On March 12, children’s entertainer and educator Ms. Rachel posted a now-viral video on Instagram that showed her FaceTiming with a young boy.
“Do you really miss your school and your friends?” Ms. Rachel, whose full name is Rachel Accurso, asks in the video.
“Very much. I want to be there, to be happy,” the boy replies. “Nothing is good here.”
The boy in the video is Deiver Henao Jimenez, a 9-year-old being held in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, with his family.
The boy in the video is Deiver Henao Jimenez, a 9-year-old being held in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, with his family. He is one of the hundreds of children being held in immigration detention centers around the country (it’s a challenge to get reliable numbers; reportedly the number of children detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has jumped to six times those seen during the Biden administration). These children have been apprehended in the sweeping raids carried out under President Donald Trump’s forceful immigration plan, which includes children being regularly captured and held in dangerously inhumane conditions and often being denied basic nutrition, access to education or necessary medical care.
The so-called “processing center” in Dilley, which resembles a prison more than anything else, first drew national attention when 5-year-old Liam Ramos was sent there in January. The gruesomeness of his detention made it the focus of headlines around the world. Children there are reportedly served food with worms in it; they lose weight; the lights are always on; they are constantly being surveilled by guards; and those who are detained must wait for hours outside, even in the rain, just to get medicine (when children are administered medicine, their mouths are inspected to make sure they swallow it).
“I can’t express how it felt to talk to a 9 year old [sic] who is in an immigration detention center,” Accurso wrote in the caption of her post, which had garnered over 343,000 likes by the time of this article’s publication. “It was devastating. Please let Deiver Henao out now so he can go to his spelling bee. Let his family back into their community. This is cruelty. His family was detained at their check in – in US 2 years [sic] seeking asylum.”
In the video, Accurso meets Deiver’s plea with gentleness and compassion. But when Lidia Terrazas, who facilitated the call, turns the camera around and away from him, Accurso can be seen struggling to keep it together. She places her face in her hands in what looks like a combination of disbelief and overwhelming grief before steeling herself for the rest of the conversation.
Accurso has gained visibility over the past few years for her fierce advocacy of Palestinian children in Gaza living under siege, a stance that has made her both a hero and a target. She has maintained that her advocacy extends to all children, everywhere, and has repeatedly appealed to elected officials and leaders to intervene where children are suffering. Over the past month, she appears to have added children held by ICE to her advocacy, specifically in her calls to close the Dilley ICE detention center.
A common criticism from Accurso’s detractors has been that she is being political where politics has no place — namely, the realm of children’s entertainment and education — to which she has replied that, in today’s climate, “it is political to believe that every child is equal.”
While this criticism is based on an absurd premise — that any spaces are apolitical — such detractors are perhaps gesturing toward an underlying truth here. Namely, Accurso is entering a domain not ordinarily intended for entertainers. And there is, in fact, something very wrong with a picture when one of the loudest voices advocating for children’s basic rights, and calling for an end to their abuse and mistreatment, comes from a YouTube-famous children’s entertainer. Accurso is standing up for something that no one should be able to argue against: the unconditional care and protection of children. But where are the elected officials? Where is the state?
The moral depravity of the Republicans who support Trump’s inhumane immigration crackdown and the ineptitude of the Democrats to put a stop to it and protect people from its harm has created a perfect storm of inaction. Meanwhile, we have a state that is terrorizing larger and larger swaths of its population, including young children.
The United States has a long history of terrorizing some of its most vulnerable populations. To be clear, the United States has a long history of terrorizing some of its most vulnerable populations — for example, indigenous people, Black people and Japanese Americans who were sent to internment camps during the Second World War, to name a few — but the scale of this state-sponsored violence is unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern era. And with the exception of a somewhat tenuous legal system (look no further than the stacked Supreme Court), there is very little institutional support at the federal and state levels when it comes to protecting children and other vulnerable populations. So the burden has fallen to ordinary citizens, particularly those with cultural capital, like Ms. Rachel. This is something Accurso understands all too well. “We need to put children’s lives and human lives before our hesitations and before our fear of any backlash. Because which is more important: A child’s life, a person’s life, or backlash?” she asked in a recent Instagram video, discussing how she navigates her own fear in her advocacy work. She is regularly sent hateful and threatening messages and comments, including calls for an investigation into her following accusations that she is a mouthpiece for Hamas. “I just urge everyone, especially those with huge platforms and privilege, to speak out, to use your voice, because when more and more people say this is wrong, it becomes not controversial,” she said. We must demand structural change, beyond the shorter-term goals of, for example, shutting down the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, too. We must demand that those who have institutional power, such as (but not limited to) politicians, do more. Children should be able to connect with Ms. Rachel as children — not as victims of war or prisoners of the state who are begging for their freedom, like Deiver and so many others.
Noor Noman is a writer focused on culture, race and LGBTQ issues. 
