As Ethnic Studies Comes Under Attack, UCSB’s ÉXITO Program Builds the Teachers We Need, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Tomorrow, I’ll have the privilege of speaking with an extraordinary group of students affiliated with the University of California Santa Barbara ÉXITO Program—many of whom, upon graduation, are heading directly into a Master of Arts in Teaching and credential programs to become the next generation of Ethnic Studies educators. At a time when Ethnic Studies faces escalating political attacks across the country, these students represent something profoundly important: a refusal to surrender the struggle over history, identity, democracy, and belonging in our schools.

The following piece from The Current at UCSB highlights the remarkable work of the ÉXITO Program, a groundbreaking initiative designed to build pathways into Ethnic Studies teaching. What stands out most is not only the students’ academic accomplishments, but their deep commitments to community, justice, cultural knowledge, and transformative education. These are future educators who understand that teaching is not simply the transmission of information, but a profoundly relational and ethical practice rooted in care, history, and collective possibility.

As attacks on Ethnic Studies intensify nationally, programs like ÉXITO remind us why this work matters so deeply. The future of public education will depend, in no small part, on courageous teachers willing to create classrooms where students can see themselves, their communities, and their histories reflected with dignity and truth. I look forward to learning alongside these students tomorrow and to witnessing the important work they will undoubtedly carry forward into California classrooms and beyond.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

UCSB’s ÉXITO Program graduates third cohort of future ethnic studies teachers amidst rising attacks on ethnic studies

Debra Herrick June 11, 2024 | The Current at UC Santa Barbara

Michelle Ramos Ramirez ’24

In Spanish, “éxito” means success. At UC Santa Barbara, ÉXITO stands for Educational eXcellence and Inclusion Training Opportunities, a first of its kind program in the UC system that provides students with a clearly structured pathway to becoming K-12 Ethnic Studies teachers. Funded by a $3 million U.S. Department of Education Title V grant, the program’s third cohort is now graduating.

Their commencement comes at a crucial moment, said Ingrid Banks, an associate professor of Black studies and a member of the program’s core faculty.

“The ÉXITO program at UCSB is exponentially important today as the attacks on ethnic studies escalate,” said Banks. “In training future ethnic studies teachers and current teachers invested in centering ethnic studies in their curriculum, the ÉXITO program provides a necessary social justice intervention within primary schooling.”

Designed for highly motivated students, the undergraduate program serves as a pipeline to earning a bachelor’s degree in one of the UCSB’s ethnic studies departments or in feminist studies and to applying to a master’s degree in education and a teaching credential program.

The program’s core faculty hail from the departments of Asian American studies, Black studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, and the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education. They work with the ÉXITO team, led by co-directors Professor Rebeca Mireles-Rios and Professor Lisa Sun-Hee Park, associate director Adanari Zarate Ph.D. ‘20 and graduate student researchers.

“On behalf of the ÉXITO team, congratulations to our graduating scholars,” said Zarate. “Thank you for the contributions you have made to our program and campus. We look forward to the amazing things you will do for the field of education and student communities. Always remember your ‘why.’"

Clockwise from top left: Cailey Angeles Larmore ’24; Eduardo “Eddie” Vázquez ’24;
Michelle Ramos Ramirez ’24 and Juan Rivera Garnica ’24

A “proud product” of unincorporated East Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District, Ramos Ramirez is earning her B.A. in Chicanx studies with a minor in educational studies. She will continue her research and training in ethnic studies education in UCLA’s master’s and teacher education program. Despite the challenges of transitioning to UCSB as a first generation college student, she said, she “found solace and inspiration within her ÉXITO cohort — a community of resistance that fuels her transformative vision for the future.”

Cailey Angeles Larmore ’24

Larmore, who uses they/them pronouns, is graduating with a B.A. in Asian American studies with distinction in the major, and a B.S. in psychological and brain sciences. During their time at UCSB, they were active in FIERCE Outreach, Kapatirang Pilipino and the Asian American Studies Department. Larmore will pursue their dual teaching credential and master’s degree in education at UC Berkeley.

Among the highlights of Larmore’s experience at UCSB were: “being part of the executive board for FIERCE Outreach, meeting my now partner through a creative writing class in Asian American Studies, my partner and I independently deciding to become part of ÉXITO at the same time, getting to do research under my favorite professor in Asian American studies, attending the drag shows put on by TQComm, and playing mahjong with my friends.”

Eduardo “Eddie” Vázquez ’24

A double major in Chicanx studies and sociology from North East Los Angeles, Vázquez, who uses they/them pronouns, served on the outreach board of UCSB’s SexInfo OnCampus; served on the Students for Reproductive Justice board and as a grader for SOC 152A (Human Sexuality). Additionally, they have worked with Orientation Programs during summer and as the resident assistant for the undergraduate apartments queer community, Lavender Living. After graduation, Vazquez will return to Los Angeles for UCLA’s Teacher Education Program and to pursue a master’s degree in education with a specialization in ethnic studies.

Juan Rivera Garnica ’24

Rivera Garnica is graduating as a double major in Chicana/o studies and film and media studies. He is originally from Mexico but was raised in Los Angeles after moving to the U.S. He will pursue his master’s degree and credential in the Teacher Education Program at UCLA this fall, hoping to become a high school social studies teacher with a focus on ethnic studies.

ÉXITO participants Amelie Calderon, Stephanie Pantoja, Riechal “Riqui” Martínez and Evelyn Giraldo also completed the program and will be taking a gap year before continuing towards their teaching degrees.
Media Contact


Debra Herrick

Associate Editorial Director

(805) 893-2191

debraherrick@ucsb.edu


About UC Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara is a leading research institution that also provides a comprehensive liberal arts learning experience. Our academic community of faculty, students, and staff is characterized by a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration that is responsive to the needs of our multicultural and global society. All of this takes place within a living and learning environment like no other, as we draw inspiration from the beauty and resources of our extraordinary location at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies by Christopher Carmona, Ph.D. Our Lady of the Lake University May, 2026

Friends, I’m honored to share this powerful guest column by Dr. Christopher Carmona on the history, sacrifice, and continued struggle behind Mexican American and Ethnic Studies in Texas, as well as nationally. —Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies

by 

Christopher Carmona, Ph.D.

Our Lady of the Lake University

San Antonio

May, 2026

Can you imagine what it was like to stand up for what you believed was right? To be taught that your people were important enough to be taught? Can you imagine men with badges and guns and tear gas ready to hurt you? To be beaten with batons, to starve yourself so that maybe the university will sit down and listen to you? Can you imagine that you fought so hard to be seen in the history of these United States only to have your children and grandchildren stripped of that knowledge?

You are lucky enough to be in this college, don’t rock the boat. Just keep your head down, go to class, and get your degree. It doesn’t matter that your people are being shot down in the streets, too poor to buy new shoes, or too scared to walk on the same sidewalk as a white man. 

Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies programs are unique in American higher education in one undeniable way: they are the only academic disciplines whose very existence was extracted through sacrifice. These programs were not invited into the academy. They were demanded into it, and the demanding came at a cost measured in arrests, hunger strikes, and blood.

It is long past time for universities and policymakers to reckon with that history, and with the continuing failure to fund what communities bled to build.

Born of Struggle, Not Invitation

The founding of Centers for Mexican American Studies across the nation is not a footnote in higher education history. It is a chronicle of sustained resistance against institutions that consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of the discipline until students and communities forced their hand.

It began in 1968. Throughout the country, racial justice and student activism were front and center, leading to a cascade of activism for ethnic studies programs, including Chicano studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, and American Indian studies. Building from this work, Chicana/o/x activists came together at the University of California, Santa Barbara and published El Plan de Santa Barbara, a document that united diverse activists from around the state and laid out a roadmap for Chicana/Chicano studies (Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education, 1969). In response, UCSB created the first Chicano Studies Department in the UC system in 1970. California State University, Los Angeles had established a Mexican American studies program two years earlier, in 1968.

At California State University, Northridge, the price was higher. From 1967 to 1971, Los Angeles police arrested 400 students and faculty members across six major demonstrations. Eventually chaos ensued, fights erupted, and arrests were made, yet this didn’t stop students from being heard. The following morning, 2,000 students gathered in front of the Administration Building, causing the university president to declare a state of emergency. The activism ultimately established the creation of both the Afro-American and Chicano Studies departments (Acuña, 2011).

At UT Austin, Mexican American student activists in the 1960s agitated for the creation of an academic program that reflected their lives, experiences, and ways of knowing. From their efforts, in 1970, UT created the Center for Mexican American Studies, with Américo Paredes named its first director. Yet it would take 44 more years, until 2014, for the university to grant it an independent undergraduate major (University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, 2024).

Perhaps the most dramatic confrontation came at UCLA. UCLA first established an interdisciplinary Chicano studies program in 1973. But the retrenchment in California’s social and budget policies during the 1980s and the recession of the early 1990s took a toll. By 1989, funding had dwindled significantly, and UCLA suspended new admissions to the program. On April 28, 1993, the chancellor announced the program would not receive departmental status. What followed was a sit-in, mass arrests, and ultimately a hunger strike. 

On May 25, a small group declared a water-only fast. A village of tents sprang up outside Murphy Hall. Four days in, one protestor collapsed requiring medical attention. The group persevered, and on June 7, more than 400 students, faculty, and community supporters celebrated the creation of the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies. The strike drew the support of state senators, state representatives, city officials, and the Mothers of East L.A., resulting in one of the largest student and community mobilizations in UCLA’s history. Even then, full departmental status was not granted until 2005 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 1993; UCLA Newsroom, 2021).

source: UCLA Magazine

In Arizona, a thriving program was simply legislated out of existence. The Tucson school district’s Mexican American studies program grew to 48 course offerings and became the largest ethnic studies program in any school district in the nation, directly increasing graduation rates and grades across all classes (Cabrera et al., 2014). In 2010, state lawmakers passed a law that dismantled the program and banned a range of related books from classes statewide.

The pattern is consistent across decades and geography: communities bleed to establish these programs, and institutions continuously find ways to cut, consolidate, or erase them.

Community Anchors Running on Empty

These Centers are not simply academic units; they are community infrastructure, and they function as such every single day. The Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin was intended toconnect students to the Austin community through outreach and public events, building on its legacy of collective action. At UT Arlington, CMAS was established by the Texas Legislature as the university's focal point for interdisciplinary education, research, publication, and public outreach relating to Mexican Americans, and serves as a bridge between UTA and the Latino community in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. 

Before it was shut down, Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, CMAS collaborated with faculty, student affiliates, and community organizations to produce events, training, and programs that promote a deeper understanding of Mexican American culture and supported the K-12 to higher education pipeline and first-generation college student success. The University of Arizona's MAS department works collaboratively with community organizations to address issues and produce knowledge benefiting historically marginalized communities, and engages public policy on criminal justice, immigration, and systemic inequity.

These Centers do more community work per dollar than nearly any other academic unit on campus. Yet they have operated for decades on the edge of survival.

A UT Austin graduate described his undergraduate experience as "frustrating," noting that there "seemed to be such battles for funding for the Center for Mexican American Studies, and that was disillusioning." That battle never ended. In early 2026, UT Austin announced the consolidation of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, along with African and African Diaspora Studies, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies, into a single new department. "It's important to realize that in joining these communities together, especially by force, you're creating a system in which they have to fight, sometimes with each other, for funding, and that is ridiculous and unfair," said one scholar at the national rally held in protest on UT's own campus. At the University of North Texas, facing a $45 million budget shortfall, the university cut its Mexican American Studies minor, along with Africana Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Asian Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.

The fallback position of college and university administrations has always been the same: Chicano/a Studies simply isn't needed, and there is simply no funding. It has been a struggle and a test of wills for Chicano/a Studies to survive.

The Students Are There. The Resources Are Not.

What makes this institutional abandonment most indefensible is that student demand is not in question. The data are unambiguous.

Research shows that Ethnic Studies coursework benefits students through better school attendance, higher standardized test scores, higher GPAs, higher graduation rates, and even a reduction in interpersonal prejudice. A peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that assignment to Ethnic Studies substantially increased high school graduation, attendance, and the probability of enrolling in college (Dee & Penner, 2017). A longitudinal University of Michigan study involving 459 ninth-grade students, the majority Mexican or Mexican American, attending high-poverty schools, found that students enrolled in Ethnic Studies experience significant growth in critical reflection, which is linked to academic success, civic engagement, improved well-being, and support for equity-promoting policies (Cabrera et al., 2014).

In Texas, a 2024 youth-led research project found that students not enrolled in MAS courses wanted to learn more and enroll, but because school districts aren’t required to offer them, students may miss out on all the benefits (Valenzuela, 2023). In El Paso, only five schools across the two largest districts offer MAS, and teachers are sounding alarms that students are being cut off from their own history. Surveys of schools offering the MAS course found that a significant number could not run the class because no teacher could be found to teach it, or because students didn’t enroll due to lack of awareness or scheduling conflicts. Educators piece together curriculum without textbooks, relying on crowdsourced materials and digital resources.

Meanwhile, the majority of Mexican American and Ethnic Studies programs, most established after the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, are dramatically underfunded and understaffed, with many having one or no core tenure-track faculty. Nationally, only 5% of four-year institutions offer an Ethnic Studies major, figures researchers have called alarming given decades of Latino enrollment growth and demographic change across the Southwest.

A Choice, Not a Coincidence

Centers for Mexican American Studies were built on sacrifice: walkouts, riots, arrests, hunger strikes, and decades of community organizing. They were won fight by fight, campus by campus. Today they serve as the connective tissue between universities and the communities that bled to create them, preserving oral histories, training educators, conducting policy research, mentoring first-generation students, and anchoring cultural identity for millions of Americans.

The question is not whether students want this education. They do, and the research proves it. The question is not whether these Centers serve communities. They do, visibly and measurably. The question is whether the institutions entrusted with public education will finally make the choice to fund what has always been funded last, if at all.

Fifty years of hunger strikes, arrests, and advocacy should be enough to earn more than a footnote in a budget that gets cut the moment the economy tightens. The discipline that required the most sacrifice to establish has received the least institutional investment to sustain.

The Pattern Repeats: What Is Happening at UC Berkeley

The story of Ethnic Studies under siege is not only a Texas story or a historical one. It is unfolding right now on one of the most storied campuses in the country. In September 2025, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons disclosed the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration as part of a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus, without notifying those affected until weeks after the disclosure had already occurred. Among those named was renowned Jewish feminist scholar Judith Butler, whose family lost members in the Holocaust. As Dr. César A. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a first-year student there, has written: the university that birthed the Free Speech Movement chose federal favor over the safety of its own community (Cruz, 2026).

That same year, Berkeley indefinitely closed the Multicultural Community Center, a student-built, student-run hub of multiracial organizing located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, won by students in 1999 after a hunger strike. When the administration eventually announced it would reopen the center, political art reflecting the movements that created it had been stripped from the walls. Administrators justified the erasure by saying they wanted to make the space “more welcoming,” using the same language used to neutralize Ethnic Studies programs across the country. As doctoral student Sarah Halabe noted plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students” (Cruz, 2026).

Then, in April 2026, Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies department announced it would not renew two lecturer positions for the coming academic year, citing “financial deficits,” eliminating ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department. Lecturer Diana Negrín discovered her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself; neither the department nor the dean’s office had told her. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, put it starkly: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department” (Cruz, 2026). Meanwhile, construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex on campus unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person, on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. The university had funding for a five-court sand facility, but not for the lecturers who teach the history of the very communities whose bones were found in the ground beneath it.

Berkeley is not an outlier. It is a mirror. What is happening there: the disclosure

Source: Department of Mexican American and 
Latino Studies

of student names to federal investigators, the gutting of a student-won multicultural center, the defunding of Ethnic Studies under cover of budget language. It is the same pattern this op-ed traces across decades of Texas and national history. The tactics change; the goal does not. Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed” (Cruz, 2026). That sentence could have been spoken by a lecturer at UT Austin, Cal State Northridge, or UCLA in any decade since 1968. When the institutions that claim to champion free inquiry are the first to comply with repression, it is community, not administration, that must hold the line.

That is not a coincidence. It is a policy. And it is one we have the power to change.

Christopher Carmona focuses on government affairs, nonprofit strategy, and education policy. He has consulted on Texas ethnic studies legislation, co-authored official Texas State Board of Education reports on Mexican American Studies implementation and served as Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and Research at Our Lady of the Lake University. 

References

Cruz, César A. “What Cal Is This? A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back.” Medium.com, May 1, 2026. Republished by Angela Valenzuela, Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas, May 5, 2026. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/05/what-cal-is-this-year-of-repression-at.html

Dr. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a UC Berkeley first-year student, chronicles a pattern of institutional capitulation at UC Berkeley during the 2025–26 academic year: the university’s disclosure of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to federal investigators; the indefinite closure and subsequent depoliticization of the student-built Multicultural Community Center; the nonrenewal of two Ethnic Studies lecturers citing budget deficits; and the discovery of Ohlone ancestral remains beneath a construction site for a new beach volleyball facility. Cruz frames these events as interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. The essay calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to organize collectively in defense of Ethnic Studies and the democratic mission of public higher education. Published on the blog of Dr. Angela Valenzuela, Professor of Education at UT Austin and a leading scholar of Mexican American education and equity policy.

Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education. El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education. La Causa Publications, 1969.

Dee, Thomas S., and Emily K. Penner. "The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum." American Educational Research Journal 54.1 (2017): 127-166 [pdf].

Cabrera, Nolan L., Jeffrey F. Milem, Oiyan Pong, and Ronald W. Marx. “Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson.” American Educational Research Journal 51, no. 6 (2014): 1084–1118. (University of Michigan longitudinal study referenced in op-ed.)

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. State University of New York Press, 1999.

Valenzuela, Angela. “Struggles For/With/Through Ethnic Studies in Texas: Third Spaces as Anchors for Collective Action.” Teachers College Record 125, no. 3 (2023). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01614681231181793

Acuña, Rodolfo. The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe. Rutgers University Press, 2011. (Source for CSUN founding history and 1967–1971 campus activism.)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Hunger Strike for Chicano Studies Department Collection, 1993. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0b69p9s1

UCLA Newsroom. “Hail to the Hills: Starving for Justice.” UCLA Magazine, March 28, 2021. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/hunger-strike-chicana-chicano-studies

University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “About: History of MALS.” Liberal Arts, UT Austin, 2024. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/about/

Happy Mother's Day Prayers and Best Wishes, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. and Dr. Cesar Cruz

Happy Mother's Day Prayers and Best Wishes 

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. and Dr. Cesar A. Cruz

Feliz Día de las Madres—Happy Mother's Day!

Today we hold deep gratitude for the mothers, grandmothers, tías, mentors, and mother-figures who love, guide, and care in a thousand visible and invisible ways. Thank you for your patience, your sacrifices, your laughter, and the steady love that shows up day after day, year after year.

As Dr. Cesar Cruz reminds us in his moving reflection, "Mother's Fierceness" — mothers carry a love that is not soft and passive, but bold, protective, and relentless. It is a fierceness that fights for their children, holds families together, and refuses to let the world diminish those they love. We invite you to watch and share his powerful message: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2khWPLWSiN0

A Special Remembrance 🌹

I hold, on this day, a tender and proud place in my heart for my own mother, Helen Valenzuela, whose fierceness was a gift I did not always have words for—but always felt—and still feel today in my very being. 

She passed from this world in 2005, twenty-one years ago, and yet her love, her strength, and her fierce devotion live on in all that I am and all that I do. Mamá, te llevo siempre en mi corazón. You are seen. You are remembered. You are deeply loved.

To those who are raising children, to those who have raised them, and to those who nurture communities and mother with their hearts in ways the world doesn't always see—your love matters more than you know.

Sending love to everyone celebrating today, and gentle, compassionate thoughts to those for whom this day is tender—those grieving a mother, missing one, or navigating this day with a heavy heart. May you feel seen, held, appreciated, and deeply loved.

Feliz Día de las Madres. Con amor y gratitud. 💐  

Call It What It Is: Children and Families are being Mercilessly Jailed. IMPORTANT READ ON WHAT'S HAPPENING IN DILLEY, TEXAS

IMPORTANT READ ON WHAT'S HAPPENING IN DILLEY, TEXAS

We should stop hiding this cruelty behind bureaucratic language. “Family detention” is not a neutral policy term when children are being jailed, denied adequate medical care, and forced to suffer inside immigration facilities. Reports of infants and children becoming gravely ill in custody are not unfortunate side effects. They are evidence of a system willing to sacrifice children’s bodies and families’ dignity in the name of enforcement.

We should be outraged, and we should say plainly what is happening: children and parents seeking safety are being harmed by the very government that owes them protection. These families deserve freedom, accountability, and justice.

We should also recognize lawmakers such as U.S. Congressman Joaquin Castro, who have refused to look away from this cruelty. He and other members of Congress have raised public awareness about the inhumanity of imprisoning children, called for detained families to be released, and demanded that the Dilley facility be shut down.

This one child's drawing says it all. So heartbreaking.

In addition to The New Yorker piece posted below, read this recent piece, "'These kids are deeply traumatized' | Castro leads delegation raising concerns over treatment of families and children at Dilley ICE facility," and follow him on Instagram to remain aware of his advocacy.

All of us deserve to live in a free society—one in which no one, citizen or noncitizen, has to fear being targeted because of how they look, what language they speak, where they work, or what papers an officer assumes they do or do not have. That fear has only deepened after the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on immigration stops in Los Angeles, allowing agents to resume practices that had been challenged as racially discriminatory while the underlying case continues.

This is a chilling, enraging piece. I encourage you to read it all the way through. You may also listen to it through the audio option on the article page.

—Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

#StopTheCruelty #CloseDilley #ShutDownDilley #EndFamilyDetention #FreeDilleyChildren

The Return of Family Detention: Under the Trump Administration, thousands of immigrant children have been detained, and many have suffered from medical neglect.

By Sarah Stillman, April 13, 2026 | The New Yorker

Kheilin Valero Marcano recalled asking detention-center staffers, “Are you going to watch my 

baby die in my arms?”Photographs by Carlos Jaramillo for The New Yorker

Read in Spanish | Leer en español April 20, 2026

In early February, Elora Mukherjee, who runs one of the country’s leading immigrants’-rights clinics, at Columbia Law School, told me about a client of hers who was detained in South Texas. The client, Mukherjee explained, was in the midst of a life-threatening medical crisis. What’s more, she was eighteen months old. Baby Amalia, as Mukherjee called her, had been sent to a San Antonio hospital with critically low oxygen levels. She’d spent more than a week in intensive care, where she and her mother were watched by ICE agents. After being discharged from the hospital, the toddler had been sent back to the place where she had nearly died: the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, where many children had severe respiratory illnesses. “The doctors prescribed Amalia a medication by nebulizer,” Mukherjee told me, but, when the child and her mother returned to Dilley, “the officers took those meds.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that any claims that Amalia “did not receive her medication or proper medical treatment” are false.)

For months, I’d been investigating how the suffering of children, including infants and toddlers, has become central to the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy. In Chicago and Portland, Oregon, federal agents had fired chemical munitions at children. In Idaho, I reviewed evidence of children being swept up in a vast and violent immigration raid on a family-friendly horse race and zip-tied until their wrists bruised or bled.

When children’s bodies bear the brunt of federal immigration enforcement, it’s not merely a matter of collateral damage. In the first days of Donald Trump’s second term, his Administration launched a series of executive actions that, in effect, directed immigration enforcement against kids. Under Joe Biden, D.H.S. had designated “protected areas,” where ICE and Customs and Border Protection were discouraged from conducting operations; these included places “where children gather.” Trump’s D.H.S. rescinded that designation, freeing agents to target children, parents, and caregivers at playgrounds, child-care centers, and schools. (In March, Democrats in Congress released a report that documented forty-two such incidents in or around “schools, school bus stops, and day care centers,” with “devastating consequences for children learning and being cared for at these locations.”) Similarly, Trump’s Executive Office for Immigration Review cancelled a Biden-era memo that urged immigration judges to adopt “child-friendly courtroom procedures.” Later, a new ICE initiative urged agents to track down unaccompanied migrant children, ostensibly to insure that they weren’t being trafficked but also, in many cases, to deport them. “The real through line is a strategic and coördinated effort specifically to target kids, with the goal to make life so unbearable for immigrant families at every point of contact that they feel they have no choice but to leave,” Kica Matos, the president of the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrants’-rights group, told me.

The harm to children is particularly clear in the Trump Administration’s revival and expansion of family detention at Dilley, where Amalia and more than five thousand other children and parents have been held during the past year. In a report released on April 1st, Human Rights First and RAICES—two major nonprofits working on immigrants’ rights—offer a close look at what they call a “new era of ICE family prisons.” Based on interviews with thirty-five families who have spent time during the past year in family detention and more than three hundred legal cases in which RAICES has represented asylum seekers, the report describes more than a dozen family separations that have been conducted by U.S. immigration enforcement since Trump returned to office; most of the incidents occurred at Dilley. It also alleges that significant due-process violations have led to the summary deportations of children and families with credible asylum claims. And it documents accounts of widespread medical neglect of children, including infants, in the care of CoreCivic, the private contractor that operates Dilley, which reported more than two billion dollars in total revenue last year. Faisal al-Juburi, a co-C.E.O. of RAICES, told me, “Right now, the egregious medical neglect alone could, isolated from all the other horrors, be considered clear evidence of intentional harm.” (D.H.S. said that all detainees receive due process and proper medical treatment. The agency also denied that ICE targets children.)

This January, the average daily population at Dilley soared to more than nine hundred. By mid-March, it fell to under a hundred before rising again. Robyn Barnard, a co-author of the report and the senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First, told me, “There is no indication that they plan to wind down at Dilley.” She was aware of at least two families in the facility who’d been there for longer than a hundred days—more than five times the legal limit for holding a child in immigration detention, as indicated by a settlement called the Flores agreement. “If these are the horrors we know about, what are the ones we still don’t know about?” she asked. She also pointed out that, unlike in the past, many of the families detained at Dilley had put down roots in the U.S. In early April, I spoke to an Indian family of four who’d lived in the Los Angeles area since 2022; when we talked, they’d been held at Dilley for nearly fifty days. The father, Jagdish, told me that one of his children was vomiting and the other had bloody stools; both were depressed. “The suffering is too big,” he said.

Amalia and her parents, Stiven Arrieta Prieto and Kheilin Valero Marcano, were released in early February. On their first weekend out of detention, Prieto and Marcano sat down at a sponsor’s home to speak with me, joined by Mukherjee and three law students who’d worked many late nights to get them released. “I want to be a spokesperson for all the women with children at Dilley who are living with the nerves and desperation of not knowing if their child will survive,” Marcano told me. “So that they won’t lose hope. So that they won’t keep living in purgatory.”

malia was a healthy child last December 11th, when she and her parents were arrested by immigration-enforcement officials in El Paso. Prieto and Marcano had grown up in Venezuela, a country they never wanted to leave. But, in 2024, they sought asylum in the U.S., on the basis that they had opposed the Nicolás Maduro regime and faced persecution.

They took all the steps required by the Biden Administration. Arriving at the southern border, they registered for an appointment with Customs and Border Protection. They then waited for months in Mexico, during which time Marcano gave birth to Amalia. The family received an immigration court date in 2027 and were granted humanitarian parole, a status that allowed them to live lawfully in the U.S. until they appeared in court.

The family moved to El Paso, where they found a playground that Amalia loved and a close-knit church. Amalia learned her first words: “Mamá,” “Papá,” and “agua.” But, in 2025, the Trump Administration attempted to terminate many forms of immigration protection for asylum seekers, including humanitarian parole programs, and began apprehending families who were awaiting their chance to go before a judge. (“The law requires those in the country illegally claiming asylum to be detained pending removal,” a D.H.S. spokesperson told me.) In early December, Prieto was told to show up for an immigration check-in at an earlier date than ICE had initially requested and to bring his family. He complied. At the check-in, Prieto, Marcano, and Amalia were arrested. They weren’t provided with arrest warrants or any paperwork explaining why they were being apprehended. Amalia cried after the family was loaded into a van full of other parents and young children. “Why are you doing this?” Prieto asked the immigration agents. He recalled that an agent replied, “It’s a change of Administration. They pay us to deport you.”

When the family reached Dilley, they noticed that the water smelled strange. At the commissary, Prieto bought packs of bottled water, which they reserved for Amalia. (RAICES and Human Rights First note that families at Dilley routinely describe water that is “unclean, foul-smelling, and causes stomachaches”; bottled water, the report observes, must be purchased, despite the fact that detainees have typically been stripped of any sources of income.) In the cafeteria, Marcano told me, “a girl pulled a bug from her hamburger meat and showed it to all of us—and the kids didn’t eat that day.” Then, Marcano recalled, “the kids started falling sick.” (CoreCivic said that inspections have confirmed that the water at Dilley is “safe and clean for consumption” and that it has no record of a bug being removed from food at the facility.)

On January 1st, Amalia developed a high fever. The next day, Marcano took her to Dilley’s medical clinic; she told me that a clinician prescribed Amalia ibuprofen. The same thing happened the following day. “A fever is good, because it means she’s fighting off a virus,” Marcano recalled a clinician saying. But the fever didn’t go away, and Amalia was clearly suffering. After nearly two weeks, she began vomiting and having diarrhea.

Often, Marcano had to stand in line for hours with her sick daughter to insure that Amalia was seen by Dilley’s medical team. She waited in line at least eight times, she told me, only to get her concerns shrugged off by the staff. One day, after Marcano tried to lower her daughter’s temperature with a cool bath, Amalia lost consciousness. Marcano went back to the clinic and screamed, “Are you going to watch my baby die in my arms?”

Family detention is hardly unique to the Trump Administration. George W. Bush launched the first large-scale, for-profit family-detention facility, although it proved short-lived, on account of legal challenges and public outcry. The Obama Administration revived the concept in 2014 by opening family-detention camps, including Dilley, to deal with an influx of asylum seekers from Central America. At an event marking the opening of Dilley, Jeh Johnson, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, described the detention center as an “effective deterrent” against the rise in family border crossings. By the summer of 2015, the facility reportedly held more than seventeen hundred people, about a thousand of them children. When I first interviewed Mukherjee about Dilley, years ago, she was helping to coördinate an effort to provide pro-bono legal representation to families there. Back then, Mukherjee took her law students on an annual trip to Dilley; some of the students called it “spring break in baby jail.”

During the Obama Administration, allegations of neglect at Dilley were common. I wrote about a client of Mukherjee’s, a Honduran asylum seeker named Suny Rodríguez, who’d been detained there with her seven-year-old son for four months, in violation of Flores. In federal court, the pair alleged that they were subjected to “inhumane conditions” (including disregard for Rodríguez’s son’s asthma and weight loss), pressured to self-deport, and threatened with separation, claims for which they reached a settlement. Similarly, a group of ten mothers filed formal complaints in 2016, alleging substandard medical care in D.H.S. custody. One of those mothers noted, “I thought I came to this country to escape abuse, mistreatment, and disrespect. But it’s the same here.”

During Trump’s first term, family detention soared, and so, too, did accounts of medical horrors at Dilley. In the spring of 2018, a Guatemalan toddler contracted a respiratory infection there and died six weeks after being released; then, between September of 2018 and May of 2019, six children died in U.S. immigration custody, after nearly a decade without any such deaths. Under Biden, Dilley was shuttered. Asylum seekers were largely allowed to await their court dates outside detention, and many, like Amalia’s family, were granted humanitarian parole.

The second Trump Administration reopened Dilley in March of last year. By January 16, 2026, more than five hundred and fifty children were held in ICE detention, according to government data analyzed by the Marshall Project. Recently, detained families at Dilley have come from such countries as Afghanistan, China, Colombia, Haiti, Russia, and Uzbekistan. Often, Juburi and Barnard told me, children from non-Spanish-speaking countries have been asked to translate for their parents in high-stakes interactions with ICE officers, owing to Dilley’s limited interpretation services.

According to Barnard, the center has both threatened family separations and enacted them. “Many of the families we interviewed recounted being threatened that, if you don’t comply with us, we will separate you from your loved ones,” Barnard said.

In one case, an eleven-year-old boy and his parents fled Mongolia, flying to Chicago with the intention of seeking asylum. D.H.S. sent the family to Dilley, where officials, lacking a translator, allegedly asked the boy to inform his parents that ICE intended to separate him from them. The parents were shackled and sent to adult detention; the child was shipped to a federal shelter as an unaccompanied minor. “I am devastated,” the mother said in an official declaration. “ICE officers have not explained anything to me.” The family was only reunited two months later, in order to be deported back to Mongolia.

In another case, a thirty-seven-year-old woman from China and her ten-year-old son sought asylum at the border in San Diego. They were taken to the airport, where, she said, agents told her that she could accept deportation to China with her son or be forced to return on her own and have him “taken away” from her. She physically resisted and was briefly dragged by an agent. (In a sworn statement, she recounted one of the agents saying, “Fuck! You’re going on a military plane back to China!”) The mother and her son were sent to Dilley. There, according to RAICES records, they were officially separated: the son was sent, alone, to a federal shelter in New York, while she was sent to detention centers, first in New Jersey, and then in Texas and New Mexico. As of early April, the two remained separated.

Before they were arrested by the Trump Administration, Amalia and her parents had been granted humanitarian parole under Biden.

PRESS RELEASE: Students to Stage Funeral for Academic Freedom at Texas Tech Regents Meeting

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 4, 2026

Contact: Cameron Samuels

press@studentsengaged.org

Students to Stage Funeral for Academic Freedom

at Texas Tech Regents Meeting

LUBBOCK, TX — On Thursday, May 7 at the Board of Regents meeting, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas

(SEAT) and Raiders Against Censorship will stage a funeral at the Texas Tech University System Board of Regents meeting, marking what organizers describe as the "death by a thousand cuts" to academic freedom and higher education in Texas.

Academic freedom, long considered a cornerstone of higher education, has succumbed after what can only be described as a slow and deliberate erosion. Its decline was not sudden. There was no single moment of collapse, no dramatic final breath. Instead, it endured a death by increments — policy by policy, decision by decision — until the thing itself became unrecognizable.

"In lieu of flowers, we ask participants to bring objects representing the blessed memory of academic freedom," said James Snoddy (he/him), a SEAT member and founder of Raiders Against Censorship. "This is not symbolic exaggeration; this is a serious response to a year of decisions that threaten the integrity of our universities."

Many have pointed to leadership decisions by Chancellor Brandon Creighton as part of this decline, describing a shift toward constraint rather than curiosity. Policies affecting marginalized groups — particularly transgender students — became flashpoints, interpreted by many as signals about who belonged and who did not.

The event will feature a memorial wake, press remarks, and a staged procession across campus. Visual elements will include funeral attire and a horse-drawn carriage carrying an urn and books, photographs, and other markers of academic life.

WHEN:

• Thursday, May 7, 2026

• 8 AM - Memorial Wake

• 9 AM - Testimony at the Regents Meeting

• 11 AM - Eulogy Press Conference

• 11:30 AM - Funeral Procession

• 1 PM - "The clock strikes thirteen"

WHERE:

• System Administration Building, 1508 Knoxville Avenue, Lubbock, Texas.

WHO:

• James Snoddy (he/him), Texas Tech freshman and Raiders Against Censorship

• Tara Findley (she/her), Texas Tech junior and Democrats for Texas

• Andrew Martin (he/him), professor of art and president of AAUP-Texas Tech

• T J Geiger, AAUP-Texas Tech

• Matthew Pehl, AAUP-Texas Tech

• Sumya Paruchuri (they/them), SEAT

• Cameron Samuels (they/them), SEAT

• And more

The university and its spirit of academic freedom is survived by those who still insist on asking difficult questions — and by those who believe universities should remain places where such questions are not only allowed, but exalted. May she rest in peace.

###

About Students Engaged in Advancing Texas

SEAT is a movement of young people developing transferable skills and demonstrating youth visibility in policymaking. Advocating for a seat at the table, SEAT is normalizing the presence of students in educational policymaking – nothing about us, without us.