Dozens of immigrant families demonstrated on Saturday behind the walls of a detention center in Texas A 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy His father was sent this week after they were detained in Minnesota.
Aerial photos taken by the Associated Press showed children and parents at the South Texas Family Residential Center wearing jackets and sweaters, some carrying signs that included “Freedom for Children.”
Families can also be heard outside chanting “Freedom!” Or “Let’s go,” said Eric Lee, an immigration lawyer who was there to visit a client at the facility in Dilley Township.
“The message we want to send to them is that they treat us with dignity and according to the law. We are immigrants, we have children, we are not criminals,” Maria Alejandra Montoya Sanchez, 31, told the AP in a phone interview from the facility after the demonstration. She and her 9-year-old daughter have been detained in Dili since October.
5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, were arrested in Minnesota on Tuesday. Become another lightning rod of US divisions over immigration under the Trump administration. Versions provided by government officials, family lawyers, and neighbors offer conflicting accounts of whether the parents were given sufficient opportunity to leave the child with someone else.
Earlier Saturday in Minneapolis, a federal immigration officer said He shot and killed a manThis led to hundreds of demonstrators taking to the cold streets and escalating tensions in an already shaking city Another deadly shooting Weeks ago.
Montoya Sanchez said she saw the father and son outside for a few minutes during the protest. Mark Prokosch, the family’s attorney, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesman did not immediately comment on Saturday.
Montoya Sanchez said the protest was organized internally by families exhausted by the long detention and conditions that advocates say included Food with worms, constant illness and inadequate medical access. Lee said he later heard from his agents inside that the demonstration was connected to the Liam Conejo Ramos case.
Lee, a Michigan attorney, said he was in the waiting room for a scheduled client visit when guards entered and ordered everyone out.
“That children and their parents are at risk of retaliation under these circumstances for speaking out is a testament to how brave they are and how bad the conditions are in this place,” he said.
Hundreds of children were detained at the facility beyond the court-ordered limit, according to a report U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement filed in December in an ongoing federal lawsuit.