Immigrant families protest at Texas facility housing 5-year-old boy, father detained in Minnesota

Dozens of immigrant families protested Saturday behind the fences of a Texas detention facility where a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy and his father were sent this week after being detained in Minnesota.

Aerial photos taken by The Associated Press showed children and parents at the South Texas Family Residential Center clad in jackets and sweaters, some of them holding signs that included “Libertad para los niños,” or “Liberty for the kids.”

Families could also be heard outside chanting “Libertad!” or “Let us go,” said Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who was there to visit a client at the facility in the town of Dilley.

“The message we want to send is for them to treat us with dignity and according to the law. We’re immigrants, with children, not criminals,” Maria Alejandra Montoya Sanchez, 31, told the AP in a phone interview from the facility after the demonstration. She and her 9-year-old daughter have been held at Dilley since October.

The detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, in Minnesota on Tuesday has become another lightning rod for America’s divisions on immigration under the Trump administration. Versions offered by government officials and the family’s attorney and neighbors offer contradictory versions of whether the parents were given adequate opportunity to leave the child with someone else.

Earlier Saturday in Minneapolis, a federal immigration officer shot and killed a man, drawing hundreds of protesters onto the frigid streets and ratcheting up tensions in a city already shaken by another fatal shooting weeks earlier.

Montoya Sanchez said she saw the father and son outside for a few minutes during the protest. Marc Prokosch, an attorney for the family, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately comment Saturday.

Montoya Sanchez said the protest was organized internally by the families exhausted by the long detention and conditions that advocates say have included food with worms, constant illness and insufficient medical access. Lee said he later heard from his clients inside that the demonstration was related to Liam Conejo Ramos’ case.

Lee, an attorney from Michigan, said was in the waiting room for a scheduled client visit when guards walked in and ordered everyone out.

“That children and their parents would risk retribution under these conditions to speak up is a testament both to how courageous they are and how abysmal the conditions of this place is,” he said.

Hundreds of children have been held at the facility beyond the court-mandated limit, according to a report filed December by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an ongoing federal lawsuit.