Skip to content
Each Step Home
Donate

Commissary

You can fill a family's commissary account. You'll help them buy clean water, food their children will actually eat, medicine, toiletries, and phone calls to lawyers and loved ones. Let them know they're not alone.

Donate Now

No child belongs in a detention cell

Help us alleviate some of the pain for the parents and children locked away in ICE detention. Reports from Dilley Immigration Processing Center — the only ICE facility that detains children — include worms in food, dirty water that causes stomachaches, and restless nights under fluorescent lights that never fully turn off.

Many families rely on what they can buy at the commissary. Donate today to fill families’ commissary accounts. These funds will allow families to buy the most basic items, like clean water or a phone call to lawyers and loved ones. Donate to make their lives a little brighter.

Donate Now

WHAT YOU CAN PROVIDE

$36
Four packs of water bottles
$20
Toiletries & medicine
$13
A 12-pack of ramen noodles
$7
Four boxes of mac & cheese

Frequently Asked Questions

  • A commissary is a store in the detention center. Detainees each have a “commissary account” which is like store credit. When they buy items at the store, funds are deducted from their account balance.

  • People can buy snacks, water, toiletries like toothbrushes, shampoo, and lotion, tablet time, and phone minutes.

  • A network of advocates and lawyers provides us with names and commissary account numbers.

  • We have been very lucky to have enough funding every week to fill the account of every family we know about.

  • Detainees have access to the tap water in Dilley and other ICE detention centers but the tap water often gives them stomach aches and diarrhea. (ProPublica)

  • The various ICE detention centers across the country use different services to process commissary deposits. At Dilley, the private company that runs it uses an app called Connect Network GTL

  • Through advocates and lawyers, we get messages from detainees thanking us for the deposits.

  • At Dilley, if someone is released before funds have hit their account, the money is returned to us. CoreCivic, the private prison company that runs the ICE family detention center, writes us a check.

  • Only once a week.

  • In court declarations, people have testified that the water makes them and their children sick with stomach aches, diarrhea, and even gives them rashes in the showers.