Rachel Accurso, the prominent children’s entertainer known as Ms. Rachel, told NBC News in a recent interview that she’s currently fighting to close the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas, where ICE has been detaining children and their parents. Accurso said she first found out about Dilley after federal agents detained the father of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in Minneapolis and sent them both to Dilley.
Per NBC News: “Children have complained of limited education, lights that never turn off and moldy food” at Dilley. Amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, “more than 2,300 children” have been put into detention with their parents, “with the overwhelming majority held at Dilley, according to figures provided by court-appointed monitors. Many have been held for several weeks or months.”
Accurso recently had a video call with 9-year-old Deiver Henao Jimenez, who was detained at Dilley along with his parents in early March. It was her second video call with a detained child, the first being with a 5-year-old named Gael.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Accurso, dressed in her trademark Ms. Rachel outfit, told Jimenez on the video call. “A lot of people want to try to help.”
“I want to leave and go to the spelling bee,” Jimenez told her.
Speaking to NBC News, Accurso said: “It was unbelievably surreal to see this sweet little face and feel like I was on a call with somebody who’s in jail. 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 is now working with lawyers and immigration activists “to close Dilley and make sure that kids and their parents are back in their communities where they belong.”
As the singing educator Ms. Rachel, Accurso has amassed a giant online following that began on YouTube and has since moved over to Netflix. But her decision to speak out over the last year on political issues has generated backlash over the role a children’s entertainer should play in global politics. Accurso has advocated on behalf of children in Gaza, for instance, resulting in accusations that she’s centering Palestinian youth over Israelis. Accurso has maintained that all children are equal. She was accused of antisemitism in January after her Instagram account liked a comment that read, “Free America from the Jews.” Accurso said the “like” was an accident, telling her followers: “I’m a human who makes mistakes.”
The controversies she’s endured after speaking out in support of children in Gaza have led to threats against her family, Accurso told NBC News. She was originally worried that getting involved in the battle against ICE here in the U.S. would only add fuel to the backlash against her, but she couldn’t stay idle after learning about Dilley.
“I am political,” Accurso told 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.”
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