How a Planned Disney World Vacation Turned Into Four Months in Immigration Detention - ProPublica

[justaprogressive]

This week, ProPublica published a story I wrote based in part on interviews with parents and children being held at the nation’s only operating detention center for immigrant families in Dilley, Texas. I had asked some of the parents to see if their children would be willing to write to me about their experiences inside. More than three dozen did.

One of those letters came from 9-year-old Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya from Colombia. Her letter was written on a piece of notebook paper. She decorated it with rainbows and hearts. And she drew a portrait of herself and her mom wearing their detention uniforms and government-issued ID badges.

I had initially met Maria a few weeks earlier, when I managed to get inside the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. It’s just south of San Antonio. Maria Antonia, her mother and more than 3,500 people, half of them minors, had cycled through there since the Trump administration reopened it early last year. I went in mid-January, before the facility burst into public view when Liam Conejo Ramos — the 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat detained with his father in Minneapolis — was sent there, with the aim of hearing about the conditions in which children were being held, from the children themselves.

After signing in, I passed through a metal detector and a series of locked doors to get to the visitation room. Maria Antonia and another girl her age were quietly playing fast-moving hand games, when her mother, Maria Alejandra Montoya, called her over to introduce me.

https://www.propublica.org/article/ice-dilley-maria-antonia-guerra-story