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Dozens of immigrant families protested Saturday behind the fences of a Texas detention facility where a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy and his father were sent this week after being detained in Minnesota.
Aerial photos taken by The Associated Press showed children and parents at the South Texas Family Residential Center clad in jackets and sweaters, some of them holding signs that included “Libertad para los niños,” or “Liberty for the kids.”
Families could also be heard outside chanting “Libertad!” or “Let us go,” said Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who was there to visit a client at the facility in the town of Dilley.
“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 facility after the demonstration. She and her 9-year-old daughter have been held at Dilley since October.
The detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, in Minnesota on Tuesday has become another lightning rod for America’s divisions on immigration under the Trump administration. Versions offered by government officials and the family’s attorney and neighbors offer contradictory versions of whether the parents were given adequate opportunity to leave the child with someone else.
