Immigrant families protested Saturday inside a detention facility near San Antonio where federal authorities sent 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy Liam Conejo Ramos and his father after detaining them in Minneapolis last week.
Aerial photos captured by the Associated Press show parents and children at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley holding signs reading “Libertad para los niños,” or “Liberty for the kids” as they’re surveyed by guards. The lockup is located an hour southwest of the Alamo City.
“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,” Maria Alejandra Montoya Sanchez, 31, told the AP in a phone interview from the Dilley site. She and her 9-year-old daughter have been confined there since October.
Department of Homeland Security officials didn’t respond to the AP’s request for comment.
In videos shared on social media platform X, immigration attorney Eric Lee said detainees were protesting the treatment of Ramos, whose detention triggered a national uproar.
In the video clips, Lee explains he was ejected from the detention center while visiting a client held there. In the footage, inmates can he heard chanting “Let us go!” and “Libertad!” as the attorney films from the parking lot. Eventually, a detention center employee demands that he leave the premises altogether.
In one of the videos, Lee relates that he’d spoken to people inside the facility via phone and learned that around 80% of detainees, or a total of 1,500 people, participated in the demonstration.
“Guards are trying to physically block people from protesting — from joining the protest,” Lee says in the clip. “They’ve closed off a gate between two separate parts of the facility to prevent another section of the detention center from joining the protest. Up along the highway and on the roads, you can still see ICE, [Customs and Border Patrol] and county sheriffs’ vehicles traveling to this.”
As he closes out the video, Lee says he hopes the crackdown on the prisoners won’t turn violent.
ICE agents sent Ramos and his father to Dilley after detaining them outside their Minneapolis home. Family and neighbors maintain agents used the child as “bait” to convince his mother to open the door — an account ICE officials deny.
The South Texas Family Residential Center is the only family detention center currently operating in the U.S. Although the Biden White House shuttered it in 2024, President Donald Trump ordered it reopened when he returned for a second term.
Court testimony filed by immigrant advocacy group RAICES in July reported that Dilley detainees voiced concerns about lack of heath care, clean drinking water and the absence of adequate food. One detainee said her 9-month-old son lost more than 9 pounds during the first month of the family’s detention.
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This article appears in family detention center, South Texas, Liam Conejo Ramos, Minneapolis 5-year-old, Immigrant protest, South Texas Family Residential Center, Department of Homeland Security, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, and Trump.