Immigration Detention Is Failing Women and Children—By Design

The South Texas’ Family Residential Center, an immigration detention facility in Dilley, Tex., has been the subject of an onslaught of headlines in recent weeks. National protests followed the horrifying seizure of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, the boy with a blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, who was sent there from Minnesota with his father last month. (Officials later released them.) By early February, Dilley was the epicenter of a measles outbreak. ProPublica just issued a searing report as told by the kids detained there — a place where they are served rotten, worm-infested food and dirty water, get little or no classroom time, and are perpetually sick.
The facility is routinely criticized for inhumane conditions. Says Trudy Taylor Smith, who leads the Children’s Defense Fund: “The horror that we are seeing right now is happening on such a shocking scale. There’s no better way to describe it than state-sponsored child abuse.”

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