemmy.
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.
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!
Those immigrants kids have more courage than our elected Democrats.
Anytime any republican does ANYTHING and says it’s “for the children”, I want you to remember this exact moment, and know that they are full of shit. THIS is how they treat children.
I don’t bother listening to any pedophile’s recommendations for child care, and EVERY MAGA is a pedophile.
I recently tracked down a 2a against tyranny type who I knew decades ago. I wanted to get his take on current events.
He is in prison for child porn, so maybe you’re right.
In their minds these are not children they are “illegal aliens”.
They just made a mistake, they had the wrong preposition. They mean they do things “to the children”. It makes a lot more sense after appling that correction.
It’s for their own children, not anyone else’s.
MAGAs are sociopaths, they don’t care about anybody but themselves, and that includes their children. Children are just tools to get what they want.
Nah, it’s not even that. They’ll toss their own children out in a heartbeat if they don’t follow in their parents’ footsteps. It’s not about children at all. That’s just another of their double speak lies.
In fact “children” is nothing but a dog whistle
Just a reminder to those who didnt vote.
You helped this.
I feel pretty comfortable telling anybody that reads the headline and doesn’t immediately side with the kidnapped children who are being forced to live in squalor: 🗣️🔊GO FUCK YOURSELF AND I HOPE YOU BURN IN HELL, YOU SACK OF NAZI DOG SHIT.
How long have those children been in there, huh? I was in juvie pretrial for actual crimes and got outdoor time, school sessions, group therapy. This place have any of that for non-criminal minors?
The whole operation is a money making scheme. They get about $100 per day from the government to detain a person. They are sweeping up as many as they can which clogs up the courts which means they can detain people even longer and make even more money.
I guess it depends on if you trust the word of the private prison corporation that owns the facility and receives a federal contract to pack people in like sardines.
This is just a guess, but I will go out on a limb and say that probably if any of that “exists” it’s just for show to check off some boxes on a form that tacks in a few more million to your contract. Like a classroom nobody uses or a recreational area the kids aren’t allowed to play in.
We all know the answer to that
Starting to sound an awful lot like capital ‘C’ Concentration Camps.
Start watching for “deportation” to transition to torture, forced labor, and death by neglect (which has already happened in some cases.)
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Well that would be super hard to imagine since that’s never happened repeatedly throughout history. /s
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It makes me feel sick to have to ask this, but did all of the kids survive? Did any make it out?
What do you mean make it out? They’re being held in a private prison.
Lee described Saturday’s action inside the facility as a peaceful demonstration, not a riot, and said the show of solidarity carried risk for detained families.
Lee said the protest unfolded against what he described as harsh day-to-day conditions inside the Dilley detention center. He characterized the facility as “a horrible, horrible place,” alleging that drinking water is “putrid” and often undrinkable, and that meals have contained “bugs,” dirt, and debris.
“The guards are just as tough as the guards at the adult facilities. This is not a place that you would want to have your child be for even 15 minutes,” Lee said.
Texas Public Radio reached out to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for comment on the disturbance and on Lee’s allegations regarding Liam Ramos’ treatment but had not received a response by Saturday evening.
The Dilley detention complex — known for years as the South Texas Family Residential Center — closed in 2024 and later reopened, as federal authorities expanded detention capacity for immigrant families, according to prior reporting and company statements.
I was expecting more of a riot type of situation. It’s at least good that they still have some morale, regardless.
