A massive protest at the largest immigrant detention center in the U.S. erupted over the weekend, with children heard chanting, “Let us out” in a viral video posted by immigration lawyer Eric Lee.
Lee said he was abruptly asked to leave while visiting a client, along with other visitors.
“It’s an extremely bizarre situation in which you can hear them shouting. Can you hear that? They’re shouting, ‘Let us out, let us out,’” Lee said in the video, with the screams of children clearly audible in the background.
Highlights
- Children inside Texas ICE facility were heard chanting 'let us out' during a massive protest involving about 1,500 detainees.
- Detainees appeared to wear color-coded jackets, drawing disturbing comparisons to 'The Handmaid’s Tale' and 1930s Germany.
- Advocacy groups criticize Dilley center conditions as unsafe, citing substandard medical care and harsh treatment of children.
Children screamed ‘let us out’ during a massive protest at an ICE facility in southern Texas
“There’s people in blue shirts, again there’s drones flying up ahead. There appear to be hundreds of people through the crack that I can see,” he said while standing outside the facility’s fence.
In a second video from the same location, a female voice can be heard commanding Lee to stop filming, with Lee responding that he is outside and therefore allowed to film, before saying that he was instructed to leave the premises.
Image credits: EricLeeAtty
According to a follow-up post from Lee, who works as a federal litigator focused on immigration detention, deportation, and visa denial cases, detainees at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Frio County, had told him that 80% of the facility was protesting, which he says would be around 1,500 people.
He added that detainees said the protest was triggered by news of the killing of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, as well as the capture and treatment of a five-year-old.
WARNING: The following video contains disturbing material that may be upsetting to some viewers.
Image credits: Kahlissee
The child in question appears to be Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old Ecuadorian boy detained with his father in the Minneapolis-area suburb of Columbia Heights, Minnesota, and then transferred to the facility in Dilley.
Ed Krassenstein, an anti-Trump political commentator, also circulated a video he said showed “children and women chanting ‘let us out’ at the Dilley Concentration Center.”
In the same caption, Krassenstein wrote that detainees “apparently wear color-coded jackets,” and compared the scene to “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “1930s Germany.”
The video Krassenstein posted appears to show people inside the facility wearing bright jackets. The clip does not explain what the colors mean, and the post does not provide documentation for the claim that the jackets are part of a color-coding system.
An apparent color-coding system at the ICE detention center has been compared to ‘1930s Germany’
Image credits: EdKrassen
Advocacy groups have also criticized conditions at Dilley. Neha Desai, managing director at the National Center for Youth Law, said in a statement quoted by The Texas Tribune: “The current conditions at Dilley are fundamentally unsafe for anyone, let alone young children.”
Desai added that, since the reopening of family detention, hundreds of families—including babies and toddlers—have faced “substandard medical care,” “degrading and harsh treatment,” and “extremely prolonged times in custody.”
The Dilley center, run by private prison company CoreCivic, was reopened in 2025 after the Biden administration closed it in 2024.
The facility has faced criticism for years, and The Associated Press reported that at least one mother held there since October said detainees were protesting to be treated “with dignity and according to the law.”
AP also reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had not answered questions about the situation.
The latest footage is landing amid wider scrutiny of detention conditions nationally.
In December, the American Civil Liberties Union said interviews with detainees at a large new Fort Bliss tent camp in El Paso described beatings, sexual abuse, and medical neglect.
Other investigations have raised concerns about children in custody, including a Washington Post report on migrant teens being sent to a Pennsylvania juvenile facility with a record of child-abuse findings.
Lee, for his part, has urged attention not just to the protest, but to the people he says he came to see.
In another follow-up to his viral video, he wrote that the family he was visiting—the El Gamals — had been held for eight months, including twin five-year-olds, a nine-year-old, a 16-year-old, and an 18-year-old, along with their mother.
“That may be a Dilley record,” he wrote—a claim that could not be independently verified.
The El Gamals are reportedly the wife and children of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the man federal prosecutors accused of carrying out a June 2025 firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado, against people participating in an event in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
That attack left about a dozen people injured, with an elderly victim subsequently dying of her injuries.
The El Gamal family members were reportedly detained shortly after the attack.