The Gathering for Justice Calls for the Immediate Closure of the Dilley Family Detention Center

July 29, 2026

The Gathering for Justice was founded on a single, unbearable image: a 5-year-old child in handcuffs. Twenty years later, we are watching that same injustice repeat itself at scale inside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas where as of this week, 112 children are being held, some for months beyond the legal limit meant to protect them.

Court records show nearly 600 children held past the court-mandated 20-day detention limit in a single winter, dozens of them for more than 50 days, and some for more than 100. Behind those numbers are children like 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, taken into custody in Minnesota and transferred hundreds of miles away, and a 13-year-old girl who attempted to take her own life after staff withheld her prescribed medication.

Child detention is child abuse. It is harm, delivered on a contract that runs through 2030, to a private prison company profiting from every child inside its walls.

The Gathering for Justice joins in supporting the families held at Dilley, with the attorneys and physicians documenting what is happening inside, and with the 110 members of Congress who have called for this facility's closure. Children do not belong in detention centers. They belong in classrooms, in their communities, and in their parents' arms.

We call on the Department of Homeland Security to immediately close the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, end the practice of family detention nationwide, and uphold the full protections of the Flores Settlement Agreement rather than seeking to dismantle it.

Media contact: press@gatheringforjustice.org