End Cruel Immigration Enforcement Against Kids
Floor Speech
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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I thank the Congresswoman for yielding.
We have seen and we have witnessed the brutality on the streets of America by ICE. We saw two Americans killed, and many people brutalized.
Just the other day, in the San Francisco Airport, we saw a mother who was ripped away from her 9-year-old daughter. We saw that replayed in courthouses across the country, in neighborhoods, in cities across America. We have seen that mostly on television or social media as people have posted it up.
There is another brutality that most Americans have not gotten a chance to see that Congresswoman Dexter and I have witnessed, that only Members of Congress and a few others have had a chance to see. It is also a brutality by ICE. It is the way that children and families are treated at the Dilley trailer prison in Dilley, Texas.
I have been there multiple times now, and I have seen the suffering of the young kids who will be traumatized for life. As you know, they have talked about worms in their food, about being separated from a parent. There are some there who have no clue why they are there.
Dilley is unique in America in that I can't think of another place where you would imprison a 5-year-old boy like Liam Ramos who has committed no crime.
During this discussion and this debate about these prisons, there has been a temptation to direct the anger at ICE and at the people that work there, and I certainly understand that. But there is another group of people that we don't talk about much who are making millions, if not billions of dollars off of child suffering. As a country, we have made a decision to commodify child suffering, to allow investors to profit from child imprisonment, innocent child imprisonment.
There was a baby at Dilley that was 2 months old. The first time I went there I asked who the youngest child was, and I was told a 2-month old baby. Some of the largest asset managers, BlackRock, Vanguard have stakes in these private prison companies in CoreCivic that runs Dilley or GO that ran the south Texas ICE processing center where we visited several weeks ago.
We have to shut down the Dilley Detention Center, that trailer prison that has done so much damage to the kids and to the families who are there, kids like the mariachi boys who came to this Capitol at the invitation of their Congresswoman and performed their mariachi music, toured the White House, and yet, along with their parents were thrown into this trailer prison in Dilley.
Fortunately, because of an ensemble effort and so many Americans that spoke up, Members of Congress that spoke up, this wonderful group of pediatric doctors, mostly women who have been very active in pleading people's cases, they were released. Also, fortunately, at Dilley the first time I went there in January there were 1,100 people there. The next time there were 450 people. On Monday, there were only 102 people still at the Dilley trailer prison.
Keep speaking up. We need to shut Dilley down.
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