The 14-year-old Caleb Gámez-Cuéllar and his parents and younger brother sat in the first line of benches in a makeshift courtroom at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center on Monday, waiting anxiously to meet the member of Congress they hoped would help get them out.
Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas, had driven 75 minutes on a bus with a group of his Democratic colleagues, from San Antonio to this desolate stretch of South Texas, with the express purpose of meeting this particular family and making the case for their immediate release.
It was his latest trip to the Dilley center, a sprawling prison fashioned out of trailers, which serves as the country’s largest family immigration detention site. Shuttered by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2024 but reopened by President Trump last year, the site has become a symbol of the indiscriminate nature of the administration’s crackdown. And Mr. Castro, a seven-term Democrat from San Antonio, is on a crusade to close it.
In the meantime, he has been highlighting the plight of its most sympathetic detainees in a bid to shame immigration authorities into releasing them — and in the process, calling attention to the cruel consequences of the president’s immigration agenda.
In the case of the Gámez-Cuéllar family, their story did most of the work for him. Before landing at Dilley, Caleb and his older brother, Antonio, had been celebrated mariachi musicians from McAllen, invited by their Republican congresswoman last summer to perform at the Capitol and then visit the White House. Antonio had been crowned the best trumpeter in Texas.
Yet here Caleb was with the rest of his family, held in a detention center where they were fed worm-infested food and slept 12 people to a room under fluorescent lights that never dimmed.
On Monday, the family was released just hours after Mr. Castro’s visit. His staff drove them home, and the Democrats who had made the trek on the bus clapped and cheered. It counted as a small victory. But as he scanned the faces of detainees seated in the rows behind them, Mr. Castro was struck by the unfairness of it.
Most of the families did not have a compelling narrative that sparked national outrage, and there was less he could do to help get them out, even if they, too, were not criminals.
“They all realize they’re all in the same lot,” Mr. Castro said during an interview on the bus ride to Dilley. “But they’re coming up individually saying, ‘Can you please help me?’ It’s weird psychologically for them, and for me.”
For now, Mr. Castro says his pressure campaign is working. On his first visit in January, there were 1,100 people at Dilley. On Monday, he said, the number of detainees was down to about 450.
“The public outcry is making a difference,” he said. “More people are being released.”
Still, the lawmakers who visited on Monday described wretched scenes of cruelty and neglect.
“Watching the dynamic between the parents and the kids is just painful,” said Mr. Castro, a father of three. “To watch these parents suffer indignity while their kids are watching them — you see the illusion of being able to protect them melts away. I don’t know that those relationships will ever be the same. Those are the things I think about, outside of the laws or the policies.”
Alongside his identical twin brother, Julián, Mr. Castro has been a fixture in Texas politics since his boy-wonder days, when he was elected to the state Legislature at age 28. His mother, Rosie, was a well-known civil rights activist in San Antonio when he was growing up.
This year, he contemplated a run for statewide office but ultimately decided against it, in part because of Dilley.
“I had to choose between spending the next year and a half in a campaign,” he said. “But the world was coming to me. I thought, let me just stand here and fight, in this office, with this platform.” It helps that he is also the most senior Democrat on the subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, at a time when the Trump administration is waging a crusade against Latino immigrants.
With hopes that Texas might finally turn blue in this year’s midterm elections, Mr. Castro, who comes across as humble but self-assured, appeared to harbor a tinge of regret about the decision to stay where he is.
“I’ll just watch them all get inaugurated next January,” he joked. “But at least it will be a new day in Texas.”
But he has had some success in sticking with the problem in front of him.
When Liam Conejo Ramos — the 5-year-old in the Spider-Man backpack and oversize fluffy blue winter hat who was photographed being rounded up with his father in Minneapolis — was released, it was Mr. Castro who flew home to Minneapolis with him. While Liam had been detained at Dilley, Mr. Castro had visited the boy inside and fought hard for his release.
But just like with the Gámez-Cuéllar family, that victory was bittersweet.
“There’s another young boy I met last time whose name is Liam Nias,” Mr. Castro said. “He’s 7, from Honduras, I believe. He reminded me of Liam Ramos, except no one knows this other boy — he’s just unknown and sitting there in this prison.”
He added: “I think if people had not seen Liam Ramos’s picture and the Spider-Man backpack, he could still be sitting there now.”
It is hard for outsiders to get into Dilley to scrutinize the conditions there or share the stories of the people who are locked up inside. Journalists are not allowed inside, and until last week, the Trump administration was barring lawmakers who wanted to conduct oversight visits from entering unless they submitted an application seven days in advance. Planned visits are sometimes cut short because of holdups at the entry point. The instructions for detainees to sign up to meet with visiting lawmakers are posted only in English; most of the detainees speak only Spanish.
On Monday, the group of Democratic lawmakers that toured saw some telltale signs of a cleanup before their visit: an unused box of crayons that they assumed had been placed in sight for their benefit and spotless hallways.
Most lawmakers have visited their share of detention centers over the years. But Mr. Castro said he felt something different on his recent visits to Dilley.
“There’s a brutality and cruelty now even beyond what existed before,” he said. “You can just feel it.”
So the group of Democrats who visited on Monday were surprised when Mr. Castro received a call minutes after their visited ended, informing him that the Gámez-Cuéllar family was being processed for immediate release. They did not think the Trump administration would be willing to give them that win.
Luis Antonio Gámez, the father, has said that his family entered the United States in 2023 at the border crossing in Brownsville, Texas, and claimed asylum, because they were fleeing threats in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, where he had been kidnapped by cartel members.
For hours, the Democrats waited in the parking lot: The release, they were told, was contingent on a directive from Washington.
There were other politics at play. The oldest brother, Antonio, 18, was being held at a separate facility for adults, the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas. And the Republican congresswoman who had invited him and his brother to Washington last year, Representative Monica De La Cruz, said on social media that she was racing there to pick him up.
The Democrats on the bus suspected that the long wait at Dilley was being orchestrated to allow Ms. De La Cruz to go first, but they could do nothing but sit and wait.
Some of them said Ms. De La Cruz had been late to the cause, reacting only under the growing pressure of a national outrage involving her constituents. The family sitting inside Dilley, they said, felt the same way. “They said to me, ‘No, she hasn’t done anything; she isn’t helping us,’” Representative Nanette Barragán of California said.
As they waited, the group processed the stories they had heard inside: a 19-year-old pregnant woman who was not getting enough to eat and was told by a doctor three weeks ago that her baby was not growing; a toddler with an untreated, infected tooth; complaints about the water making people sick; a woman vomiting blood who was told that she “just needed to calm down.”
They took turns standing in the parking lots filming videos for their social media feeds, sharing the stories they had borne witness to.
And after hours of waiting, there was action: The Gámez-Cuéllar family, dressed in maroon and navy sweatsuits, had exited a trailer and was making its way across the parking lot and over to the bus.
“I’m a Jewish mother in training and I must feed people,” Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California, said as she handed them boxed sandwiches from H-E-B, the Texas supermarket. As Caleb and a younger brother, Joshua, sat in the back of the bus smiling and eating sandwiches, their parents clasped their arms around each other and struggled to hold back their tears.
“You literally saved this family,” Mr. Gámez told Mr. Castro in Spanish, while his wife called her sister.
After about 15 minutes, the family got in a car driven by a staff member to Mr. Castro, which was to take them to Alice, Texas, where they would be reunited with Antonio, who had also been released.
Onboard the bus, the Democratic lawmakers cheered. It counted as a rare feel-good day.
As the bus pulled out of the parking lot, Ms. Barragán of California joked to Mr. Castro: “Who are we going to get released next week, Joaquin?”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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