Staff at Dilley’s South Texas Family Residential Center have begun raiding cells at the immigrant detention facility to confiscate letters from children detailing the conditions inside, Migrant Insider editor Pablo Manríquez reports.
“UPDATE: 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 tweeted Tuesday morning.
The raids at the family detention site an hour southwest of San Antonio are in response to a ProPublica article published Feb. 9, which features the letters and drawings of children inside, according to Manriquez.
Many of the children who detailed their experience in the letters have been detained far longer than the 20-day maximum for child detention outlined in the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, ProPublica reported.
“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school,” 7-year-old Mia Valentina Paz Faria, who was detained for 70 days, wrote, according to the nonprofit news site.
“More than 60 days … going to the doctor and that the only thing they tell you is to drink more water and the worst thing is that it seems the water is what makes people sick here,” Ender, a 12-year-old from Venezuela, told ProPublica.
Univision-affiliated reporter Lidia Terrazas confirmed that the guards had torn up pictures drawn by children and teens with whom she had spoken.
“They threw away all my drawings,” said 15-year-old Cariexis Quintero on a video chat with Terrazas, shared to her Instagram. Her mother, displaying a pile of colorful paper scraps, detailed how the guards “stormed into her room looking for drawings and letters” and then “destroyed what they found,” Terrazas reports.
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