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Shut Down Dilley and End Family Detention in Texas

To: Sen. Eckhardt, Rep. Cole

From: A constituent in Manor, TX

June 23

Shut down the Dilley Immigration Processing Center — permanently — and use every tool available to close every family detention facility in Texas. What is happening at Dilley is not a policy disagreement. It is a human rights crisis, and it is happening on your watch. Children as young as infants are being held in a former natural gas camp made of trailers, eating food described as rotten and worm-filled. The American Academy of Pediatricians has said since 1997 that any detention time causes long-term developmental harm to children. Congressman Joaquin Castro called it the "Dilley trailer prison." There is no humane version of this. The Texas Civil Rights Project is currently fighting to free approximately 50 children held there right now. This facility was closed under Biden and deliberately reopened by the Trump administration. ICE arrested over 33,000 people in the San Antonio and Harlingen areas alone between January and March of this year. Mass detention leads directly to family separation — parents without children, children without parents, some never reunited. Speak about this publicly, every day, until it stops. Push to repeal the legal frameworks enabling it. The human cost is not abstract. It is children in trailers, and it demands an immediate response.

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