Detainees Protest Inside Texas ICE Concentration Camp for Families

Read our editorial on Trump’s mass deportation campaign as a response to the imperialist economic crisis here.

On January 24, imprisoned immigrants demonstrated inside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, calling for the release of the children and families locked up there. During the demonstration, hundreds of detainees, the majority of whom are women and children, gathered in the yard of the complex and chanted “Libertad” (“Freedom”) and “Let us go!” while holding signs demanding “Libertad para los niños” (“Freedom for the children.”)

Immigration attorney Eric Lee, who was visiting the facility at the time, told monopoly media that guards forced all the visitors to evacuate as the protest began. Citing his clients at the facility, Lee said the protest was in response to the incarceration there of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, abducted with his father from Minneapolis, MN, on January 20.

Officials put the facility on lockdown in retaliation for the protest. According to Lee, guards raided a women’s dormitory after the demonstration and rummaged through personal belongings looking for signs and attempting to identify organizers.

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos’s abduction drove outrage on social media through the viral images of his abduction by ICE alongside his father while they were coming home from pre-school. Neighbors and family of Ramos said ICE attempted—but failed—to use the child as bait to lure his mother outside their family home at the time of his abduction.

On January 28, protesters gathered outside the Dilley concentration camp to demand the release of Ramos and the other children and families held there. Texas Department of Public Safety troopers attacked the demonstrators with teargas and pepper balls, arresting two. Despite the repression, demonstrations in solidarity with the imprisoned families have continued outside the facility in the days since.

A federal judge ordered the release of Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias on January 31 and they returned home a day later.

Lee told monopoly media the Dilley concentration camp keeps families in deplorable conditions, with “putrid” drinking water and food. He also denounced the Democratic Party mafia which built the facility in 2014.

According to a 2025 lawsuit against the facility, families are subjected to living in cramped metal trailers and lack adequate food, water, and medical care. Attorneys representing the families accuse the Trump administration of violating the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 policy requiring immigrant children detained in federal custody to be held in safe and sanitary conditions and to be quickly released. According to the lawsuit, hundreds of children have been held at the facility beyond the mandated time limit, a practice continuing today according to Lee. “My son has only eaten two days out of the 19 days,” said one parent quoted in the lawsuit, while other families have been held there for months.

On February 1, immigration officials citing a measles outbreak put the concentration camp on lockdown again, in another example of the criminal neglect of medical care across ICE’s torturous detention centers.

Image: View of the Dilley, TX federal concentration camp, officially called the “South Texas Family Residential Center.” Brenda Bazán, The Texas Tribune.

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