The Return of Family Detention
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 Trump’s D.H.S. rescinded that designation, freeing agents to target children, parents, and caregivers at playgrounds, child-care centers, and schools.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.”
Amalia 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.
Often, threats of family separation work hand in hand with medical neglect, Juburi told me, persuading families to accept deportation. He described the case of a woman and her five-year-old daughter who were apprehended in an ICE raid in Chicago last September, then transferred to Dilley. The mother, he said, had ovarian cysts and, because she couldn’t access her usual medication while at Dilley, experienced profuse bleeding; she agreed to “voluntary departure” with her daughter because she didn’t want to die of blood loss in front of her. Juburi said that his team has represented scores of families who’ve accepted deportation only in the context of serious medical neglect. “Parents make these life-threatening journeys to the U.S. in service to their children, for their children’s safety, and so this Administration is very well aware of that parental psychology, that the parents would do anything to insure their child isn’t harmed,” he told me. “The evidence at Dilley points to the weaponization of that primal instinct.”
At one point, when Amalia was extremely sick, an ICE officer approached Prieto and Marcano and pressured them to sign paperwork that they could not understand. Mukherjee later told me that it was a motion intended to withdraw their application for admission to the U.S. “They felt they had no choice but to sign,” she said. “Had we not intervened, it would have resulted in their deportations.”
A few days after the incident in which Amalia lost consciousness, Marcano brought her back to the clinic at Dilley. A staffer measured Amalia’s blood-oxygen saturation—which, in a healthy individual, is between ninety-five and a hundred per cent—and found that it was in the low fifties. “Such a low amount of oxygen going to the brain can, if it’s long enough, kill off parts of the brain—it’s really, really high-stakes,” Prantik Saha, a pediatrician who reviewed Amalia’s medical records, told me. “It’s shocking that this level of callousness and omission of care could occur.” Amalia was taken to a local hospital, where it became clear that she needed care beyond what the facility could provide. She was transferred to a larger hospital in San Antonio, where she was given five diagnoses: Covid-19, RSV, bronchitis, pneumonia, and an ear infection. She received supplemental oxygen and intensive care.
While at the hospital with her daughter, Marcano sometimes went to the bathroom, kneeled on the floor, and prayed, “Don’t let Amalia die!” As she watched over her daughter, two ICE agents monitored the pair at all times, even when Amalia was breast-feeding. “The officers never left me alone,” Marcano told me. “If a nurse entered, they’d write it down, and if I moved to touch my baby, they’d write it down.”
On the second day in the hospital, the nurses kindly gave Marcano a bag of clothes and hygiene items for her and Amalia. An ICE agent angrily confronted the nurses, Marcano told me, and scolded her, too. “I don’t know why the nurses are giving you gifts like you’re a beggar,” Marcano recalled him saying. He told her that she should be grateful for the expensive medical care her daughter was receiving: “The nurses don’t understand that ICE is your protector.”
After ten days, Amalia and her mother were returned to Dilley. At that point, Mukherjee and her team got involved in Amalia’s case. “In previous Administrations, including the first Trump Administration, when I came across a kid with severe medical needs in detention, I could almost always work with ICE to insure that the child and parents were released,” Mukherjee said. But, during the past year, “in case after case, requests for parole that usually would have been granted in the past were ignored or denied.”
When that happened, she’d send a second urgent request. If needed, she’d send a third, including “medical testimony from highly respected experts in the field, sworn under oath.” When that proved fruitless—as it did in Amalia’s case—she’d turn to working with organizations such as RAICES and the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit legal group, to file a federal habeas petition pleading with the court for a family’s release. Essentially, she told me in early February, ICE was “no longer engaging in any individualized consideration of a toddler or baby’s urgent humanitarian needs.”
Older children endure their own kinds of pain. Shortly after meeting Amalia and her parents, I interviewed a Russian family of five in detention at Dilley, who’d also become clients of Mukherjee’s. The family spoke to me on a video call from Dilley. The youngest, a four-year-old boy named Konstantin, held up a drawing of a train he’d just made. “He said, ‘This train will take us away from here!’ ” his mother, a former nurse named Oksana, told me. Beside her sat her thirteen-year-old son, Kirill, a talented pianist who spent the interview with his head buried in his hands. Oksana’s eleven-year-old daughter, Kamilla, began the call upright but looked exhausted; she soon lay down on the bare floor without a pillow. Back in Russia, she’d been in a dance troupe. “She’s a very creative kid, and she loves to read poetry,” her mother told me.
The family, like Amalia’s, had come to the U.S. legally, seeking asylum. They fled first to Mexico, then presented themselves, last October 5th, at an official port of entry in San Diego. Their suffering, like Amalia’s, began promptly. First, they were detained in a Customs and Border Protection facility, where, Oksana told me, “we’d knock for an hour just to try to get them to let our kids go to the bathroom.” Oksana’s husband was separated from the rest of the family and held in a one-person cell, where he fell ill with a high fever. Soon, the whole family was sent to Dilley, where medical personnel seemed poorly equipped to address his symptoms; Oksana saw the staff Googling them. Meanwhile, Kamilla had developed a shooting pain in her ear. “They said, ‘Everything looks good,’ ” Oksana told me of the intake officials.
The next day, Oksana brought Kamilla to the medical office. Confident that her daughter had an ear infection, she wanted to obtain proper antibiotics. She was dismissed, she told me, but soon returned. This time, she recalled, a clinician said that it was just allergies and gave Kamilla antihistamines, telling them, “You came to the dustiest state!”
“I was outraged,” Oksana told me. “As a former medical professional, I can tell the difference between an ear infection and allergies!”
“After I created a ruckus, the nurse said, ‘Fine, give her an antibiotic,’ ” Oksana said. To obtain antibiotics and ear drops, Oksana and Kamilla had to stand in a long outdoor line. “We stood in line for two hours that night, in the cold, my child with a high fever and ear pain, until we finally got the drops,” Oksana said. She found it peculiar that the drops were in an unmarked vial; it was cold to the touch. She tried to warm the vial with her hands before administering the drops to her daughter. “But the guards said, ‘You’re holding up the line, you have to give them to her right now!’ ” Oksana told me. “They intimidated me, and so I did it, and right away Kamilla started crying and complaining of sharp pain. Pus started pouring from her ear.”
Oksana shook her head as she recounted this to me; Kamilla remained motionless on the floor. “She cried that entire night,” Oksana continued. “After this treatment—if you can call it a treatment—my daughter said, ‘I can’t hear in this ear.’ It’s been nearly four months, and still her hearing has not been restored.” By the time we spoke, the family had been in detention for more than a hundred and twenty days—six times the legal limit.
Oksana told me that she had concluded that many of the people at Dilley were not qualified to administer the medical services that they were providing. Similar concerns had been raised about medical care in family detention during the first Trump Administration. In 2023, researchers affiliated with Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital analyzed the medical records of a hundred and sixty-five children who’d been held in family detention in Karnes County, Texas, between June, 2018, and October, 2020. According to the report, “There appeared to be a preponderance of providers practicing outside of their scope” and a “lack of pediatric-specific medical knowledge, evident in many medical records and inadequate documentation of medical reasoning.” More recently, the Human Rights First and RAICES report alleged “consistent patterns” with medical care at Dilley: “delayed and denied treatments, misdiagnoses, ignored emergencies, and direct interference with ongoing care.”
At the end of our interview, Kamilla rose from the floor. She perked up as her mother described the small collection of Russian-language books that Kamilla had cherished in detention, provided by the facility: the fairy tales of Pushkin, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” and the work of a Russian poet named Korney Chukovsky. Oksana seemed flush with a mix of pride and devastation as she spoke of her daughter’s literary curiosity. She told me, “Kamilla is turning twelve tomorrow.” She added that recently a woman had been released on her birthday. “So she got the idea that ICE gives birthday gifts and that maybe tomorrow, because of her birthday, she will be released.” Oksana had to urge Kamilla not to hope for their immediate freedom. She told me, “I’d always heard that America is wonderful with children, and that there’s so much love and nurturing toward kids here.” She continued, “So we’re bewildered. Is this not America?”
Prompt release wasn’t impossible for the family, I knew. Unlike many others in detention, they had an expert legal team. On the night of February 6th, I’d got word from Mukherjee that, after fifty-seven days in detention, Amalia and her parents had been released from Dilley. A staffer had driven the family more than an hour to Laredo and dropped them at a migrant shelter, without returning Amalia’s birth certificate, her vaccination records, or the medications she’d been prescribed at the hospital. (The family did eventually receive copies of the documents, after multiple requests.) They made their way to their sponsor’s home in California, where Amalia found balloons awaiting her, along with a music box and a train set.
When I spoke to the family, two nights later on Zoom, they looked elated to be sitting on a comfortable red couch, with Amalia snuggling into her mother’s arms. Marcano wore her hair in braids and smiled often. After an hour or so, Amalia fell asleep. “Amalia loved the welcome balloons,” Marcano said, as she cradled the sleeping child. “She loved tossing them in the air.”
Not long after that conversation, Mukherjee sent me more news: Oksana’s family was also slated for release. Soon, she told me, all five of them would be en route to a sponsor’s home, also in California. She took this development as a sign of progress; increasingly, she’s been able to get families out of detention after two or three parole requests. Still, Mukherjee told me, “Literally every day, I’m getting phone calls from families detained at Dilley who need help. It’s just one horrifying situation after another.”
When I spoke to the Indian family of four at Dilley, Guri, aged twelve, told me that he missed playing soccer at his school, back in L.A. Now, he said, he felt like “a bird in a cage—they just feed you and keep you here, like you’re trapped.” His sister, Manpreet, an eleven-year-old math whiz, had been at the medical clinic the night before we spoke, seeking help for vomiting, only to be turned away. That incident and others like it made her angry: “It’s like when you’re locked in a place and you can’t move anywhere and you don’t even have a little bit of freedom.” Soon, their parents began to weep. “Before being here, my daughter spoke normally, but now, she lashes out,” their father told me. Watching both of his children struggle with confinement and medical neglect had been, he said, a form of “mental torture.”
Recently, I looked up Korney Chukovsky, whose poetry Kamilla had been reading. One of his series, I learned, features a character named Dr. Aybolit—which translates loosely to “Dr. Ouch It Hurts”—who tends to the ailments of animals. When presented with a medical crisis, Dr. Aybolit acts with great skill and compassion: “No problem,” he calls out in one poem. “Give it here!” A mother hare is so pleased, at one point, that she laughs and shouts, “Well, thank you, Aybolit!”
I could see why Kamilla might have loved Chukovsky, and not just for his sense of humor. I sent her and her mother one of the poems I’d encountered in translation. When the doctor learns of young animals sick with cholera, appendicitis, malaria, and bronchitis, he races across fields, forests, and mountains to treat them. By the poem’s end, one of the creatures calls out, “Glory, glory . . . Glory to the good doctors!” ♦