As ICE expands family detention at the Dilley facility in Texas, immigrant families — many with deep U.S. roots — face prolonged confinement that raises urgent legal and human rights concerns.
A month after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents sent a young Ecuadorian mother and her 7-year-old daughter 1,300 miles from their Minnesota home to a massive detention facility, the family was finally released. The experience left lasting physical and emotional scars.
When the bus arrived at a migrant shelter in Laredo, Texas, it dropped off several families carrying bags filled with belongings. The stress of weeks in ICE detention followed the mother and daughter like long shadows on a cold February afternoon. Night after night inside south Texas’ Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the young girl cried and asked why they were being held. “She would tell me, ‘Mom, what crime did I commit to be a prisoner?’ I didn’t know what to tell her,” said the 29-year-old mother, who requested anonymity to protect her immigration case. Her husband had been deported to Ecuador shortly after their detention.
Images of children in ICE custody alarmed the American public last month when photos showed a 5-year-old boy in Minneapolis wearing a bunny hat and carrying a Spiderman backpack. The child, Liam Conejo Ramos, and his father were sent to Dilley, a detention center surrounded by chain-link fences on a dusty plain about 75 miles south of San Antonio. Unfortunately, Liam’s case is not unique. ICE holds hundreds of children at Dilley, many for months at a time, often with limited access to proper medical care, inadequate food, and lights on 24/7.
Christian Hinojosa, an immigrant from Mexico, described her own experience by phone from Dilley, where she and her 13-year-old son were detained for more than four months. They were recently released and returned to San Antonio, where she works as a health aide. She pointed out that Liam and his father were released after just 10 days due to intervention by members of Congress and a judge. Her son asked, “Mama, what’s the difference between him and us?”
The number of families detained by ICE has risen sharply since last fall, with many children held far beyond the 20-day limit established by longstanding court orders. Many detainees have lived in the U.S. for years, with strong connections to neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, according to lawyers and observers. Georgetown University law professor Philip Schrag, author of Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America, said, “Just imagine that you’re a child and you’re taken out of your surroundings and placed in a completely strange environment with locked doors and guards in uniform roaming around.” Schrag also volunteered as a lawyer for Dilley detainees during the Obama administration.
Data from the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, analyzed by the Associated Press, show that ICE booked over 3,800 children into detention during the first nine months of the Trump administration. On an average day, more than 220 children were held, with the majority detained at Dilley for longer than 24 hours. More than half of all Dilley detainees during that period were children, many subjected to substandard living conditions, poor medical care, and constant stress, highlighting ongoing concerns about the treatment of migrant families in ICE custody.
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