Rachel Accurso, best known as Ms. Rachel on YouTube, is using her voice to advocate for the closure of the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, which is holding children and their parents.
Accurso was first made aware of the ICE facility after agents detained 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father in Minneapolis.
The popular children’s entertainer recently had a video call with Deiver Henao Jiménez, a 9-year-old who was detained in early March along with his parents. The boy told Ms. Rachel that the food at the facility made his stomach hurt and that he wanted “to leave and go to the spelling bee.”
“It was unbelievably surreal to see this sweet little face and feel like I was on a call with somebody who’s in jail,” Ms. Rachel told NBC News. “It broke me, and it was something I never thought I’d encounter in life.”
She later added, “We’re trying to get a child out of a jail to do a spelling bee. I just never thought those words would go together.”
According to NBC News, following Trump’s crackdown on immigration, “more than 2,300 children” have been detained with their parents, mostly being held at Dilley, where children have “complained of limited education, lights that never turn off, and moldy food.”
Advocating for the safety of kids, Ms. Rachel says that she is working with lawyers and immigration activists “to close Dilley and make sure that kids and their parents are back in their communities where they belong.”
Accurso was also in contact with another family at the Dilley facility. Five-year-old Gael, who is nonverbal, was detained with his parents in El Paso amid an assessment for autism. Since their detention, Gael’s health has deteriorated. The report also notes that Gael has “grown increasingly distressed” at the facility, “at times hitting himself,” which was a behavior he had not had before.
“Treating a child this way is a crime,” Accurso told NBC News. “It’s neglect and child abuse.”
Ms. Rachel has become an advocate against the Trump administration and said, “I am political. It’s political to believe that children are worthy of love and care, and that every child is equal, and that our care shouldn’t stop at what we look like, our family, at our religion, at a border.”