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When Dilmer “Loba” Lovos Mendez learned about the protests inside the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, they were not surprised. While being held for two years in California immigration jails from 2024 to 2026, Lovos Mendez had seen firsthand how common such organized acts of resistance actually are, and was themself directly involved with three protest actions during that time.

During two hunger strikes, one of which had up to 100 participants, as well as sit-ins that lasted two weeks in September 2025, Lovos Mendez worked with other people inside immigrant jails to protest medical neglect and terrible conditions including rotten food and undrinkable water.

As in the case of Dilley, Lovos Mendez felt it was outrageous that the detainees had to be the ones to expose conditions and make people aware. “It’s the only way that a person inside the detention center can actually have their voices heard,” Lovos Mendez told Truthout.

During the same month as the sit-ins that Lovos Mendez participated in at California City Immigration Processing Center, hunger strikes emerged at Louisiana State Prison (also known as Angola, for the slave plantation it was built over) in “Camp 57,” a solitary confinement unit that was housing immigrants in federal custody. Detainees were given small “childlike” portions of food and weren’t allowed to go to commissary, on top of being housed in tiny cells meant for solitary confinement, according to Chanthila Souvannarath, who helped lead the hunger strike from inside.

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“We wanted to expose the corruption,” Souvannarath told Truthout. “It’s not a place for detainees. We’re trying to get that place shut down. It’s inhumane.”

These were just two of the many protests emerging in immigration jails across the U.S., only a few of which have come into the national spotlight under the second Trump administration. Even so, Alex Mensing, who works with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, told Truthout that protests happen inside immigration jails all the time, even if it is just one person leading a hunger strike from solitary confinement. These facilities have been sites of resistance since their inception, with one of the first recorded protests occurring in 1985 in El Centro Detention Facility in California.

“There’s a very long lineage and history of incarcerated people resisting as a form of survival, very much as a form of political activism once they’re incarcerated, and sometimes they work with people on the outside in solidarity, but still very much motivated by the people on the inside themselves,” said Jessica Ordaz, a historian and assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Under-Documented Protests

Ordaz told Truthout that when she began researching El Centro Detention Facility, which was built in the 1940s and closed in 2014, she wasn’t trying to look at examples of protests or resistance,........

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