Ben Stiller was among the new Hollywood names to add their signatures to a petition demanding the immediate closure of the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. The letter, first announced late last month, has now drawn more than 215,000 signatures as pressure builds on the federal government and private prison operator CoreCivic.
The petition targets a prison-like facility used to hold children and families after ICE raids in the United States. It says children held in immigration detention endure trauma, neglect and conditions that violate basic standards of health, safety, dignity and human rights, and it calls for children to be kept in schools and on playgrounds, not detention centers.
The weight behind the campaign is not just celebrity support. The signers include actors, artists, activists, physicians and organizations, and the letter lays out a catalogue of alleged abuse that court filings have tied to detention of children: refusals to provide clean water, rotten food contaminated with worms, dangerous medical neglect, sleep deprivation, denial of legal counsel, separation of children from their families and retaliation against families protesting the conditions.
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That anger has sharpened as multiple reports have cited unsafe conditions at the facility, including recent cases of measles, contaminated food and water, inadequate medical care, severe mistreatment of detainees and illegal imprisonment. The center drew even wider attention after federal authorities sent 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos there after arresting him with his father in Minneapolis during controversial ICE raids in the city, and images of the boy wearing a Spider-Man backpack went viral.
The Dilley center has been under mounting scrutiny for months, and the latest wave of signatures pushes the campaign beyond symbolic protest. As the outcry over ICE abuse and violence continues to grow, the fight is now over whether the facility can stay open at all.
Carly Pérez Fernández, communications director at Detention Watch Network and a member of the National Coalition to End Child and Family Detention, said family detention is inhumane and unjust. She said childhood is fleeting and has a lasting effect on a person's well-being, and it must be protected.
