A San Antonio mechanic and his 9-year-old daughter have spent more than a month locked inside a South Texas detention facility after a routine traffic stop turned into an immigration arrest that swept up the little girl too. U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro is now demanding their release, saying Jesús Bracho was stopped by Texas state troopers simply arriving at work, and that federal agents later forced him to call his daughter Katherine out of hiding so she could be taken into custody alongside him.
According to Castro, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers stopped Bracho as he arrived at his job, then called in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which took him into custody, as first reported by WOAI News 4 San Antonio. Before he was detained, Bracho reportedly told 9-year-old Katherine to go inside his boss’s house, apparently trying to keep her out of the encounter. Castro says ICE agents ultimately forced Bracho to lure his daughter back out so they could take her into custody as well, leaving the child scared and unaware of where she was being taken.
Katherine is a student at Bonnie Ellison Elementary, a public school in San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District that serves more than 750 students in Pre-K through fifth grade, according to Northside ISD. Castro says Bracho, who works as a mechanic, has no criminal record. The pair have now been held for over a month at what Castro’s office describes as the Dilley trailer prison, the sprawling family detention facility south of San Antonio.
A Facility Built to Hold Thousands of Families
The site in question is the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, a 2,400-bed complex that federal immigration officials reopened last year under a five-year contract with private prison operator CoreCivic, according to The Texas Tribune. The facility had previously been shuttered before being brought back online to serve as a primary site for detaining migrant families…