SAN ANTONIO – U.S. Representatives Joaquin Castro and Greg Casar held a Wednesday afternoon news conference in San Antonio to call for the release of families held inside the Dilley immigration detention center.
The news conference was held in conjunction with criminal justice reform organization FWD.us and Families Belong Together, a campaign to “permanently end family separation and detention” as well as reuniting separated families, according to its website.
Watch the full Wednesday afternoon news conference in the below video player.
The congressmen discussed what they witnessed during their Wednesday tour of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) family detention center, which Castro called “unlike any I’ve been to before in Dilley, and in many ways, worse.”
The San Antonio-area congressman made the comment in reference to how he believes Markwayne Mullin, the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary sworn in last month, is running the agency.
“It’s the same cruelty, but there’s more secrecy now,” Castro said on Wednesday.
According to Castro, upon his Wednesday arrival in Dilley, ICE officers began reading from “scripts that they had been commanded to read by ICE leadership in Washington, D.C.” while ICE leadership monitored his visit.
Over the last week, Castro said the number of families detained in Dilley has increased from about 100 to 138.
‘Free the children’
Casar, whose congressional district includes portions of San Antonio and Austin, said President Donald Trump’s administration has “arrested and detained 6,200 kids.”
“We are here to say: ‘Free the children,’” Casar said.
The congressman shared several letters from detainees at the Dilley facility, including one from a 19-year-old who said she was separated from her family.
“I feel lost, alone and many times, I feel like I no longer have the strength to keep going,” a detained college student from Maine wrote in the letter to Casar.
While the 19-year-old’s mother and siblings were released from the facility, the college student remains in Dilley.
“Since I was detained, everything stopped,” the 19-year-old wrote.
In a second letter, an Austin-area teenager wrote about how ICE officers entered their home, “handcuffed” and pointed guns at he and his family in the early morning hours of March 2.
“We no longer want to be here (at the ICE detention facility in Dilley),” the teenager wrote.
According to Casar, in lieu of high schoolers getting an education at the facility, they “sit in a room and draw all day.” He also learned detainees seeking free online legal advice cannot because “they haven’t had internet for weeks.”
“Trump and ICE lie and lie and lie about what they’re doing to immigrant families and to our kids,” Casar said. “And that’s why it’s so important for everyone all over this country to know what’s really happening at Dilley, what’s happening on our watch and what the Trump administration is doing with your tax dollars.”
Casar and Castro have previously advocated for the release of immigrants detained in Dilley. Castro assisted in the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in February, as well as a family of five from McAllen.
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