Popular children’s YouTuber Ms. Rachel has detailed an ‘unbelievably surreal’ conversation she had with a child detained inside an ICE facility, pleading with lawmakers to ‘let him out’.
Rachel Anne Accurso — widely known online as Ms Rachel — is an American educator and activist whose toddler-focused learning videos have attracted 19.3 million subscribers on YouTube.
The 43-year-old has also been outspoken about the ongoing humanitarian crisis affecting children in Gaza, previously saying that supporting young people in Palestine “is a direct continuation of the work [she’s] been doing most of [her] life”.
“We don’t care about only some of our students because of where those students were born, we care about every one of them,” she added, as per NewsWeek.
More recently, Accurso said she has been putting energy into efforts aimed at shutting down the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas — a detention site that has drawn criticism for years.
The remote ICE facility has operated since 2014 and is run by private prison company CoreCivic. As reported by NBC News, human rights advocates have alleged the center subjects detainees to “inhumane conditions”.
According to the same reporting, the center can hold as many as 2,400 people — largely women and children — with some families kept there for weeks or even months.
One of those detainees, nine-year-old Deiver Henao Jimenez, was held at Dilley with his parents in March and later spoke with Accurso over a video call.
During the conversation, he told her he hoped to leave quickly so he could take part in a spelling bee, and shared that he missed his friends.
Jimenez is the second child from Dilley that Accurso has spoken to, following an earlier call with a five-year-old named Gael, Variety reported.
“It was unbelievably surreal to see this sweet little face and feel like I was on a call with somebody who’s in jail,” she told NBC News.
“It broke me, and it was something I never thought I’d encounter in life… We’re trying to get a child out of a jail to do a spelling bee. I just never thought those words would go together.”
Accurso later posted her exchange with Jimenez to Instagram.
She also included a caption which read: “I can’t express how it felt to talk to a 9 year old who is in an immigration detention center. It was devastating.
“Please let Deiver Henao out now so he can go back to his spelling bee. Let his family back into their community. This is cruelty.”
In her comments to NBC News after the call, Accurso said she is working alongside lawyers and immigration advocates with the goal of ending operations at the facility and returning families to their communities.
She also said she initially had reservations about speaking out on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns, citing the online backlash she has faced tied to her recent activism.
“I am political,” Accurso added the news outlet.
“It’s political to believe that children are worthy of love and care, and that every child is equal, and that our care shouldn’t stop at what we look like, our family, at our religion, at a border.”