Texas’ one-of-a-kind concentration camp for children and families

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Every day brings with its stories of new humanitarian horrors perpetrated by our own government in the execution of President Trump’s mass incarceration and deportation campaign, and I’m sorry to say this, but things are shaping up to get a lot worse before they get any better. As the guardian recently reported US Citizenship and Immigration Services expects to spend an estimated $38.3 billion on a plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into new immigration detention centers with capacity for tens of thousands of detainees according to documents the agency sent to the government of New Hampshire. For journalists and civilians alike, we need to be as clear and precise as possible with our language here. These are not detention centers, they are concentration camps, and we can see that clearly not just in the government’s plans for these ghoulishly retrofitted warehouses around the country, but in the conditions that human beings are enduring right now in these so-called detention centers that already exist.

And our guest today, Stephanie Kohan, journalist and digital content editor at the San Antonio Current, has been doing invaluable work documenting those conditions in Texas, particularly at the infamous concentration camp in the South Texas town of Dilley. In a recent horrifying report titled Staff at Dilley Rating Cells to Confiscate Kids’ letters and drawings Detailing conditions. Inside Han Writes, staff at Dili South Texas Family Residential Center have begun rating cells at the immigrant detention facility to confiscate letters from children detailing the conditions inside Migrant Insider editor Pablo Monique’s reports the raids at the family detention site. An hour southwest of San Antonio are in response to a ProPublica article published February 9th, which features the letters and drawings of children inside. According to Manriquez, many of the children who detailed their experience in the letters have been detained far longer than the 20 day maximum for child detention.

Outlined in the 1997 Flores settlement agreement, ProPublica reported, I don’t want to be in this place. I want to go to my school. 7-year-old Mia Valentina Paz Faria, who was detained for 70 days wrote, according to the nonprofit news site, Unovision affiliated reporter, Lydia Teraza confirmed that the guards had torn up pictures drawn by children in teens with whom she had spoken. In another report, horrifyingly titled two month Old Baby, choking on his own vomit while detained in Dili. Kohan writes, A two month old baby detained at Dili South Texas Family Residential Center has fallen ill and has been described as choking on his own vomit. According to Unovision reporter, Lydia deas, his life is in danger. US Representative Joaquin Castro said in a live video shared to Instagram about the child named Juan Nicolas. In addition to vomiting, Castro said the baby was having respiratory issues.

Nicolas has been detained at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility about an hour southwest of San Antonio for more than three weeks or approximately half of his young life according to Castro. Listen, we need to talk about this and we can’t look away and pretend that it is not happening. It is happening. And what happens next depends on what we all do now and to talk about this today, I’m grateful to be joined on The Real News by Stephanie Kohan herself. Stephanie, thank you so much for joining me today and thank you for the work that you are doing. Before we dig into these recent reports that you published, I want to take a step back and ask you to paint a more detailed picture of the so-called Family Residential Center at Dili. What is it? Who is being held there and what have you learned about the conditions there in the course of your reporting?

Stephanie Koithan:

Yeah, so like you said in your intro, this is a euphemistic name, a family residential center. I really hate that that’s what they call it. But yeah, it’s in Dilly, which is about an hour southwest of San Antonio, and it is one of only two facilities that detain families in the country from what I understand. And Texas is the only state that detains children. So dili, I feel like I’m uniquely positioned to focus on this horrific facility. And the conditions inside families have said that the water there is putrid, and at the same time, the mothers with nursing babies have in many cases stopped producing milk because of the horrific conditions inside. And so they have to rely on this putrid water to mix with baby formula, which is potentially what is making these babies and these young children sick. And also when they go to the medical facility, that is when it’s actually staffed because that’s also been an issue that if there is staff in the medical facility on premises, they often prescribe drinking more water as a solution for whatever ails you.

But of course, as the kids in that ProPublica article said, it seems to be the water that’s making them sick in many cases. So there’s that. And also the food itself, they’ve described it as having mold and worms and bugs in it, and many of these kids are getting very little sunlight stepping outside hardly at all in some of these cases. I know of an 18-year-old who was separated from her family, the attorney says it was in retaliation for speaking to the press. And so there’s a general feeling that the conditions inside are terrible, and also that they are trying to suppress us actually understanding just how terrible they are because they’re censoring these kids now when they try to talk about just how terrible it is inside.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to hover on the question of how the hell this facility came to exist in the first place and why it has the morbid distinction of being one of the only facilities in the country that houses and detains and incarcerates children. Could you say a little more about that? The specifics of Texas and the Dilley facility and even this stipulation from the nineties that yes, they incarcerate children, but they’re not supposed to do that for longer than 20 days.

Stephanie Koithan:

So Dilley was originally opened under Obama actually. And so the Democrats do have blame in all of this, and Dili was open for almost the entire Biden term. He shut it down within the last six months of his term, and then when Trump took office, he opened it back up. So let’s not kid ourselves about this being strictly a Trump problem. However, everyone I speak to who says that follows it up with, it’s definitely gotten worse also. So I think we need to be clear-eyed about the part that both parties have played in this, in building up this industrial complex between Geo Group and Core Civic, and now it’s just going to be exploding with the big beautiful bill allocating all this money to ice and they have to spend it, right. So we see this explosion of all these new facilities. They also have acquired a warehouse here in San Antonio and many other cities throughout the country, even though this warehouse is not designed to house human beings,

Maximillian Alvarez:

One of the biggest ones that they’ve purchased is right in our backyard here in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Stephanie Koithan:

And luckily another part of Texas successfully pushed back on their mega facility, which was going to be ridiculous. I watched Citizens to be heard at their city council and one guy said, we’re going to get a detention center before we get a grocery store. So it’s just like putting a major strain on the local resources of these places. And if the facility is bought directly by ice, then the city council has way fewer options to resist it. If it were bought by a private party that we’d have more recourse. But this facility that was just purchased within San Antonio was purchased directly by ICE, and they get to bypass all of these ordinances, all these tricks we could have had up our sleeve to either deny or delay this process. They get to bypass all of that. And as far as Texas having these family detention facilities we’re just special.

I guess we just don’t have a problem with jailing children here, whereas every other state seems to have a problem with that for some reason. So we have the number fluctuates, but at Dili I’ve heard that there are about 1800 people inside between 1400, 1800. I think the capacity is over 2000, and I’ve heard that at least 400 of those inmates are children, but it’s really a black hole. They don’t allow press to go inside. Joaquin Castro, our congressman, he has to apply seven days in advance to get a tour. And of course it’s like why do they need seven days notice? It makes you wonder, I’m not supposed to speculate too much as a journalist, but it does make you wonder why they need seven days notice and then only show him certain things. But even still, what he did see was pretty alarming according to his own report afterwards, the fact that he toured midday and there was no one in the medical facility even then. And so it’s like if they’re not there midday, then if you have a medical emergency in the middle of the night, like the two month old baby Juan Nicola did, he had a medical episode at around 3:00 AM over the weekend. There was no one on site to treat him. So I mean, it’s just horrific. There are just so many horror stories.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And like you said, they have specifically created these concentration camps to be black holes where the truth of what is going on inside is kept out of public view. And yet through the efforts of journalists like yourself, the journalists at ProPublica, the information that immigration lawyers and families have given us, we do know something about what is going on in there. And I wanted to ask by way of hooking this back into the two pieces you recently published that I quoted from the one on the raids that are apparently happening now in apparent retaliation for children handwritten letters by children making it out of the black hole and into the public view, and also, yeah, this poor child, Juan Nicholas, and what happened to him. I guess my question is could you say a little more about what children, human children are experiencing in this concentration camp right now? What is it doing to them?

Stephanie Koithan:

Yeah, I mean, I hear of so many kids getting depressed because they are missing school. They miss their classmates. ICE likes to claim that the kids are getting education inside, but that amounts to an hour of all ages learning. So you’ll have a young kid in this same class with a teenager, it’s like ages five to 16. So the teenager, one of these teenagers just ended up no longer attending these classes because it was just so far beneath their level of learning. And like I said, it’s an hour a day from what I’ve heard. And so no, they’re not getting education inside. I think they’re suffering from extreme boredom. And the food is also the same every day. From what I’ve heard, one of the kids said that she was just getting so tired of eating the same exact meal for every meal. So you hear of these really young kids talking about self-harm and suicide.

One of the attorneys I’m in touch with, he told me that his nine-year-old client said that she no longer wants to be alive, and that’s just unthinkable that a 9-year-old would even be considering suicide. And then another little kid did try to self-harm and did actually make an attempt recently. And these kids, that same attorney that I just mentioned, his other client, a 16-year-old boy, he suffered appendicitis and was experiencing extreme pain. And then when he went to the medical facility on premises, they told him to take pain relievers. They said, just take a couple of Advil and you’ll be fine. And then of course, his condition deteriorated and then they had to rush him to the hospital and he almost died. So it’s just a lack of medical care on premises like deferring real medical care that’s necessary for these actually very sick kids.

The two month old Juan Nicholas, he suffered a medical episode in which he was puking and then choking on his own vomit, and they didn’t have anyone at the medical facility in the middle of the night. Then eventually they were just checking on him periodically and then his condition worsened by Monday evening and they had to rush him to the hospital and there he was diagnosed with bronchitis. Within a few hours he was out. Then they made his mother attend an immigration hearing in which the judge said that they would be deported. And then within that same day, they were, even though Juan Niklas still had bronchitis and should have been resting in that hospital still, so they just dumped him at the border. According to Congressman Joaquin Castro, with the money left in their commissary, which was $190 for this entire family, it was Juan Nicholas, his mother and father, and a 16 month old sister, and they all just got dumped at the border with the $190 left in their commissary.

And the reporter, Lydia Terraza that had been in touch with them, hadn’t heard from them for a few hours, and she was starting to get worried, and then they have to borrow someone’s phone in the street. Some stranger let them borrow their phone just to call her so they could give her an update on their situation. So it’s just horror upon horror. And the good news with Juan Nicola is that a GoFundMe was launched and very quickly it exceeded its $24,000 goal. I mean, when I reported on the updates with him being deported, I included the GoFundMe, and at that time, midday yesterday, it was at 17,000, but it was climbing so fast that I knew in a matter of a few hours it was going to meet its goal. So the good news is that they now have some money because they can’t stay in Mexico. That’s where they’re originally from. And according to Lydia Terrazas, they fled Mexico for a reason, which sounds like they could have been in asylum, could have had a solid asylum case. So they need to leave Mexico again, but they’re going to go to Guatemala where the father is from, and now they actually hopefully have the money to start over again in Guatemala. So that’s thanks to the outcry from the public, not thanks to our government though.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, Jesus man. And I’m sitting here shaking my head in horror and disgust literally the entire time that we’ve been talking as I imagine anyone listening to this is doing. And I know we only have a few minutes left, and I wanted to kind of quickly follow up on that and just ask if you could kind of talk Frank to folks listening about the fact that so much of this injustice, this horror, this fascist nightmare that is unfolding in front of our eyes, it quickly and terrifyingly becomes just sort of, I don’t know if accepted is the right word, but it just sort of locks into place as just the normal state of things. But it is really worth impressing upon people that our immigration system before Donald Trump was not good, but this is a shit ton worse and it is not normal that we are incarcerating people with no criminal records, asylum seekers, people who are just brown in these massive concentration camps like we’re doing now. I guess, are there any kind of points in that vein that you wanted to hammer home for folks listening before we wrap up?

Stephanie Koithan:

Well, one thing I will say, I’m going to echo what Congressman Joaquin Castro has been saying about dili is that there are no criminals in dhi. All of the families that are there, they don’t have criminal histories and illegal entry amounts to a misdemeanor. This is not something that you need to be incarcerating an entire family over, in my opinion, particularly an infant, when we know that carceral settings are full of germs and because of the confined quarters and the crowded setting, these are really no place for an infant. And that’s why this same facility had a measles outbreak recently, which we haven’t even touched on because there’s just so many horrible things coming out of this one place. And I honestly think that if you say dili, I think that’s already a national, it already has name recognition nationally, and I seriously think we’re going to remember it like Dachau or something.

I think it’s going to be one of those names that just sends a shiver down your spine when you hear it, because it means mass incarceration of innocent people and horrific conditions. And I mean, it’s an internment camp, and as a journalist, what I print sometimes has to be more measured in its tone. But how I personally feel is that this is an act of genocide, and we are essentially, if you look up the definition of genocide, it’s like terrorizing a group of people and targeting them with mass incarceration. And we’ve had six people die in ice custody in the past six weeks at the El Paso East Montana Detention Camp. There are all these horror stories of allegedly what the guard said was a suicide and later was proven to be a homicide. And other inmates there said that they saw the guards choking this detainee.

So it’s like Dilley is one of several, even just in this area, we also have Pearsall, which detains adults, and they deserve our compassion too. It’s very easy to build empathy when talking about a cute little kid in a bunny hat. I mean, it’s easier, I should say some people are beyond reach, but for those who are within my reach to build some empathy within, I think you see a kid being incarcerated and you just know that that’s fundamentally wrong. But the adult men who even if they do have a criminal record, are the conditions that they’re enduring equal to whatever crime they committed or if it was only illegal entry are the conditions that they’re enduring fitting of. If you do view this as a crime fitting of the crime, I would argue that it’s cruel and unusual punishment. And so I don’t want us to lose sight of the adults either. I as a journalist, don’t want to lose sight of those stories either. It’s just I happen to, as I said, be uniquely positioned near a jail for children. And I feel like I have to tell those stories because I think those are especially horrific.

Maximillian Alvarez:

They are, and they’re really, really hard to read, of course. But I will continue reading your reports because people absolutely need to know what is happening there. This is all being done in our name. So like I said in the introduction, we cannot look away. We cannot pretend this is not happening. We cannot pretend that our souls will remain intact if we survive this and look back and know that we did nothing to stop this. And I think this is really just to editorialize myself just a minute. It really does feel like a sort of civilizational do or die moment right now if we are willing to accept the horrors that are being perpetrated on our children. From all these revelations about the Epstein class to all the live streamed, genocidal acts committed against men, women, children, elderly people in Gaza for the past three and a half years, all of the horrifying images and stories that we’re seeing of immigrant children, brown children, non-white children like being terrorized, attacked and incarcerated in our own goddamn country, if we to say nothing of all of our children who get slaughtered by school shootings every year.

I mean, if we don’t actually say, this cannot go on, we will not accept a world in which we do this to our children, then there’s no coming back. What is there on the other side if we accept this? That’s a question that everyone listening to this needs to answer, and I could talk to you for hours, but I know the intrepid journalist and editor that you are. You have a whole lot of work to do. And so in the final minutes that I have you, I just wanted to ask if there are other key stories that you’ve been focusing on, stories that you have coming out that we haven’t covered here, but that you wanted to highlight before we let you go?

Stephanie Koithan:

Well, yeah, I will be continuing to follow the stories out of Dili, and there are some projects I’m working on that I’m not ready to announce yet, but I also am going to be diving deeper into the conditions there and what I can find out about the water there. And it’s hard to approach such a black hole of information, and I think we’re doing what we can to get the information out there. And for me, a big part of that is telling these stories on an individual level to hopefully make people feel something. And my mission is like, I’m not going to stop until dili gets shut down. What I experienced with, I was pretty early reporting on the Juan Nicola story long before it became a national news story the next day. And I’m so grateful that it did. But when I’m early on a story, man, it can feel so lonely.

And I just felt like I was screaming into the void. And a lot of people were doubting me because I was so early reporting on it. They were looking for national sources for this information. But because I’m here on the ground, it’s like I had to get them to trust me. And I think a lot of people, because it was so horrific when you hear about a two month old detainee, it sounds unbelievable. And so people actually had a really hard time believing it. At first. I encountered that before it became a national news story. I had a lot of people doubting me because it’s like, this couldn’t happen here. That’s not my country. Even Republicans were calling me a liar and acted like that couldn’t possibly be happening in my country that I love so much. And as far as I know, Juan Nikola was the youngest detainee in all of ice custody, but at the very least, he was the youngest detainee at Dili while he was there for half of his two months of life thus far.

And so I can see how people find something that horrific hard to believe, and I just ask people to not look away. Look, there are some days when it’s really hard for me to take in all this poison and make sense of it for my readers, but I would just ask that people take breaks when they need them, but that they don’t just look away permanently because that is how fascism can flourish is if we all just tune out because it’s just too hard to take in all that poison and look to the citizens of Germany. A lot of them just shut all of that out and went about their daily lives. And that’s part of how Hitler was able to rise to power is because for a lot of people, they were able to live in a different reality. And I think there is a certain extent to which you can curate your own reality in this digital age, and you can just unfollow the accounts that are speaking the real shit, and you can just mute the people who are saying things that upset you or the images out of Gaza, and you can curate your own reality to a certain extent.

And I just ask that people don’t do that. And again, take those breaks when you need them because mental health is important and you need to recharge your batteries and go out and touch grass. Go see some live music that helps me keep doing what I do. But don’t look away permanently

Maximillian Alvarez:

And don’t kid yourself into believing that just because you’re not seeing it, it’s not happening.

Stephanie Koithan:

Right.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Real News Network podcast, and thank you to our guest, Stephanie Cohan, journalist and digital content editor of the San Antonio Current. If you want to hear more important conversations and coverage just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. Share this podcast with people in your circles, with your friends and family and coworkers. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story. And go to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference for The Real News Network. This is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.