215,000 Demand Dilley Shutdown as Artists and Doctors Unite Against Family Detention
Janelle Monáe, Spike Lee, Jodie Foster, and a battalion of pediatricians join growing coalition calling on CoreCivic and DHS to release children now
WASHINGTON — The names keep coming.
Janelle Monáe. Jodie Foster. Spike Lee. Joan Baez. Quinta Brunson. Jessica Alba. One by one, they added their signatures to an open letter demanding the federal government shut down the Dilley Immigration Processing Center — a CoreCivic-run family detention facility in Dilley, Texas where children and their parents are held in immigration custody.
More than 215,000 people have now signed the letter, which calls not just for the closure of Dilley but for an end to the detention of children and families nationwide — and the return of those already detained to the communities from which they were taken.
The campaign, organized under the National Coalition to End Child and Family Detention, is not a celebrity vanity project. Alongside the artists is a medical corps — pediatricians, OBGYNs, pulmonologists, clinical psychologists — who have put their names and credentials behind an argument that detention itself is the harm.
Ryan Matlow, a child clinical psyc…