In a series of letters released by the Immigration Justice Campaign, migrant moms detained with their children inside the South Texas Family Residential Center—a family jail—are pleading for their release. "You will see that what we lived was a horror," one mom, Gabriela, wrote. "I wouldn't wish it even on my worst enemy."
Once-separated migrant families could be released in favor of proven alternatives to detention. Instead, the Trump administration is hellbent on locking them up together, perhaps indefinitely. "My children were far from me and I didn't know if they were okay, if they were eating or sleeping,” another mom, Elena, wrote. “I have suffered a lot. ICE harmed us a lot psychologically.” But reunification didn’t end their trauma.
“We can't sleep well because my little girl thinks they are going to separate us again,” she continued. “I wouldn't want this to happen to anyone." Elena’s story, sadly, isn’t unique. “The mothers' writings reflect a mix of despair, bewilderment and hope,” CNN reports, “as they remain in government custody and legal limbo, weeks after they were reunited.”
Trump officials have grotesquely defended family detention, with one top ICE official even comparing these facilities to a “summer camp.” But when pressed if he’d send his own kids to one, the official repeatedly dodged the question. That’s because he wouldn’t. Children do not belong in detention, period, and the fact that these officials won’t send their kids to these facilities they continue to defend says everything you need to know about the conditions in there.
"We have suffered a lot,” wrote Camila, another mom. “What the president did to us cannot be described. What will he gain from making so many people suffer in this way? What would he do if they took his child and didn't tell him where they have him and made him a prisoner and gave him dog food like they gave us in Port Isabel jail?”
But Camila, who like many other migrant parents probably gave up her entire life in her home country to give her children a chance here, assumes a migrant child kidnapper like Donald Trump is capable of empathy. "We left our country to protect our children and to offer them a better future,” Maria writes, “not so that they would separate us from them and not for them to treat us like criminals.”
It’s easy for Camila, Elena, Gabriel, and Maria’s stories to fall to the wayside in the administration’s flood of scandals and outrages—both intentional and unintentional—and that’s precisely why these vulnerable families need our full attention more than ever. “I thank God for giving me the strength, hope, and will to keep fighting for God,” Maria continued. “There is no more beautiful miracle than knowing that outside there are people who are supporting us and that we are not alone."