Please understand the horrific conditions these children are being held in. Bug and dirt filled food, guards in these concentration camps they are held in tell the kids not to waste their oxygen by complaining or making the guard deny them. While physical abuse and verbal abuse is a given there is no doubt that some sexual abuse is happening. One boy had appendicitis and the guards refused him treatment until he was throwing up in a hallway that they even dealt with him and even then they kept him from medical attention for another 6 hours. The boy barely survived. First they don’t see these brown children as people and second the government has stopped paying for the medical care of the detained people in their care. Hugs
Detainees held at the South Texas Family Residential Center wave signs during a demonstration in Dilley, Texas, Saturday, Jan. 24, 2026.
A protest broke out Saturday at the South Texas family detention complex in Dilley, about 70 miles south of San Antonio, after guards abruptly ordered attorneys to leave while detainees — many of them children — poured into open areas of the facility chanting “Libertad,” or “Freedom,” according to an immigration attorney who witnessed the event.
Immigration attorney Eric Lee said he was at the Dilley facility for a confidential visit with clients — an immigrant family of six, including five children — when guards began shouting for everyone in the waiting area to leave, citing what they described as “an incident.”
As the Michigan-based attorney walked toward his car, he said he heard what sounded like “hundreds of children” shouting, with voices he described as “high-pitched” and “urgent.” He said he could see children streaming from dormitory areas behind a chain-link fence and chanting “Libertad.”
Lee said clients he later spoke with told him the protest was triggered by concerns over the treatment of Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old who was taken into custody with his father in Minnesota earlier this week and transferred to the Dilley facility.
Lawmakers and advocates are calling for the child’s release, while the Department of Homeland Security disputes claims about how the boy was taken into custody and faces criticism over access to the facility.
School officials in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, have said federal agents took the child from a running car in the family’s driveway and directed him to knock on the door of the home — an action the superintendent described as “essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”
The Department of Homeland Security has disputed that account, saying agents did not target the child, were focused on apprehending the child’s father—whom DHS said fled on foot—and attempted to have the child’s mother take custody of the boy.
Lee described Saturday’s action inside the facility as a peaceful demonstration, not a riot, and said the show of solidarity carried risk for detained families.
Lee said the protest unfolded against what he described as harsh day-to-day conditions inside the Dilley detention center. He characterized the facility as “a horrible, horrible place,” alleging that drinking water is “putrid” and often undrinkable, and that meals have contained “bugs,” dirt, and debris.
“The guards are just as tough as the guards at the adult facilities. This is not a place that you would want to have your child be for even 15 minutes,” Lee said.
Lee said the site does not operate as “civil detention,” arguing it functions like a punitive facility despite housing families.
CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates the site under federal contract, has previously said the facility is intended to provide an “open and safe environment” with access to services such as recreation, counseling, and legal resources.
Texas Public Radio reached out to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for comment on the disturbance and on Lee’s allegations regarding Liam Ramos’ treatment but had not received a response by Saturday evening.
The Dilley detention complex — known for years as the South Texas Family Residential Center — closed in 2024 and later reopened, as federal authorities expanded detention capacity for immigrant families, according to prior reporting and company statements.
Saturday’s episode comes amid heightened scrutiny of immigration enforcement nationally, including protests in Minneapolis following the January 7 killing of Renée Macklin Good during an ICE operation, and another fatal shooting involving federal immigration agents reported Saturday.
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What will it take to understand we are not the land of the free anymore. Government has been taken over by groups that don’t care about civil rights of the public. What is happening is fascism, an authoritarian take over of the government who have no concern of the rights of the people. They only care about their individual group’s goals. The wealthy want to rule, the white supremacists want a white only country where they judge everyone on how European white they think they are, the Christian nationalist want a theocracy want a country run by their own version of the religion, the maga cult simply wants to be rude crude 1950s thugs and not be called on it. Hugs
It is clear they are not going after the worst of the worst but simply they are white supremacist trying to remove non-white people from the country. How is this making anyone safer? Hugs
Organizers say ICE agents have been targeting African nationals amid surge focused in Portland and Lewiston
A woman films a Homeland Security Investigations agent in Portland, Maine, on Friday. Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP
Three days into its immigration crackdown in Maine, the Department of Homeland Security said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had arrested “more than 100 illegal aliens”.
In a statement to the Guardian on Friday, the DHS assistant secretary of public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, said some of those taken into custody were “the worst of the worst” and had been “charged and convicted of horrific crimes”, but cited the same four examples it released earlier in the week.
Speaking to Fox News, Patricia Hyde, deputy assistant director of ICE, said the agency had compiled a list of 1,400 individuals in Maine it intends to target.
White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest
Read more
Immigrant rights groups have been on alert as ICE concentrates its operation on Maine’s two largest cities, Portland and Lewiston. Organizers say agents have been targeting African nationals from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola, many of them asylum seekers who have made the coastal state home in recent decades.
On Wednesday, a local ICE sighting hotline – organized and run by the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition – said they received more than 1,100 calls, a 35% increase in calls from the previous day. Immigrants in Maine represent only about 4% of the state’s total population, most of whom have legal status to live and work in the US, according to a recent report by the Migration Policy Institute.
At a press conference in Portland on Thursday, Janet Mills, the state’s Democratic governor, said the Trump administration had not returned her calls since the operation began. She added that her office had received reports of people with no criminal record being detained and urged homeland security to be transparent in its actions, saying she would be “shocked” if federal law enforcement located 1,400 individuals with criminal backgrounds.
“If they have warrants, show the warrants,” she said. “We don’t believe in secret arrests or secret police.”
Mills also described widespread fear in schools, workplaces and businesses that are losing employees who have either been detained or are not showing up, despite living in the state legally.
Earlier this week, a video by 28-year-old Cristian Vaca – an Ecuadorian immigrant living in Maine with valid immigration status – went viral online. In the footage, federal agents appear outside Vaca’s home in Biddeford, 18 miles south of Portland, where he lives with his wife and young son. In an interview with the Associated Press in Spanish through a translator, Vaca said that he approached the officers when they were taking pictures outside his house.
When Vaca refused to go outside, the video shows one of the agents telling him that they will “come back for your whole family” through Vaca’s screen door.
“I have been in this country since September 2023,” Vaca, who works as a roofer, told the AP. “I have immigration status … the judge postponed my court date to another day. Now I have a new court date. I have my work permit. I have my social security number [sic].”
Local authorities also decried the scope of the federal immigration dragnet this week. The Cumberland county sheriff, Kevin Joyce, said that on Wednesday evening one of his corrections officer recruits was arrested by ICE agents.
“This is an individual that had permission to be working in the state of Maine. We vetted him,” the sheriff said of the unnamed recruit.
Joyce was one of more than 100 national sheriffs who met with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, last year. “The book and the movie do not line up,” Joyce told reporters on Thursday. “We’re being told one story, which is totally different than what’s occurring.”
Later, Joyce said that ICE officials contacted him to say all detainees held at the Cumberland county jail were being moved on Thursday. In an interview with the Portland Press Herald, he said “about 50” people were removed from the jail. The DHS did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment about where detainees are being held as Maine does not have a dedicated immigration detention facility.
The Maine Immigrants Rights Coalition’s advocacy and policy manager, Ruben Torres, said that family members are now finding it “extremely difficult to be able to find their loved ones once they have been picked up”.
The Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP), Maine’s only statewide immigration legal services organization said it had received several fearful calls as the crackdown continues. This includes a pregnant woman who reached out to ILAP because she was “terrified to leave her home to go to a medical appointment”. Another person called and said someone had “pulled the fire alarm in her building, desperately trying to save people from ICE”. ILAP said that they received reports of teachers escorting immigrant children home from school who had agents follow them and push their way into an apartment building lobby.
“It is clear the overall operation is anything but targeted,” said Sue Roche, ILAP’s executive director. “People are being racially profiled on the streets and in their cars. As is their playbook, ICE is doing everything they can to inflict maximum cruelty and chaos.”
In Lewiston, it was “hard to overstate the level of fear within the community”, according to the Democratic congressional candidate Jordan Wood, who is running to replace the outgoing US representative Jared Golden. “I have heard that as many as 20% of students at certain schools did not show up,” Wood, who was born, raised and lives in the area, told the Guardian.
He added that the community response to the ICE surge – from ensuring immigrants know their rights to sharing where agents have been spotted – has been hugely encouraging. “It’s important to just know the community that they’re coming after won’t stand idly by while our neighbors are terrorized,” Wood said.
At her press conference in Portland, Mills still wanted more information about the decision to target the Pine Tree state. “Why Maine? Why now? What were the orders that came from above? Who’s giving the orders?,” she said, adding that state officials have reached out to the Trump administration but still “have no answers”.
No doubt we’ve all seen that AG Bondi has contacted Gov. Waltz stating that if he will forward the MN voter rolls to her, the federal government violence will stop in MN. Last I knew, that offer was declined. Meanwhile, they’re still in MN, and now they’re raiding in Maine (I’m certain their Republican US Senator is deeply concerned, though not concerned enough to demand a turnaround.) Anyway, below are some links and snippets about preparation. The fact is that immigration enforcement has been around in every state for years, but they mostly haven’t been Gestapo-awful, or not at the massive numbers of people abused and killed, as they are currently. So, it isn’t as if things can’t happen instantaneously anywhere. If we still haven’t begun building local community, it’s definitely time. Aside from making sure we can take care of our neighbors and vice-versa, here are some good guidelines for dealing with our reality. We can do this. There is a place for everyone.
snippet: Today, after a year of rapid, large-scale mobilizing, resistance to rogue immigration agents is seeing its own set of commandments emerge. From compiling strategies from across the United States, 10 Rules of Resistance for #ICEOut can be identified. Taken as a whole, they offer all of us a robust approach to denying ICE the basic necessities of their operation.
10 Rules of Resistance for #ICEOut
No silence.
No selling.
No service.
No hotel rooms.
No entry.
No informing.
No looking away.
No collaboration.
No transporting.
No detention centers.
(You can add to this list, of course. There’s no limit to the ways we can resist.)
Nonviolent movements succeed by strategically pressuring the pillars of support for an injustice to withhold or withdraw things like information, cooperation, funding, labor and more. These 10 Rules of Resistance for #ICEOut offer ways to deny immigration agencies the key resources they need to function effectively. ICE cannot function without detention centers, transportation of detainees, access to businesses and properties, staging areas in parking lots, surveillance, telecommunication, recruitment ads, deliveries, or even quiet and uninterrupted sleep at hotels. (snip-more at link-the title above)
General strikes can have a tremendous impact, but to succeed they require an organized majority, networks of solidarity and resources to weather repression.
The call is coming from a rapidly growing coalition that includes the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005, Service Employees International Union Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, Communications Workers of America Local 7250, the Saint Paul Federation of Educators, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, the Minnesota AFL-CIO, Sunrise Movement, and grassroots groups like Tending the Soil, among others.
That breadth matters — it’s not just a tiny group but an array of organized, powerful entities.
The action carries momentum. It follows the extreme violence carried out by ICE and other immigration agents in Minnesota — and the courageous, sustained pushback by Minnesotans who have stepped in to protect one another. The Jan. 23 one-day economic blackout is not the only tactic on the table. It sits alongside legal challenges, corporate pressure campaigns targeting ICE enablers, mutual aid and direct services, physical interventions, and more.
This is how real movements tend to move: not in a straight line, but through overlapping experiments. (snip-see the rest by clicking the title above)
The movement for justice and democracy is growing and has displayed significant political clout: mobilizing unprecedented millions in mass protest, resisting ICE attacks in Minneapolis and other cities, turning interim electoral outcomes against MAGA policies, and building pressure for National Guard withdrawals. Trump’s ratings have slumped to the lowest level of his second term. A recent poll shows a majority of Americans opposed to ICE’s aggressive tactics.
Now we are at a critical juncture, a moment of escalating risk, but also opportunity for political gain. Protests and protective actions have surged in Minneapolis, especially following the murder of Renee Nicole Good. Citizens and public officials in Minneapolis have condemned the brutality of ICE and Border Patrol operations and their blatant acts of racial and ethnic profiling. They are demanding the withdrawal of federal forces and a halt to the de facto military siege of city neighborhoods.
ICE rounded up all the witnesses that did not run from them and took their phones and warned them not to talk to people about what they saw. ICE is out of control gang thugs that feel they do not have to follow any rules or laws. They are an authority unto themselves and that might makes right. One person in one interview said that ICE are racists who feel the US is in great danger as the white population declines and the non-white population increases. They want a race war and they see whites who interfere with them ethnically cleaning the US as race traitors. Hugs
Again the video below shows the lies that Bovino is trying to push, that the tRump people are trying to pus. They want to claim just having a gun and being there makes Pretti a dangerous terrorist out to mass murder ICE thugs. But as one host shows using videos Pertti was backing away from ICE gang thugs when they attacked him. The government wants to make it so just protesting what Stephen Miller is doing is a crime worthy of death. Hugs
Videos appear to show agent taking gun before Minneapolis shooting
Notice these guys are in plain clothing, not uniformed. They could be any gang thugs. They were pepper spraying him in the face and he had turned away from them when the attacked him in a pack taking him to the ground. Look how they shove the woman around first, they are just angry men out of control. Hugs
Brenda Bazán
Scottie's Playtime 