Our full shame as a nation can be found at the South Texas Family Residential Center, better known as “Dilly” for the Texas border town near Loredo that hosts it. There, the worst of America is suffered by people who were deceived enough to believe we offered a city on a hill instead of hell in a border town. Dilly is where families rounded up to meet Stephen Miller’s quotas are processed and treated as poorly as any of the countries they came here to escape could dream up.
When Dilly was first opened under the Obama Administration it was meant to process people apprehended at the southern border, who never actually made it to the U.S. It’s standards were those meant to address migrants who were fully transient, many having just suffered nature’s worst. The guidelines were set to offer shelter and food, possibly basic medical care to those with nothing, whose baseline for treatment was that of a refugee, one who has been through an ordeal and could benefit from any services at all. Stays at Dilly grew longer as the processing caseload increased.
The Biden Administration stopped using Dilly in 2021 amid widespread reports of substandard conditions and a policy consensus that there were better ways to go than long-term detention of children. Alternative approaches such as more intensive case management and electronic monitoring were immediately equated by Republicans as simply “catch and release.”
That Dilly was inadequate to hold families for long periods didn’t bother Trump, and he had barely lied with his hand on a bible when Dilly was slated to reopen. Trump’s ICE didn’t care that it originated as a processing center for migrants who had yet to spend any time in America. The facility immediately transitioned to long-term holding for any family caught in ICE’s mass deportation web.
The facility holds mostly families, with hundreds of children. But unlike its original mandate, a large percentage of its occupants had fully integrated into U.S. society, some for decades, before ICE grabbed them from as far away as Minnesota. Home one day, a concentration camp the next. We elected a sadist who has spent more than a decade dehumanizing immigrants, and Dilly now fully delivers on that rhetoric. Excellent AP reporting recently exposed just how horrendous conditions are at Dilly, and who is suffering through them.
It is fully “open campus housing,” in other words there are no walls, or privacy. Accommodations resemble a hurricane shelter, or some other emergency site, except nobody gets to leave when the storm has passed. Lights are on 24/7, a policy most reputable human rights organizations now equate with torture.
Worms in the food, wholly inadequate medical services, guards who treat the occupants as prisoners who deserve little quarter, constant lockdowns, and worst of all an epidemic of debilitating boredom and depression throughout the children’s population. Were one not informed on who Dilly houses, after hearing one horror story after another anyone with a modicum of decency would conclude it dispenses cruel and unusual punishment for criminals. There are none of those here; ICE is holding families with children in conditions that even violent felons should not have to endure.
Clearly… and tragically, the U.S. citizenry possesses perhaps a majority of people who simply shrug when made aware of Dilly. “What about the word illegal don’t you understand?!” Or, “see what happens when you have open borders?!” Or “if they had followed the law, they wouldn’t have had any problems!” Apparently, millions of Americans can live with what mass deportation, directed by a fascist, whose entire family emigrated to America just three generations ago, encompasses.
Personally, Dilly debilitates me. Since 2015 some of us have understood clearly what fully unleashed MAGA governance was capable of. Dilly fulfills such prophecies. It is a wave of torment to the soul, as much for how bad it is as how much worse we are sure will come.
Dilly confirms beyond doubt that this country has blown past a tipping point decades of Fox/AM bigotry guaranteed would arrive sooner or later. That virtually the entire rest of our news and information universe now normalizes inevitable results like Dilly only compounds the despair.
Always when studying the Holocaust students share one common and unanswerable question: how could so many lose all of their empathy at once, all of their humanity? How could they watch abject cruelty and remain nonplussed? Who fully recognized the madness and cried for its victims in real time? Now we know those answers… and just like then, there are far too few of us. BC