Source: United States House of Representatives – Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA-07)
Pressley Has Led Efforts in Congress to Address Childhood Trauma, Championed Policies to Support Child Health, Education, Safety
WASHINGTON – Today, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA-07) rallied with colleagues, caregivers, advocates, and impacted families to demand the end of child and family detention. While the Trump Administration continues attacking our immigrant neighbors, detaining families, and traumatizing children, Congresswoman Pressley delivered powerful remarks where she discussed the importance of keeping families together, protecting children from trauma, and ensuring immigration policies do not place children and families in harmful detention.
The rally was organized by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the 10 Steps Campaign, and featured an installation of 620 teddy bears and paper dolls—one for every ten children arrested by ICE—alongside a rally and public story hour on the Capitol grounds.
In a March Oversight committee hearing, Rep. Pressley centered the children detained and traumatized by ICE who are being forced to bear the effects of lifelong trauma. In February, in her boycott of Trump’s State of the Union, Rep. Pressley spent the day uplifting the stories of children traumatized and detained by ICE through counterprogramming engagements, a floor speech, and an office installation depicting their stories and art.
A transcript of the Congresswoman’s remarks at the rally is available below and the video is available here.
Transcript: Pressley, Advocates Rally to End to Child and Family Detention, Demand Trump Stop Traumatizing Our Neighbors
U.S. Capitol
May 20, 2026
Hello, movement family!
And indeed we are one movement family, one human family. Our freedoms and our destinies are tied.
Thank you for being here today. Thank you for speaking out, and thank you for speaking up for our babies and our neighbors.
James Baldwin once said, “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe, and I’m beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
Three months ago, I stood in the well of the house floor and decried the child abuse taking place behind the wall at the Dilley Detention Center, a baby prison.
Children denied formula, water too putrid to drink. Sick babies, children with disabilities deteriorating. Fathers holding their babies in their arms as they scream, unable to sleep under the bright prison lights. Children’s drawings torn to shreds by guards to try to hide the truth from the world. Mothers with high-risk pregnancies thrown in vans and dropped along the border with nothing but funds in a commissary account.
The world is watching. The world is watching as the United States is destroying the lives of children and parents. Trauma that can endure for a lifetime. Innocent babies, hardworking people who committed no crime came to this nation with hopes and dreams, who fled horrific violence, who work demeaning jobs and make unspeakable sacrifices for their babies’ survival.
Let me be clear, no family should be torn apart by this government. No family should be detained. No family should be separated.
We must close the Dilley Detention Center immediately. We must reunite families.
Our immigrant families are our neighbors, our coworkers, our loved ones.
Seeking asylum is a human right. Being undocumented is not a crime. Families should be able to live and work in our communities while they go through the immigration process.
In a just America, these families would have been offered a just legal process, compassionate care, and a pathway to residency and citizenship.
A parent seeking safety for their child is always just. A child seeking a childhood is always just.
Many of the families at Dilley have been mired in the process of working towards legal status for many years, like a family of four that’s locked away at Dilley right now. Before they were kidnapped by ICE, their dad was working late shifts at two jobs and driving Uber to make ends meet. Their two daughters were thriving at their school, their mother beloved by neighbors, and building a life for their family.
That’s what this fight is about. That’s who it’s for. Our effort is not futile, it is righteous. Every family we have fought for the release of is proof that we are powerful, and our advocacy matters.
Those who are driving this hurt and harm, they want us to feel small, they want us to feel defeated, they want us to feel isolated, but we are powerful, and we will not give in to the ease of cynicism. We will practice the discipline of hope when families are counting on us to stand in the gap.
Not when seven year old Mathias is begging to go back to school from behind the wall of the Dilley prison.
Not when nine-year-old Valentina is praying to God to free her from behind the wall of the Dilley prison.
Not when 11-year-old Manreet spent her birthday behind bars vomiting from the toxic water at Dilley.
Not when two-year-old Daphne, from my district, has spent months asking where’s daddy?
To every family impacted, no matter the status of your paperwork, no matter how many months you have called America home — this congresswoman loves you.
You deserve to be safe. I’m so proud to call you my neighbor, and I will fight for your childhood like you are my own child, because you deserve that.
You deserve a childhood. You deserve a life free from fear.
Thank you.
Congresswoman Pressley has been an outspoken advocate in defense of immigrant communities and fought to bring detained neighbors home.