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Prison guards at an immigration detention facility in southern Texas have reportedly been raiding the cells of families to confiscate and destroy children’s letters and drawings depicting the inhumane conditions of their imprisonment.
Guards at the Dilley Detention Center appear to be retaliating against families in the jail after ProPublica reported on their living conditions.
Univision correspondent Lidia Terrazas shared a video of a mother explaining what guards had done to items belonging to her developmentally disabled child.
“15-year-old Cariexis Quintero, who has the intellectual capacity of a 7 y/o, described how guards in the Dilley Detention Center stormed in her room looking for drawings and letters, they destroyed what they found,” Terrazas said in her post.
“This is just one of several similar complaints I’ve received,” Terrazas added.
Migrant Insider editor Pablo Manríquez had also received reports of guards confiscating children’s letters.
“Staff at the ICE concentration camp in Dilley, Texas have begun raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children,” Manríquez wrote, adding that the action was a retaliatory response to ProPublica’s reporting.
According to ProPublica, hundreds of children in the facility have been held for over a month, despite legal precedent that generally limits such holdings to about 20 days. Some children have been at the Dilley facility for several months.
“I have been 50 days in Dilley Immigration Processing Center,” a 9-year-old’s letter obtained by ProPublica stated. “Seen how people like me, immigrants are been treated changes my perspective about the U.S. My mom and I came to The U.S looking for a good and safe place to live.”
“The workers treat the residents unhumanly, verbally and I don’t want to imging how they would act if they where unsupervised,” a 14-year-old’s letter said.
“To this day, I don’t know what we did wrong to be detained. I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us,” a 13-year-old said to ProPublica’s Mica Rosenberg, who was able to meet with some of the children in the prison.
Advocates for immigrant families held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center described deplorable conditions at the facility. Drinking water at the facility is “putrid” and has caused children to become sick. Food at the facility is reportedly full of dirt. Residents being held there have had to be quarantined due to an outbreak of measles, and other illnesses are running rampant. Statements from people inside imply they have faced physical abuse from prison guards.
According to one analysis, the number of people who have been sent to the Dilley facility has tripled in recent months.
Amid ramped up deportation operations against families, including the detention and imprisonment of immigrant children, the Trump administration is seeking to purchase multiple warehouses across the U.S. and convert them to immigrant prisons. Experts believe it will be difficult to ensure those warehouses will meet adequate safety standards before the administration begins using them.
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