CAGED AND CHASED: An ICE Nightmare
“She is being chased by an animal, and she cannot get away because she’s in a cage.” — Immigration attorney Eric Lee describing the nightmare of a five-year old girl, held since June 2025 at the ICE facility in Dilley, Texas.
“I am five years old” the child prints at the top of a drawing. Below, she has made stick figures caged behind a chain-link/wire fence, confined like dangerous animals but the figures are people. She has drawn downward smiles on their faces.
The drawing illustrates the nightmare the child told her immigration lawyer, Eric Lee, when he visited January 26 at the euphemistically named South Texas Family Residential Center where the girl has been held for eight months with her twin sister, three older siblings, and mother. She has nightmares every night, wakes up screaming, “mama, mama,” “These children will be scarred for life,” Lee posted on his X.com account (@EricLeeAtty) several days later.
The dream-drawing is an indelible image of the cruelty and dehumanization of the racist US immigration policy: The people are caged and the menacing beast is roaming free, terrorizing the human beings.
Lee continues daily to plead for his clients. He appeared on @MSNOWNews March 14 calling what the Trump administration is doing to the El Gamal family “a great historic crime.” He posted a description of the abuse on X: “5 kids, detained 9 months, fed nails, worms, denied medical care & school. When adults do this to kids it is criminal child abuse. Will American ppl allow it to continue?”
“There’s nothing new about a federal policy of family separation. The Obama administration did that to millions of families. The Biden administration did so, too.” Lee said on Democracy Now January 29, describing the nightmare and showing the drawing. Under Trump, however, Lee said, there is a “deliberate policy” Stephen Miller calls “remigration.” Lee said the policy is rooted in “fascist doctrines of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” He pointed to the resistance of the people of Minnesota in the face of the illegal and violent actions of ICE agents as a way forward. “The Declaration {of Independence} says there’s a right of revolution. When the government violates the rights of the population, we have a right to alter or abolish it,”he said.
A Living Nightmare
We often call “a bad dream” a nightmare.
In a nightmare, writes Tony Crisp in Dream Dictionary, “We are desperately trying to get away from a situation, feel stuck in a terrible condition, or meet fear or disgust in almost overwhelming degree, so on awakening, we feel enormous relief it was just a dream.”
Sadly, for the child in the ICE facility in Texas and for thousands of others caged by the US government, denied their legal and human rights, the nightmare is reality.
Follow @EricLeeAtty on X.com for updates and action.
See also our previous story“Trump Deals with God,” about a dream illuminating the cruel psyche of Trump and his private bargaining with G*d.
You are encouraged to share your nighttime dreams and how you incorporate their messages into your daily life and activism. Dreaming at JOYCE LYNN dot com.