Last week we shared four client stories from our week in Dilley. A father who complied with every legal requirement and watched his children — with no pending case, no legal basis to be detained — locked up beside him anyway. A mother whose child was used as a gateway to her arrest. A mother shackled in front of her daughter, her medication withheld, her son ordered removed. A 13-year-old who will face an immigration judge alone.
We came back grieving. We also came back determined.
On a late flight out of Austin, several of us had a few hours and found ourselves at the LBJ Presidential Library. Standing in front of an exhibit on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, we read the words Johnson spoke at its signing:
"The bill that we will sign today… repair[s] a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice."
The exhibit made clear what President Johnson understood: if the nation was serious about ending racial injustice at home, it needed to end discrimination against immigrants, too. Immigration reform was inseparable from civil rights. One struggle. One standard of justice.
Sixty years later, that standard is being shredded — family by family, case by case, in a remote facility in south Texas where children cannot sleep and mothers go without medication and a 13-year-old boy is expected to argue for his own life before a federal judge.
The wound LBJ thought we had healed never fully closed. Discrimination in immigration law is not new. But what is happening now is something different — a systematic destruction of due process and the rule of law, carried out quietly, procedurally, in remote facilities far from public view. Families disappear. Arrests are without legal basis. Cases are severed. Medications are withheld. A 13-year-old is handed a court date. The machinery of it is almost mundane. That is precisely what makes it so dangerous.
These families deserve witnesses. So do the thousands whose names we will never know. Alongside our colleagues, clients, the communities who trust us with their stories, and everyone who refuses to look away — we will not stop.
Click on the title to see this post on LinkedIn.