Seven actions you can take right now to help close immigrant detention centers.

By MoveOn Staff. Friday, June 28 2019

In the last eight months, six migrant children are known to have died after being taken into U.S. immigration custody. 

This tragic tally includes 16-year-old Carlos Hernandez Vásquez, 2 ½-year-old Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez, 16-year-old Juan de León Gutiérrez, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin, 8-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonzo, and 10-year-old Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle. And a 18-month-old girl, Mariee Juárez, died shortly after being held with her mother at a family detention center in Texas. 

There have been more deaths of children held in custody this year than in the last decade.

Thousands of children have been separated from their parents, and many are being kept in detention centers—in crowded, unsafe conditions—and are denied basic supplies, like soap, toothbrushes, and more. Our government is intentionally treating immigrant children and families inhumanely—to terrorize the immigrant community.

It’s going to take all of us taking action to close the camps.

Here are seven things that you can do right now to help:

• Attend a protest near you on July 2. #CloseTheCamps protests will be held outside the offices of members of Congress on July 2nd (If there isn’t a local event listed, sign up to lead one.)

• Donate to the Texas Civil Rights Project so they can keep doing the vital work needed: from fighting around the clock to reunite families to ensuring that they get excellent legal representation on their underlying immigration claims. 

• Click here to call your members of Congress and tell them to fight to close the camps.

• Text CAMPS to 668366 to get updates from MoveOn on how you can get involved locally.

• Sign this petition demanding that Congress shut down the camps.

• Watch and share this video on the conditions that kids are facing at the border. 

• Reach out and get involved with one of these organizations in your area:
  • • PICO National Network
    • The Center for Popular Democracy Network
    • ACLU
    • American Friends Service Committee
    • Church World Service
    • Faith in Action
    • Amnesty International
    • Human Rights First
    • United We Dream
    • National Domestic Workers Alliance
    • Sanctuary Movement
    • Asian Americans Advancing Justice
    • Detention Watch Network
    • UnidosUS
    • UndocuBlack Network

Unfortunately, donating items like toothbrushes may not reach children in these detention centers, as Border Patrol is actively denying and returning donations.

We can’t let these human rights abuses by the Trump administration continue. We must act now to close the camps. Force your members of Congress to confront the atrocities that are happening on their watch, in your name, with your tax dollars.

We cannot allow any more babies to be ripped from the arms of their parents. We cannot allow any more children to come home from school to find out that their parents have been deported. And we cannot allow America to run internment camps. 

Please act now.