IMPORTANT READ ON WHAT'S HAPPENING IN DILLEY, TEXAS
We should stop hiding this cruelty behind bureaucratic language. “Family detention” is not a neutral policy term when children are being jailed, denied adequate medical care, and forced to suffer inside immigration facilities. Reports of infants and children becoming gravely ill in custody are not unfortunate side effects. They are evidence of a system willing to sacrifice children’s bodies and families’ dignity in the name of enforcement.
We should be outraged, and we should say plainly what is happening: children and parents seeking safety are being harmed by the very government that owes them protection. These families deserve freedom, accountability, and justice.
We should also recognize lawmakers such as U.S. Congressman Joaquin Castro, who have refused to look away from this cruelty. He and other members of Congress have raised public awareness about the inhumanity of imprisoning children, called for detained families to be released, and demanded that the Dilley facility be shut down.
This one child's drawing says it all. So heartbreaking.
In addition to The New Yorker piece posted below, read this recent piece, "'These kids are deeply traumatized' | Castro leads delegation raising concerns over treatment of families and children at Dilley ICE facility," and follow him on Instagram to remain aware of his advocacy.
All of us deserve to live in a free society—one in which no one, citizen or noncitizen, has to fear being targeted because of how they look, what language they speak, where they work, or what papers an officer assumes they do or do not have. That fear has only deepened after the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on immigration stops in Los Angeles, allowing agents to resume practices that had been challenged as racially discriminatory while the underlying case continues.
This is a chilling, enraging piece. I encourage you to read it all the way through. You may also listen to it through the audio option on the article page.
—Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
#StopTheCruelty #CloseDilley #ShutDownDilley #EndFamilyDetention #FreeDilleyChildren
By Sarah Stillman, April 13, 2026 | The New Yorker
baby die in my arms?”Photographs by Carlos Jaramillo for The New Yorker
Read in Spanish | Leer en español April 20, 2026
Read in Spanish | Leer en español April 20, 2026
In early February, Elora Mukherjee, who runs one of the country’s leading immigrants’-rights clinics, at Columbia Law School, told me about a client of hers who was detained in South Texas. The client, Mukherjee explained, was in the midst of a life-threatening medical crisis. What’s more, she was eighteen months old. Baby Amalia, as Mukherjee called her, had been sent to a San Antonio hospital with critically low oxygen levels. She’d spent more than a week in intensive care, where she and her mother were watched by ICE agents. After being discharged from the hospital, the toddler had been sent back to the place where she had nearly died: the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, where many children had severe respiratory illnesses. “The doctors prescribed Amalia a medication by nebulizer,” Mukherjee told me, but, when the child and her mother returned to Dilley, “the officers took those meds.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that any claims that Amalia “did not receive her medication or proper medical treatment” are false.)
For months, I’d been investigating how the suffering of children, including infants and toddlers, has become central to the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy. In Chicago and Portland, Oregon, federal agents had fired chemical munitions at children. In Idaho, I reviewed evidence of children being swept up in a vast and violent immigration raid on a family-friendly horse race and zip-tied until their wrists bruised or bled.
When children’s bodies bear the brunt of federal immigration enforcement, it’s not merely a matter of collateral damage. In the first days of Donald Trump’s second term, his Administration launched a series of executive actions that, in effect, directed immigration enforcement against kids. Under Joe Biden, D.H.S. had designated “protected areas,” where ICE and Customs and Border Protection were discouraged from conducting operations; these included places “where children gather.” Trump’s D.H.S. rescinded that designation, freeing agents to target children, parents, and caregivers at playgrounds, child-care centers, and schools. (In March, Democrats in Congress released a report that documented forty-two such incidents in or around “schools, school bus stops, and day care centers,” with “devastating consequences for children learning and being cared for at these locations.”) Similarly, Trump’s Executive Office for Immigration Review cancelled a Biden-era memo that urged immigration judges to adopt “child-friendly courtroom procedures.” Later, a new ICE initiative urged agents to track down unaccompanied migrant children, ostensibly to insure that they weren’t being trafficked but also, in many cases, to deport them. “The real through line is a strategic and coördinated effort specifically to target kids, with the goal to make life so unbearable for immigrant families at every point of contact that they feel they have no choice but to leave,” Kica Matos, the president of the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrants’-rights group, told me.
The harm to children is particularly clear in the Trump Administration’s revival and expansion of family detention at Dilley, where Amalia and more than five thousand other children and parents have been held during the past year. In a report released on April 1st, Human Rights First and RAICES—two major nonprofits working on immigrants’ rights—offer a close look at what they call a “new era of ICE family prisons.” Based on interviews with thirty-five families who have spent time during the past year in family detention and more than three hundred legal cases in which RAICES has represented asylum seekers, the report describes more than a dozen family separations that have been conducted by U.S. immigration enforcement since Trump returned to office; most of the incidents occurred at Dilley. It also alleges that significant due-process violations have led to the summary deportations of children and families with credible asylum claims. And it documents accounts of widespread medical neglect of children, including infants, in the care of CoreCivic, the private contractor that operates Dilley, which reported more than two billion dollars in total revenue last year. Faisal al-Juburi, a co-C.E.O. of RAICES, told me, “Right now, the egregious medical neglect alone could, isolated from all the other horrors, be considered clear evidence of intentional harm.” (D.H.S. said that all detainees receive due process and proper medical treatment. The agency also denied that ICE targets children.)
This January, the average daily population at Dilley soared to more than nine hundred. By mid-March, it fell to under a hundred before rising again. Robyn Barnard, a co-author of the report and the senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First, told me, “There is no indication that they plan to wind down at Dilley.” She was aware of at least two families in the facility who’d been there for longer than a hundred days—more than five times the legal limit for holding a child in immigration detention, as indicated by a settlement called the Flores agreement. “If these are the horrors we know about, what are the ones we still don’t know about?” she asked. She also pointed out that, unlike in the past, many of the families detained at Dilley had put down roots in the U.S. In early April, I spoke to an Indian family of four who’d lived in the Los Angeles area since 2022; when we talked, they’d been held at Dilley for nearly fifty days. The father, Jagdish, told me that one of his children was vomiting and the other had bloody stools; both were depressed. “The suffering is too big,” he said.
Amalia and her parents, Stiven Arrieta Prieto and Kheilin Valero Marcano, were released in early February. On their first weekend out of detention, Prieto and Marcano sat down at a sponsor’s home to speak with me, joined by Mukherjee and three law students who’d worked many late nights to get them released. “I want to be a spokesperson for all the women with children at Dilley who are living with the nerves and desperation of not knowing if their child will survive,” Marcano told me. “So that they won’t lose hope. So that they won’t keep living in purgatory.”
malia was a healthy child last December 11th, when she and her parents were arrested by immigration-enforcement officials in El Paso. Prieto and Marcano had grown up in Venezuela, a country they never wanted to leave. But, in 2024, they sought asylum in the U.S., on the basis that they had opposed the Nicolás Maduro regime and faced persecution.
They took all the steps required by the Biden Administration. Arriving at the southern border, they registered for an appointment with Customs and Border Protection. They then waited for months in Mexico, during which time Marcano gave birth to Amalia. The family received an immigration court date in 2027 and were granted humanitarian parole, a status that allowed them to live lawfully in the U.S. until they appeared in court.
The family moved to El Paso, where they found a playground that Amalia loved and a close-knit church. Amalia learned her first words: “Mamá,” “Papá,” and “agua.” But, in 2025, the Trump Administration attempted to terminate many forms of immigration protection for asylum seekers, including humanitarian parole programs, and began apprehending families who were awaiting their chance to go before a judge. (“The law requires those in the country illegally claiming asylum to be detained pending removal,” a D.H.S. spokesperson told me.) In early December, Prieto was told to show up for an immigration check-in at an earlier date than ICE had initially requested and to bring his family. He complied. At the check-in, Prieto, Marcano, and Amalia were arrested. They weren’t provided with arrest warrants or any paperwork explaining why they were being apprehended. Amalia cried after the family was loaded into a van full of other parents and young children. “Why are you doing this?” Prieto asked the immigration agents. He recalled that an agent replied, “It’s a change of Administration. They pay us to deport you.”
When the family reached Dilley, they noticed that the water smelled strange. At the commissary, Prieto bought packs of bottled water, which they reserved for Amalia. (RAICES and Human Rights First note that families at Dilley routinely describe water that is “unclean, foul-smelling, and causes stomachaches”; bottled water, the report observes, must be purchased, despite the fact that detainees have typically been stripped of any sources of income.) In the cafeteria, Marcano told me, “a girl pulled a bug from her hamburger meat and showed it to all of us—and the kids didn’t eat that day.” Then, Marcano recalled, “the kids started falling sick.” (CoreCivic said that inspections have confirmed that the water at Dilley is “safe and clean for consumption” and that it has no record of a bug being removed from food at the facility.)
On January 1st, Amalia developed a high fever. The next day, Marcano took her to Dilley’s medical clinic; she told me that a clinician prescribed Amalia ibuprofen. The same thing happened the following day. “A fever is good, because it means she’s fighting off a virus,” Marcano recalled a clinician saying. But the fever didn’t go away, and Amalia was clearly suffering. After nearly two weeks, she began vomiting and having diarrhea.
Often, Marcano had to stand in line for hours with her sick daughter to insure that Amalia was seen by Dilley’s medical team. She waited in line at least eight times, she told me, only to get her concerns shrugged off by the staff. One day, after Marcano tried to lower her daughter’s temperature with a cool bath, Amalia lost consciousness. Marcano went back to the clinic and screamed, “Are you going to watch my baby die in my arms?”
Family detention is hardly unique to the Trump Administration. George W. Bush launched the first large-scale, for-profit family-detention facility, although it proved short-lived, on account of legal challenges and public outcry. The Obama Administration revived the concept in 2014 by opening family-detention camps, including Dilley, to deal with an influx of asylum seekers from Central America. At an event marking the opening of Dilley, Jeh Johnson, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, described the detention center as an “effective deterrent” against the rise in family border crossings. By the summer of 2015, the facility reportedly held more than seventeen hundred people, about a thousand of them children. When I first interviewed Mukherjee about Dilley, years ago, she was helping to coördinate an effort to provide pro-bono legal representation to families there. Back then, Mukherjee took her law students on an annual trip to Dilley; some of the students called it “spring break in baby jail.”
During the Obama Administration, allegations of neglect at Dilley were common. I wrote about a client of Mukherjee’s, a Honduran asylum seeker named Suny Rodríguez, who’d been detained there with her seven-year-old son for four months, in violation of Flores. In federal court, the pair alleged that they were subjected to “inhumane conditions” (including disregard for Rodríguez’s son’s asthma and weight loss), pressured to self-deport, and threatened with separation, claims for which they reached a settlement. Similarly, a group of ten mothers filed formal complaints in 2016, alleging substandard medical care in D.H.S. custody. One of those mothers noted, “I thought I came to this country to escape abuse, mistreatment, and disrespect. But it’s the same here.”
During Trump’s first term, family detention soared, and so, too, did accounts of medical horrors at Dilley. In the spring of 2018, a Guatemalan toddler contracted a respiratory infection there and died six weeks after being released; then, between September of 2018 and May of 2019, six children died in U.S. immigration custody, after nearly a decade without any such deaths. Under Biden, Dilley was shuttered. Asylum seekers were largely allowed to await their court dates outside detention, and many, like Amalia’s family, were granted humanitarian parole.
The second Trump Administration reopened Dilley in March of last year. By January 16, 2026, more than five hundred and fifty children were held in ICE detention, according to government data analyzed by the Marshall Project. Recently, detained families at Dilley have come from such countries as Afghanistan, China, Colombia, Haiti, Russia, and Uzbekistan. Often, Juburi and Barnard told me, children from non-Spanish-speaking countries have been asked to translate for their parents in high-stakes interactions with ICE officers, owing to Dilley’s limited interpretation services.
According to Barnard, the center has both threatened family separations and enacted them. “Many of the families we interviewed recounted being threatened that, if you don’t comply with us, we will separate you from your loved ones,” Barnard said.
In one case, an eleven-year-old boy and his parents fled Mongolia, flying to Chicago with the intention of seeking asylum. D.H.S. sent the family to Dilley, where officials, lacking a translator, allegedly asked the boy to inform his parents that ICE intended to separate him from them. The parents were shackled and sent to adult detention; the child was shipped to a federal shelter as an unaccompanied minor. “I am devastated,” the mother said in an official declaration. “ICE officers have not explained anything to me.” The family was only reunited two months later, in order to be deported back to Mongolia.
In another case, a thirty-seven-year-old woman from China and her ten-year-old son sought asylum at the border in San Diego. They were taken to the airport, where, she said, agents told her that she could accept deportation to China with her son or be forced to return on her own and have him “taken away” from her. She physically resisted and was briefly dragged by an agent. (In a sworn statement, she recounted one of the agents saying, “Fuck! You’re going on a military plane back to China!”) The mother and her son were sent to Dilley. There, according to RAICES records, they were officially separated: the son was sent, alone, to a federal shelter in New York, while she was sent to detention centers, first in New Jersey, and then in Texas and New Mexico. As of early April, the two remained separated.
Before they were arrested by the Trump Administration, Amalia and her parents had been granted humanitarian parole under Biden.
For months, I’d been investigating how the suffering of children, including infants and toddlers, has become central to the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy. In Chicago and Portland, Oregon, federal agents had fired chemical munitions at children. In Idaho, I reviewed evidence of children being swept up in a vast and violent immigration raid on a family-friendly horse race and zip-tied until their wrists bruised or bled.
When children’s bodies bear the brunt of federal immigration enforcement, it’s not merely a matter of collateral damage. In the first days of Donald Trump’s second term, his Administration launched a series of executive actions that, in effect, directed immigration enforcement against kids. Under Joe Biden, D.H.S. had designated “protected areas,” where ICE and Customs and Border Protection were discouraged from conducting operations; these included places “where children gather.” Trump’s D.H.S. rescinded that designation, freeing agents to target children, parents, and caregivers at playgrounds, child-care centers, and schools. (In March, Democrats in Congress released a report that documented forty-two such incidents in or around “schools, school bus stops, and day care centers,” with “devastating consequences for children learning and being cared for at these locations.”) Similarly, Trump’s Executive Office for Immigration Review cancelled a Biden-era memo that urged immigration judges to adopt “child-friendly courtroom procedures.” Later, a new ICE initiative urged agents to track down unaccompanied migrant children, ostensibly to insure that they weren’t being trafficked but also, in many cases, to deport them. “The real through line is a strategic and coördinated effort specifically to target kids, with the goal to make life so unbearable for immigrant families at every point of contact that they feel they have no choice but to leave,” Kica Matos, the president of the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrants’-rights group, told me.
The harm to children is particularly clear in the Trump Administration’s revival and expansion of family detention at Dilley, where Amalia and more than five thousand other children and parents have been held during the past year. In a report released on April 1st, Human Rights First and RAICES—two major nonprofits working on immigrants’ rights—offer a close look at what they call a “new era of ICE family prisons.” Based on interviews with thirty-five families who have spent time during the past year in family detention and more than three hundred legal cases in which RAICES has represented asylum seekers, the report describes more than a dozen family separations that have been conducted by U.S. immigration enforcement since Trump returned to office; most of the incidents occurred at Dilley. It also alleges that significant due-process violations have led to the summary deportations of children and families with credible asylum claims. And it documents accounts of widespread medical neglect of children, including infants, in the care of CoreCivic, the private contractor that operates Dilley, which reported more than two billion dollars in total revenue last year. Faisal al-Juburi, a co-C.E.O. of RAICES, told me, “Right now, the egregious medical neglect alone could, isolated from all the other horrors, be considered clear evidence of intentional harm.” (D.H.S. said that all detainees receive due process and proper medical treatment. The agency also denied that ICE targets children.)
This January, the average daily population at Dilley soared to more than nine hundred. By mid-March, it fell to under a hundred before rising again. Robyn Barnard, a co-author of the report and the senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First, told me, “There is no indication that they plan to wind down at Dilley.” She was aware of at least two families in the facility who’d been there for longer than a hundred days—more than five times the legal limit for holding a child in immigration detention, as indicated by a settlement called the Flores agreement. “If these are the horrors we know about, what are the ones we still don’t know about?” she asked. She also pointed out that, unlike in the past, many of the families detained at Dilley had put down roots in the U.S. In early April, I spoke to an Indian family of four who’d lived in the Los Angeles area since 2022; when we talked, they’d been held at Dilley for nearly fifty days. The father, Jagdish, told me that one of his children was vomiting and the other had bloody stools; both were depressed. “The suffering is too big,” he said.
Amalia and her parents, Stiven Arrieta Prieto and Kheilin Valero Marcano, were released in early February. On their first weekend out of detention, Prieto and Marcano sat down at a sponsor’s home to speak with me, joined by Mukherjee and three law students who’d worked many late nights to get them released. “I want to be a spokesperson for all the women with children at Dilley who are living with the nerves and desperation of not knowing if their child will survive,” Marcano told me. “So that they won’t lose hope. So that they won’t keep living in purgatory.”
malia was a healthy child last December 11th, when she and her parents were arrested by immigration-enforcement officials in El Paso. Prieto and Marcano had grown up in Venezuela, a country they never wanted to leave. But, in 2024, they sought asylum in the U.S., on the basis that they had opposed the Nicolás Maduro regime and faced persecution.
They took all the steps required by the Biden Administration. Arriving at the southern border, they registered for an appointment with Customs and Border Protection. They then waited for months in Mexico, during which time Marcano gave birth to Amalia. The family received an immigration court date in 2027 and were granted humanitarian parole, a status that allowed them to live lawfully in the U.S. until they appeared in court.
The family moved to El Paso, where they found a playground that Amalia loved and a close-knit church. Amalia learned her first words: “Mamá,” “Papá,” and “agua.” But, in 2025, the Trump Administration attempted to terminate many forms of immigration protection for asylum seekers, including humanitarian parole programs, and began apprehending families who were awaiting their chance to go before a judge. (“The law requires those in the country illegally claiming asylum to be detained pending removal,” a D.H.S. spokesperson told me.) In early December, Prieto was told to show up for an immigration check-in at an earlier date than ICE had initially requested and to bring his family. He complied. At the check-in, Prieto, Marcano, and Amalia were arrested. They weren’t provided with arrest warrants or any paperwork explaining why they were being apprehended. Amalia cried after the family was loaded into a van full of other parents and young children. “Why are you doing this?” Prieto asked the immigration agents. He recalled that an agent replied, “It’s a change of Administration. They pay us to deport you.”
When the family reached Dilley, they noticed that the water smelled strange. At the commissary, Prieto bought packs of bottled water, which they reserved for Amalia. (RAICES and Human Rights First note that families at Dilley routinely describe water that is “unclean, foul-smelling, and causes stomachaches”; bottled water, the report observes, must be purchased, despite the fact that detainees have typically been stripped of any sources of income.) In the cafeteria, Marcano told me, “a girl pulled a bug from her hamburger meat and showed it to all of us—and the kids didn’t eat that day.” Then, Marcano recalled, “the kids started falling sick.” (CoreCivic said that inspections have confirmed that the water at Dilley is “safe and clean for consumption” and that it has no record of a bug being removed from food at the facility.)
On January 1st, Amalia developed a high fever. The next day, Marcano took her to Dilley’s medical clinic; she told me that a clinician prescribed Amalia ibuprofen. The same thing happened the following day. “A fever is good, because it means she’s fighting off a virus,” Marcano recalled a clinician saying. But the fever didn’t go away, and Amalia was clearly suffering. After nearly two weeks, she began vomiting and having diarrhea.
Often, Marcano had to stand in line for hours with her sick daughter to insure that Amalia was seen by Dilley’s medical team. She waited in line at least eight times, she told me, only to get her concerns shrugged off by the staff. One day, after Marcano tried to lower her daughter’s temperature with a cool bath, Amalia lost consciousness. Marcano went back to the clinic and screamed, “Are you going to watch my baby die in my arms?”
Family detention is hardly unique to the Trump Administration. George W. Bush launched the first large-scale, for-profit family-detention facility, although it proved short-lived, on account of legal challenges and public outcry. The Obama Administration revived the concept in 2014 by opening family-detention camps, including Dilley, to deal with an influx of asylum seekers from Central America. At an event marking the opening of Dilley, Jeh Johnson, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, described the detention center as an “effective deterrent” against the rise in family border crossings. By the summer of 2015, the facility reportedly held more than seventeen hundred people, about a thousand of them children. When I first interviewed Mukherjee about Dilley, years ago, she was helping to coördinate an effort to provide pro-bono legal representation to families there. Back then, Mukherjee took her law students on an annual trip to Dilley; some of the students called it “spring break in baby jail.”
During the Obama Administration, allegations of neglect at Dilley were common. I wrote about a client of Mukherjee’s, a Honduran asylum seeker named Suny Rodríguez, who’d been detained there with her seven-year-old son for four months, in violation of Flores. In federal court, the pair alleged that they were subjected to “inhumane conditions” (including disregard for Rodríguez’s son’s asthma and weight loss), pressured to self-deport, and threatened with separation, claims for which they reached a settlement. Similarly, a group of ten mothers filed formal complaints in 2016, alleging substandard medical care in D.H.S. custody. One of those mothers noted, “I thought I came to this country to escape abuse, mistreatment, and disrespect. But it’s the same here.”
During Trump’s first term, family detention soared, and so, too, did accounts of medical horrors at Dilley. In the spring of 2018, a Guatemalan toddler contracted a respiratory infection there and died six weeks after being released; then, between September of 2018 and May of 2019, six children died in U.S. immigration custody, after nearly a decade without any such deaths. Under Biden, Dilley was shuttered. Asylum seekers were largely allowed to await their court dates outside detention, and many, like Amalia’s family, were granted humanitarian parole.
The second Trump Administration reopened Dilley in March of last year. By January 16, 2026, more than five hundred and fifty children were held in ICE detention, according to government data analyzed by the Marshall Project. Recently, detained families at Dilley have come from such countries as Afghanistan, China, Colombia, Haiti, Russia, and Uzbekistan. Often, Juburi and Barnard told me, children from non-Spanish-speaking countries have been asked to translate for their parents in high-stakes interactions with ICE officers, owing to Dilley’s limited interpretation services.
According to Barnard, the center has both threatened family separations and enacted them. “Many of the families we interviewed recounted being threatened that, if you don’t comply with us, we will separate you from your loved ones,” Barnard said.
In one case, an eleven-year-old boy and his parents fled Mongolia, flying to Chicago with the intention of seeking asylum. D.H.S. sent the family to Dilley, where officials, lacking a translator, allegedly asked the boy to inform his parents that ICE intended to separate him from them. The parents were shackled and sent to adult detention; the child was shipped to a federal shelter as an unaccompanied minor. “I am devastated,” the mother said in an official declaration. “ICE officers have not explained anything to me.” The family was only reunited two months later, in order to be deported back to Mongolia.
In another case, a thirty-seven-year-old woman from China and her ten-year-old son sought asylum at the border in San Diego. They were taken to the airport, where, she said, agents told her that she could accept deportation to China with her son or be forced to return on her own and have him “taken away” from her. She physically resisted and was briefly dragged by an agent. (In a sworn statement, she recounted one of the agents saying, “Fuck! You’re going on a military plane back to China!”) The mother and her son were sent to Dilley. There, according to RAICES records, they were officially separated: the son was sent, alone, to a federal shelter in New York, while she was sent to detention centers, first in New Jersey, and then in Texas and New Mexico. As of early April, the two remained separated.
