It wasn’t a typical morning for a member of Congress.
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At 4:30 am on a recent Sunday, long before the February sun came up in San Antonio, Representative Joaquin Castro found himself driving to the airport with 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and Liam’s father Adrian. A photograph of Liam wearing a spider-man backpack and blue bunny hat while he and his father were being detained by ICE on a Minneapolis suburb had gone viral, making Liam’s case a cause celebre. The pair had been released from an ICE detention center hours earlier and Castro had agreed to take them to the airport and escort them back home to Minnesota.
The small town of Dilley, where the Congressman had picked up the father and his famous son, has become familiar terrain for Castro, even though it’s about an hour’s drive southwest from his district in San Antonio. The Biden Administration stopped holding immigrant families there in 2021. The federal government reopened it last year to detain women and families caught up in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Castro says he’s spoken with hundreds of children and parents in the facility and that the conditions there should be a national scandal.
“I feel like Americans don’t fully understand how we’re treating people in these facilities when the overwhelming majority of them have committed no crime at all,” Castro says during a recent phone interview while driving to Dilley
ICE has set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to buy massive industrial warehouses across the country where they intend to install large cages to hold tens of thousands more people the Trump administration wants to deport. Local communities across the political spectrum have protested the effort, raising concerns about the conditions under which people confined in such facilities will be held and the impact of increased sewage and water use in their areas. Castro says the conditions at Dilley, where ICE is holding children and families, are why the federal government should be shutting that facility down, instead of expanding such severe detention conditions elsewhere.
Castro can tick off a list of inhumane conditions those being held at Dilley are facing. There was a measles outbreak several weeks ago. Many people he’s spoken with have said the water quality and food are inadequate. Pregnant women have complained of not receiving prompt medical care. A family inside the detention center alleged to Castro that their daughter was sexually assaulted in the facility. Castro said he and his staff are working with the Dilley police and have forwarded the allegations to the Department of Justice.
On its website, the Department of Homeland Security describes Dilley as a facility “purpose-built to ensure that families in detention are comfortable and have all of their needs cared for — all at the taxpayer’s expense.” The facility employs physicians, nurses and psychologists, according to DHS.
Castro says during one of his visits, all of the pregnant women being held there had been transported more than an hour away to Laredo for OB-GYN appointments. He suspects the timing was to keep them from talking to him about their experiences at Dilley. In an emailed statement, the Department of Homeland Security press office says that pregnant women being held receive regular prenatal visits and mental health services and nutrition support, and that the facility staff did not hide pregnant women during Castro’s visit.
The department said that about 0.18% of people in immigration detention are pregnant. Given that ICE had held about 60,000 people in detention centers in recent months, that percentage indicates that, at any given time, ICE is detaining about 100 pregnant women it intends to deport.
Castro plans to be back at Dilley next week, with fellow members of Congress in tow. “Every time members of Congress go visit these facilities,” Castro says, “they tend to clean them up some and operate a little bit better, and so that’s always helpful.” He hopes to meet with some of the people he saw there the last time and bring more attention to their experiences in Dilley.
Why Trump reopened Dilley
The South Texas Family Residential Center is a large grid of permanently installed trailers behind a high fence on the outskirts of Dilley. It is run by the private prison company CoreCivic and is designed to hold 2,400 people. The Biden administration closed the facility, citing high costs, and the ability to use alternatives to detention like ankle monitors and regular in-person check-in appointments at ICE offices. Under Trump, ICE has used many of those required check-in appointments as an opportunity to put people in detention while they challenge their deportation cases in immigration court.
The town of Dilley is represented in the U.S. House by Castro’s Republican colleague, Representative Tony Gonzales, who has called Dilley “a nice facility.” (Gonzales is facing calls to resign over allegations of an affair with a former staff member who later died after lighting herself on fire.)
Under Trump, immigration authorities have dramatically increased the number of people being detained who have no criminal record or pending charges. Trump has also stripped away protections from deportation for hundreds of thousands of people who had been allowed to enter the U.S. to apply for asylum and other protection.
During a recent visit to Dilley, Castro recalls asking a large group of families how many had entered the country through a designated point of entry, after making an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection through an app called CBP One. That program, which Trump ended on his first day back in office, had been implemented by the Biden Administration to create an orderly way for migrants to formally ask for asylum and other forms of legal protection and reduce the number of people taking dangerous routes across the border. Castro said hands shot up around the room.
As he talks about that moment, the frustration in his voice is apparent. “These are people who followed the rule at the time,” he says. “Now they’re sitting here wondering, what the hell did I do wrong? You told me instead of coming, to do this. I did it, and now I’m sitting here in this prison.”
Getting Liam home
In a visit in late January, Castro and fellow Texas Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett sat with Liam and his father. The lawmakers were alarmed to see how despondent the five year old seemed. They spoke with Liam’s father for 30 minutes while the boy slept. “He didn’t look good,” Castro recalls.
Days later, Castro was at an anti-ICE rally in East Austin when he got a call from a lawyer informing him Liam and his father were about to be released and needed help getting back home. A federal judge had ruled their detention violated the search and seizure protections in the Constitution and, in the opinion, criticized Trump administration’s “ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented” deportation operations.
Castro volunteered to escort them, but getting the Congressman in position so quickly would be a team effort. Castro’s twin brother, Julián Castro—who had been San Antonio Mayor before becoming Housing Secretary in the Obama Administration and then running for President in 2020—drove the Congressman the hour and twenty minutes back to San Antonio—where Joaquin met his office staff to drive to the detention center. Castro met Liam and his father as they came out of the facility.
Castro says he asked Liam where he wanted to eat. They stopped at a McDonald’s and Liam ordered a Happy Meal with a cheeseburger. Castro tracked down a friend in the area who hosted Liam and his father for a few hours of rest late Saturday night before he came to pick them up at 4:30 a.m. for an early morning Delta flight from San Antonio to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport.
On the plane, pilots showed Liam the plane’s controls and gave him a pair of wings, according to a video posted on online by ABC News. After touching down, Castro took the next flight back to San Antonio, arriving late for his 10-year-old son’s Minecraft-themed birthday party, but in time to sing “Happy Birthday.”
While Trump has recently pulled back his immigration crackdown in Minnesota, many are bracing for the Administration’s plans going forward. Castro says immigration agents will have to significantly ramp up their arrests to fill all those extra detention facilities it is rushing to build. “For them to do that, they’re going to have to do like five or six or seven Minneapolises at the same time,” Castro says. “They’re going to have to ramp up really hard.”
