The CoreCivic employees stop me when I turn off Highway 85 onto the road to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. The men are gleaming, barrel chested, with huge thighs, good haircuts, and matching blue polo shirts, as they step out of their white SUV into the not yet kiln-hot air. One places his pink Gatorade on the hood of his car. Could I drive up to the parking lot and observe the goings-on there? No, I could not. Was there someone I could call? He squawks on his radio, then tells me I can call “the front lobby.” He wishes me a nice day.

The Dilley Immigration Processing Center — formerly known as the South Texas Family Residential Center — shares an enormous desert parcel near Dolph Briscoe Unit state prison and Crescent Energy. Dilley used to grow 25 million pounds of watermelon a year and call itself “the watermelon capital of Texas.” Now it’s a carceral town, specializing in immigrant children detained with their families by ICE. A hugely pregnant dog approaches me, yearning, at the corner of East Curtis Street and Sheep Hill Road. She is dusty, like everything in Dilley except the white cars, white trucks, white vans, and white buses that pull into the detention center. The dog sniffs my hand. She has not yet absorbed the Dilley code.

A few years ago, the Frio-Nueces Current called the center “an internment camp.” CoreCivic operators immediately called the editor and told him not to call it that. The editor pushed back, asking where he was confused. Was it not “a camp — being made up largely of temporary structures? … Were the people behind its fences interned?” Earlier this year, two people from the Dilley Immigration Processing Center escaped. Law enforcement hunted them down with dogs. Their names were Nilson Pedromo-Perez, 17, of Honduras, and Rodrigo Jose Cedeno-Espinoza, 35, of Venezuela.

In late January, as Minneapolis fell under ICE siege, Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old boy in the bunny hat, arrived in Dilley along with his father. Soon after, a few buses of protesters marched to the spot where the gleaming men turned me away. They carried whistles, cowbells, signs. One carried a huge white papier-mâché bird: gold beak, feathered wings. Forty Texas Department of Public Safety troopers in riot gear doused them with pepper spray. Activism is not a local pastime. Only one protester lived in Frio County, a curious cowboy who stumbled upon the group near the shuttered hamburger stand in the dusty town square.

Pastor Dianne Garcia passed by here a few days earlier on her 90-mile walk from Dilley to San Antonio Immigration Court. Her congregation, Iglesia Cristiana Roca de Refugio, is almost all recent immigrants, about 125 families, “the most vulnerable of the vulnerable,” she says. Twenty-one have been detained by ICE, including a 3-year-old child. Eight have been deported. They text her “emergencia” and “Llámame,” snapshots of ICE officers, and pins of their locations. Often, by the time she sees the texts, no one answers the phone. In January 2025, the federal government stopped limiting........

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