Protesters Fill Minnesota Capitol, Read Letters from Children Held in Immigration Custody
Saint Paul, MN — More than 100 people filed into the Minnesota State Capitol on Feb. 26 to protest the prolonged detainment of children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities around the country.
The crowd, led into the capitol building by the immigrant rights-oriented nonprofit Unidos MN to protest a legislative session, pooled into the second floor outside of the Senate Chamber as an array of speakers read letters sent by children detained in ICE detention centers in Texas aloud.
The protest follows a recent trend in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detaining more and more children, the Associated Press reported. At the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, more than half of the detainees held early in Trump’s second term — over 3,600 — have been children.
In February, the number of families and children held at Dilley plummeted dramatically, from an average of 600 per month from April 2025 to Jan. 2026 to 54 by mid-March, ProPublica reported.
The Dilley Detention Center, or the South Texas Family Residential Center, is designed specifically to house families and children and is where many children detained by ICE for more than 24 hours in Minnesota have been sent. CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison firms in the country, runs Dilley, and expects to earn $180 million annually from the contract.
At the state capitol, the letters read by the speakers followed a clear theme of isolation and poor treatment of detainees by facility staff. The advocates protested for the children’s release and safe return to their families and homes, making a point that, although Operation Metro Surge has allegedly been winding down, many people are still in federal custody.
Among the speakers was Lisa Amman, an active parishioner at St. Thomas Moore Catholic Church in St. Paul speaking on behalf of Unidos Catholics.
“We have all these new pleas, all these letters being read, these children’s faces, children’s artwork coming out of Dilley Detention Center,” Amman said. “We cannot forget about them.”
One letter was written by a nine year old from Colombia named Maria who has been held in a Texas detention facility by ICE for 113 days, nearly one-third of a year.
According to her letter, she was visiting the United States on a 10-day vacation to see her mother in New York when she was detained. Despite having her tourist visa on-hand, ICE agents interrogated her alone for two hours before using her to catch her mom.
“I miss my friends and I feel like they are going to forget me,” Maria wrote. “I feel like being here was my fault. I just wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.”
Another letter read was written by a seven year old named Mia who had been detained by ICE for 70 days. Mia, a second grader, arrived in the United States from Venezuela with her family when she was three.
“I don’t want to be in this place,” Mia wrote in her letter. “I want to go to my school. I miss my grandparents. I miss my friends. I don’t like the food here. I don’t like being here.”
Speakers read numerous letters to the crowd and held up large, poster-sized versions of the correspondences, including pictures drawn by the children.
The amount of time the federal government has detained these children and many others is blatantly illegal, crossing a line set by a settlement agreement in the 1997 case Flores v. Reno, in which a federal judge ruled that the U.S. government cannot detain a child at immigration detention centers for more than 20 days.
The 20-day limit — a decades-old court-ordered supervision standard — has been surpassed so frequently lately that children’s rights advocates monitoring the facilities have started using a 100-day benchmark.
Behind the doors at the end of the hall, the Minnesota Senate began its 44th legislative day, all of which have occurred alongside the occupation of the Twin Cities by federal immigration authorities in Operation Metro Surge.
Senator Clare Oumou Verbeten introduced the sole bill related to immigration, which would prohibit state and local officials from forming immigration enforcement agreements with the federal government and terminate any existing contracts.
Back outside of the Senate Chamber, protesters continued to squeeze themselves into the capitol’s narrow corridors. They repeatedly joined each other in song, both in English and in Spanish, calling for unity and strength.
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