March on Dilley Detention, Dems Say 'Abolish ICE,' Fascism and Our Future, Amy Hardberger on Growth

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An ICE Out of Everywhere National Day of Action has been called for Saturday, January 31, 2026.

Protests of ‘Abolish ICE’ Reach Texas Dems as Trump’s Agents Count the Holes in the Dead

The struggle against ICE has picked up in Texas since the killings of legal observers in Minneapolis and transporting of 5-year-old Liam Ramos to CoreCivic’s Dilley family detention center.

Greg Harman

On Saturday, January 24, United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers pepper sprayed 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti and pinned him face down in the street. They disarmed him. And then they then shot him “at least” 10 times.

One of the agents clapped.

Some then gathered over Pretti’s lifeless body, but not to render aid. They were counting holes.

Bullet holes are bragging rights for the best funded military force on the planet now patrolling United States streets accosting citizen and noncitizen alike.

After another shooting of a legal observer in Chicago, a Border Patrol agent boasted on his posse’s encrypted chat: "I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”

Like Pretti, fellow legal observer Renee Good, killed earlier in the month in Minneapolis, didn’t get any medical attention from agents after she was shot multiple times after officers apparently gave her conflicting directives.

It’s a pattern highlighted by the Marshall Fund.

“After shooting both Good and Pretti, officers did not perform CPR or any other medical aid, and when physicians at the scene attempted to help, federal agents either delayed or stopped them from doing so.”

In the midst of this mayhem in Minneapolis, background to the abuses piling up in headline after headline, is the daily targeting of local residents for removal. Days before the killing of Pretti, for instance, officers grabbed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos on his way home from school. He wasn’t the first from his school to be snatched. In spite of active asylum claims, both the child and his father were sent to a family detention center outside San Antonio in Dilley, Texas.

As Deceleration wrote back in December, lawsuits and judges’ orders chronicling persistent inhumane conditions have dogged ICE facilities in Illinois, New York, Baltimore, and California City. A federal judge compared the facilities at Broadview, Ill., for example, to a concentration camp.

Don’t expect better in Texas.

As columnist Moira Donegan writes at the Guardian this week:

“It is likely that [Liam] is not being treated well there. A report on detention camps holding children – including the one in Dilley, Texas – from the non-profit newsroom the Marshall Project, reveals claims of dirty conditions, overcrowding and inadequate food. Detained families said “the food was contaminated with mold and worms.”

Children suffered “so much psychological stress that parents said they were hitting their own faces or wetting themselves despite being potty-trained,” she writes.

Nothing in this contradicts the assessment of U.S. Rep Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, who declared at a press conference outside San Antonio City Hall on Wednesday that Liam must be released. That ICE must be abolished. Democrats didn’t get here overnight. It took time.

Other recent deaths include Silverio Villegas González outside Chicago, 31-year-old Isaias Sanchez Barboza in Rio Grande City, Texas, and Keith Porter in Los Angeles. Then there are the record-setting death rates in the ICE facilities themselves. Four in-custody deaths in the first 10 days of 2026, including in El Paso, point to a total eclipse of past mortality figures.

And widespread chilling threats continue to be recorded by agents to protesters to "learn their lesson" from the wanton killings.

As the escalation of national demonstrations show, much of the country—and certainly targeted Minneapolis, where residents declared last Friday “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth & Freedom”—have had enough.

The people of Texas too, epicenter of so much of the deportation-industrial complex, are raising their voices against ICE and the rising attacks on communities around the county.

This is what happened next.