A mother and her 5-year-old daughter went to a Chicago laundromat this fall, expecting it to be a regular day. But as they were washing their clothes, the mother said, they were surrounded by 20 armed officers in “full riot gear” and arrested. The mother, identified in court documents as N.G.C., had been living in the United States for around two years. She said the officers detained her with her daughter at a Chicago airport, where they had no access to showers, phones or the ability to brush their teeth. “The food they gave us was not edible,” the mother said in court documents. “We didn’t eat anything for days. They didn’t even give us water to drink.”
After about two days, they were transferred to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, which N.G.C. described as a living hell. “Sometimes my daughter doesn’t want to leave our room because she is so sad and just wants to leave this prison so badly. She cries and cries about all of this. I am so worried that I barely eat,” N.G.C. said.
An analysis by The Marshall Project of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by the Deportation Data Project found that the Trump administration’s revival of family detention has swept thousands of children into ICE custody. At least 3,800 children under age 18, including 20 infants, have been booked since Trump took office.
A 1997 settlement, known as Flores, provides protections for children in immigrant detention to try and ensure their needs are met, and a judge continues to monitor the case today. A federal court has interpreted the legal agreement to mean that it is generally excessive for a child to be held with their family in custody by ICE for more than 20 days.
The Marshall Project’s analysis counted over 1,300 children who have been held in detention longer than 20 days this year. ICE told the judge overseeing the Flores settlement that it is minimizing the detention of children, writing in a report filed this month that its “primary goal is to ensure that minors are discharged from custody as quickly as possible.”
But the data shows a spike in releases from detention clustered around the 20-day benchmark, which former Department of Homeland Security staffers say indicates the government is choosing to hold families as long as possible to increase the likelihood of deporting them directly from detention. It is hard to fight deportation cases with scarce legal resources in detention, and the poor living conditions make it more likely people will leave the country voluntarily, even if they have valid legal claims to remain.
Large numbers of children were released at or around the 20-day court limit for ICE detention of minors.
Over a third of the children and infants ICE booked this year were released within a few days, likely because they were unaccompanied or separated from a guardian and, under court guidance, should be freed within 72 hours. But more than 1,300 were held for 20 days or longer, exceeding the benchmark for how long children with families can be detained.
“You have that spike around 20 [days] where they’re trying to hold people as much as possible,” Scott Shuchart, former head of policy at ICE under President Joe Biden, told The Marshall Project. “They want to be able to hold families indefinitely, and remove them or pressure them to give up.”
ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment about The Marshall Project’s analysis of the data.
In 2021, Biden largely halted the practice of holding children in immigration detention, and the Dilley facility, run by the private company CoreCivic and then called the South Texas Family Residential Center, later closed. But the Trump administration revived the practice this year, and the facility reopened. Another facility in Texas, Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, is also holding families.
In court documents filed this month as part of ongoing civil litigation, families described brutal conditions while detained with their children. Parents said it was difficult to get bottled water to mix with formula for babies and that the food was contaminated with mold and worms. Education and recreation were extremely limited, with some parents reporting that their children were desperate for toys and they’d resorted to playing with rocks, according to legal filings. Children were under so much psychological stress that parents said they were hitting their own faces or wetting themselves despite being potty-trained.
“This place definitely feels like a jail,” one mother said in a court declaration about the facility in Dilley. “There is no other way to describe it; it’s a jail for children.”
The data analyzed by The Marshall Project only goes through mid-October and only includes children in the custody of ICE, not other agencies such as Customs and Border Patrol or the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which generally holds children separated from their families or in the country without a legal guardian. Advocates for immigrant children said that fewer kids have tried to cross the border alone this year. But they are seeing more children who have already been living in the United States for a stretch of time getting arrested with their families. Many of those people have active immigration proceedings, like asylum cases, and were arrested while trying to comply with the law by showing up at check-ins or court dates, according to Becky Wolozin, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law.
Wolozin works on the Flores settlement representing children who have been detained by ICE. “It’s just such clear evidence that the goal of this administration is to create as much pain as possible to the most vulnerable people in the hopes that that will mean they can more easily carry out whatever their deportation goals are,” she said.
Wolozin said she believes the government is choosing to hold families as long as possible, instead of releasing them as soon as they are able, as a tactic to force deportations. The majority of the children who ICE detained this year under the Trump administration eventually wound up being deported.
In court filings this month, ICE admitted that “extended custody” of children is a “widespread operational challenge,” but blamed “transportation delays, medical needs, and legal processing” for slowing releases. Lawyers working on the Flores agreement said those reasons are not good enough to explain the large numbers held in custody for weeks or even months with their families. The lawyers said in November they identified at least five children who’d been at Dilley for more than five months.
“My daughter was depressed,” one mother said of her 8-year-old. The mother said the facility where they were held before Dilley had no games, paper to draw on, or television to watch. “There was a piece of glass in our room and you could draw with a finger on it. I tried to show her how to do it, and the guards yelled at us.”
Parents at Dilley also complained that education offerings were extremely limited. In court filings, ICE acknowledged that a “comprehensive education program was not in place” but said they expected a new program that complied with court standards to begin in January.
Wolozin said the medical care in family detention was especially troublesome. Court filings about Dilley described a child who had not received appropriate treatment for an ear infection and was experiencing hearing loss, and another child who got food poisoning and was told to only return for medical care if the child vomited eight times. One detained person said Dilley medical staff were slow to respond after a pregnant woman fainted. Wolozin said she believes it is a matter not of if but when a child would die.
Court filings said parents had trouble getting diaper cream. They also said they were not provided with child-friendly snacks. One parent at Dilley said their 5-year-old was losing weight, and another said her 9-year-old daughter fainted in the shower because she was not eating.
Parents and children described the effects of extreme stress to the court. One 14-year-old said their muscles were twitching because they were so nervous. Another parent said her 7-year-old child had become volatile and cried constantly. “This is a horrible place for a child. Knowing we can be deported any second, knowing that people are being taken in the middle of the night,” she said.
Increasing the psychological trauma, multiple families said staff were using the threat of separating the children from their parents to discipline them. “We are scared to ask for anything, because the officers start threatening us that they’ll put us in different detention centers and put our children in foster care,” one said.
CoreCivic, which operates the Dilley facility, declined to respond to specific complaints about conditions there, referring all questions to ICE. But the company said in a written statement that it complies with all policies, procedures and detention standards. Court filings from ICE painted a very different picture from the worm-infested food and poor health care that families described. Officials said “medical care is readily available upon request to ensure the well-being of all minors entering the facility.” They also submitted pictures of healthy-looking meal trays, formula, baby food and diapers and said ICE’s actions were a “model of regulatory compliance and humane care.”
Javier Hidalgo is legal director for RAICES, an organization that provides legal support for immigrant families in Texas. He said ICE’s reports to the court did not match what they’ve heard from families, and the lack of external oversight made it extremely difficult to know what was actually happening inside facilities like Dilley. Since Trump took office, the federal government has gutted watchdog agencies that previously investigated potential civil rights violations in immigrant detention.
“That’s very, very scary to think of that lack of oversight when you’re putting babies in a privately run jail,” Hidalgo said.