Reopened the Dilley Family Detention Center and Detained More Than 6,300 Immigrant Children

Details

On March 5, 2025, the private prison company CoreCivic announced it had reached an agreement with the city of Dilley, Texas, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to resume operations at the South Texas Family Residential Center—now called the Dilley Immigration Processing Center—reversing the Biden administration's decision to end the detention of migrant families. Families began arriving that April. Under President Donald Trump, ICE detained more than 6,300 children in 2025 and 2026, according to data analyzed by CBS News and The Marshall Project, with nearly half held at Dilley. About 97 percent of the detained children had no criminal record.

Background

Dilley first opened in December 2014 under the Obama administration, built to hold families arriving from Central America after a surge of border crossings. It drew criticism during Trump's first term, and in 2021 the Biden administration largely halted family detention. The facility held only adults before ICE closed it in June 2024, citing higher operating costs than other detention centers. With a capacity of roughly 2,400, it is the largest family detention facility in the country and, since reopening, the only active one.

The reopening was among the first of many. NPR identified at least 16 previously shuttered facilities that ICE reactivated after January 2025, several of which had faced allegations of poor conditions before closing. CoreCivic received the Dilley contract without competitive bidding, part of what the Brennan Center for Justice described as a rapid, largely no-bid expansion of detention capacity. CBS News reported the contract as worth $180 million annually.

The population inside Dilley changed as the Trump administration's enforcement shifted. Border crossings fell to record lows, while ICE ramped up arrests in the interior of the country. As ProPublica documented, the families sent to Dilley increasingly were not recent border-crossers but people who had lived in the United States long enough to build networks of relatives and friends—some who had applied for asylum, married U.S. citizens, or been granted humanitarian parole, and who were detained when they showed up for scheduled ICE check-ins. Around 3,500 detainees, more than half of them minors, cycled through the facility in its first year.

Immigration Status and Criminal Records

The roughly 97 percent of detained children with no criminal record were, as minors, largely too young to have one, but ProPublica found that the vast majority of adults held at Dilley also had no U.S. criminal record. That mirrored the detention system as a whole: as of November 30, 2025, about 73.6 percent of all ICE detainees had no criminal conviction, and only about 5 percent of recent detainees had a violent conviction, according to reporting compiled that year. The most prominent exception at Dilley was the El Gamal family, detained after the father, Mohamed Soliman, was charged over a June 2025 attack on demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado. His wife and five children were not charged with any crime.

The families' immigration status was mixed and, in individual cases, disputed. Some had overstayed visas—the El Gamals entered on a tourist visa in 2022 and later applied for asylum—while many had pending asylum applications or had been granted humanitarian parole under the Biden-era CBP One system, which the administration later revoked. Others had final orders of removal. In the case of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, DHS called the father an "illegal alien" who had entered without inspection, while the family said he arrived through CBP One and had a pending asylum claim. CBS News confirmed he had an active immigration case and could not be lawfully deported until a judge ruled. Many families were taken into custody when they appeared for scheduled ICE check-ins.

The Case That Drew National Attention

Public scrutiny intensified in late January 2026 after ICE agents in Minneapolis detained five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, from Ecuador, along with his father, and sent them to Dilley. A photograph of the boy in a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack went viral. Detainees inside Dilley staged a demonstration—captured in an aerial photograph—and protesters gathered outside, where Texas state troopers used pepper spray and pepper balls on the crowd on January 28. A federal judge ordered the boy and his father released on January 31 and blocked their deportation. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who escorted them out, said Liam had been sleeping heavily, eating little, and had grown depressed.

The same weekend the family was released, Texas health officials confirmed two active measles cases among detainees. ICE halted all movement inside the facility and quarantined those suspected of contact. The outbreak came amid a broader national measles resurgence. The U.S. recorded more than 2,280 cases in 2025, the highest annual total in decades.

Conditions Inside Dilley

Beginning in early February 2026, ProPublica published letters and drawings written by children detained at Dilley, drawn from interviews with families inside the facility. The accounts—later echoed in sworn testimony, additional interviews, and court filings—described children losing their appetites after finding worms and mold in meals, difficulty sleeping on metal bunks in rooms shared by a dozen or more people, and lights left on around the clock. The Associated Press separately reported families describing persistently cloudy water and delayed medical care.

Attorneys and detainees raised more than 700 complaints about medical care, according to court filings cited by The Marshall Project. Several specific cases were documented in detail:

• A two-month-old, Juan Nicolás, was in respiratory distress and, according to his mother and advocates, monitored for two days before being rushed by ambulance to a hospital on February 16 after an unresponsive episode. The infant, his mother, and siblings were later deported to Mexico.
• An Egyptian mother, Hayam El Gamal, and her five children—detained more than nine months, believed to be the longest-held family at Dilley—submitted 59 pages of declarations to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her 16-year-old son wrote that he collapsed with what he described as appendicitis before being transferred to an emergency room. A five-year-old daughter was denied dental treatment for multiple cavities.
• A one-year-old Russian asylum seeker, Amir, stopped speaking beyond two words and began hitting himself, his parents said, as his family struggled to find food appropriate for a toddler.

Several mothers told ProPublica that some children were so distraught they cut themselves or spoke of suicide. Immigration attorney Eric Lee, who represents the El Gamal family, described the conditions as an unmitigated horror show.

The Flores Settlement

The detention of children in the United States is governed by the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 consent decree that sets minimum standards for food, water, medical care, and sanitation, and that courts have interpreted to require the release of accompanied children within 20 days. A ProPublica data analysis found about 300 children sent to Dilley were held for more than a month. A March 2026 court filing by attorneys who represent all children in federal detention stated that nearly 600 children were held longer than 20 days during December and January. Separate data reported by NBC News indicated roughly 270 were held more than 40 days.

None of the family detention centers are licensed to hold children long-term, so the 20-day rule presents the government with what the Congressional Research Service and legal scholars have called a "binary choice": release a family together, or separate the parent from the child. A child who is not released with a parent is treated as an unaccompanied minor and transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement, then placed with a relative or sponsor or, if none is available, in a shelter or foster care. The same dynamic produced the family separations of the 2018 "zero tolerance" period. The Department of Homeland Security has said parents may choose to be removed together with their children or designate a "safe person" to take custody, and has urged families to self-deport through its CBP Home App.

Opponents of family detention argue that the choice is a false one and that families should instead be released under community-based alternatives—case management, regular check-ins, and electronic monitoring—which the American Immigration Council and other groups describe as far cheaper than detention and associated with high rates of court appearance, noting that most families have relatives ready to receive them. The American Academy of Pediatrics holds that no child should be held in immigration detention. The Trump administration has pursued the opposite approach, seeking authority to detain families together throughout their immigration proceedings.

The Trump administration has sought to eliminate the settlement entirely. On May 22, 2025, the Justice Department moved to terminate the agreement, arguing that new regulations and the July 2025 tax-and-spending law—which appropriated $45 billion for detention capacity, including family detention—reflected a changed legal landscape. Government attorney Tiberius Davis told the court the law gave the government authority to hold families indefinitely.

On August 15, 2025, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee denied the motion, finding the government had identified no new facts or law to justify termination. Recalling the first Trump administration's failed 2019 attempt, she wrote that there was "nothing new under the sun." Gee acknowledged the government had improved some conditions but wrote that abandoning the agreement because of that progress would be "nonsensical." The administration appealed to the Ninth Circuit, where the case—now captioned Flores v. Bondi—remained pending into 2026. Legal advocates expect the dispute could ultimately reach the Supreme Court.

Scale and Outcomes

The Marshall Project, analyzing federal data, found the number of children in ICE detention on a given day rose more than sixfold after Trump returned to office, with more than 6,200 children detained overall—roughly ten times the rate of the prior period. More than 3,600 children were deported from detention, often with little notice, the outlet found, while at least 1,500 were released into the United States as their immigration cases continued. Families said the abrupt deportations left them scrambling and sometimes forced them to leave behind medical supplies, pets, and belongings.

After the children's letters and protests generated national attention, the number of families booked into Dilley fell sharply. ProPublica reported that monthly book-ins dropped from an average of about 600 to 133 in February 2026 and 54 by mid-March, and that the facility's daily population fell from more than 900 in January to around 100 by mid-March. Current and former ICE officials told ProPublica they could not fully explain the decline, though it followed weeks of public pressure. The Department of Homeland Security said custody decisions are made case by case and that the administration "does not make immigration decisions based on public opinion." Detainees and attorneys also reported that guards confiscated crayons, colored pencils, and paper during room searches and cut off access to video calls in common areas. The administration said in a court filing that confiscated items were limited to protest-related materials.

Response

The detention of children prompted an unusually broad public reaction. On February 26, 2026, nearly 4,000 doctors, nurses, and other health professionals from 49 states—organized by three board-certified pediatricians—sent a 58-page letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem calling for the immediate release of all children in immigration detention, citing American Academy of Pediatrics guidance that children should never be held in such facilities. One of the pediatricians, Anita Patel, called the conditions child imprisonment in substandard living conditions.

A coalition organized under the National Coalition to End Child and Family Detention gathered more than 215,000 signatures on a letter demanding Dilley's closure, joined by public figures including Pedro Pascal, Keke Palmer, and John Legend, alongside medical and child-welfare organizations. The children's educator Rachel Accurso, known as Ms. Rachel, posted a video for her millions of followers saying the detained children had done nothing wrong and needed to come home.

Rep. Castro, who visited Dilley multiple times, described it as a "trailer prison" and called for its closure, saying the government knew the detainees were not criminals. Reporters have been barred from entering the facility, and members of Congress who visit must surrender their phones, meaning no photographs of the interior have been published.

The Administration's Position

DHS and CoreCivic have consistently rejected the allegations. In a statement to CBS News, DHS called the reporting a "hoax," said any claim of subprime conditions was "FALSE," and asserted that detainees receive proper meals, quality water, and medical treatment. It described the Flores Settlement as "a tool of the left." In a February 25 news release titled "Debunking the mainstream media lies," ICE reaffirmed what it called safe, humane, and family-friendly conditions. Acting ICE director Todd Lyons said the agency "detains to deport" and that Dilley is not a correctional center.

CoreCivic said in a detailed statement that the described conditions do not reflect its operations, that Dilley receives the same water the city supplies to surrounding residents—independently tested by the City of Dilley and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality—and that meals are reviewed by a registered dietitian and religious dietary needs accommodated. The company said health care is delivered by licensed physicians, dentists, nurses, and mental health professionals, and that it does not set immigration policy or decide who is detained or released.

The government's account also diverged sharply from advocates' in court. A federal filing covering November 2025 through February 2026 stated there was no evidence of worms in the food, no placements on suicide watch, and no reportable critical incidents, and that no detainee had required hospitalization or an emergency-room referral. The Marshall Project, however, obtained 911 calls from the facility indicating multiple hospital transfers. ICE did not address the discrepancy. CoreCivic denied that a suicide attempt occurred, while a separate court filing referenced a 13-year-old placed in isolation after a suicide attempt and a two-year-old who hit himself.

Expansion Plans

Rather than scaling back, the Trump administration has proposed a substantial expansion of family detention. The July 2025 tax-and-spending law dedicated $45 billion over four years to detention capacity—a figure the Brennan Center described as roughly a 400 percent increase to ICE's annual detention budget—and explicitly authorized new family facilities. The White House's fiscal year 2027 budget proposal, released in April 2026, sought funding sufficient to activate up to 100,000 single-adult detention beds and up to 30,000 family-unit beds. Nearly 90 percent of ICE detainees are already held in facilities run by for-profit firms, whose executives, the Brennan Center noted, were significant financial supporters of the president and Republican candidates. CoreCivic's chief executive told investors in 2025 that demand for the company's services was the highest in its four-decade history.

Broader Context

The Dilley conditions unfolded amid a documented rise in deaths across the immigration detention system, which reached a record population of more than 70,000 people in January 2026. At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, tying the deadliest year since 2004, and a joint Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights report found 52 deaths in the first 500 days of the second term—a mortality rate the groups said was nearly four times that of the Biden administration and disproportionate to the growth in the detained population. No child death at Dilley has been reported during this period, though advocates repeatedly warned that the combination of medical neglect, overcrowding, and disease made one foreseeable. Oversight organizations, including the Project on Government Oversight, reported that DHS inspection activity declined even as the system expanded.

The debate reflects a long-running divide over family detention that predates the current administration. Supporters argue that detention ensures families appear for immigration proceedings and allows orderly case management within existing law. Critics—including medical and child-welfare experts, and lawmakers of both parties who intervened in individual cases—argue that detaining children causes lasting psychological and physical harm and that the practice should end regardless of administration. Both the Obama and first Trump administrations sought to loosen the Flores restrictions. Both the Biden administration and successive courts declined to abandon the core protections. As of mid-2026, the practice's future rested on the Ninth Circuit's review of Flores v. Bondi and on whether Congress funds the administration's proposed expansion.