Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica; The Children of Dilley:
ProPublica went inside the immigrant detention center for families in Dilley, Texas. Children held there told us about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the United States and the fear of what comes next.
"Dilley, run by private prison firm CoreCivic, is located some 72 miles south of San Antonio and nearly 2,000 miles away from Ariana’s home. It is a sprawling collection of trailers and dormitories, almost the same color as the dusty landscape, surrounded by a tall fence. It first opened during the Obama administration to hold an influx of families crossing the border. Former President Joe Biden stopped holding families there in 2021, arguing America shouldn’t be in the business of detaining children.
But quickly after returning to office, President Donald Trump resumed family detentions as part of his mass deportation campaign. Federal courts and overwhelming public outrage had put an end to Trump’s first-term policy of separating children from parents when immigrant families were detained crossing the border. Trump officials said Dilley was a place where immigrant families would be detained together.
As the second Trump administration’s crackdown both slowed border crossings to record lows and ramped up a blitz of immigration arrests all across the country, the population inside Dilley shifted. The administration began sending parents and children who had been living in the country long enough to lay down roots and to build networks of relatives, friends and supporters willing to speak up against their detention.
If the administration believed that putting children in Dilley wouldn’t stir the same outcry as separating them from their parents, it was mistaken. The photo of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from Ecuador, who was detained with his father in Minneapolis while wearing a Spider-Man backpack and a blue bunny hat, went viral on social media and triggered widespread condemnation and a protest by the detainees.
Weeks before that, I had begun speaking to parents and children at Dilley, along with their relatives on the outside. I also spoke to people who worked inside the center or visited it regularly to give religious or legal services. I had asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for permission to visit but got a range of responses. One spokesperson denied my request, another said he doubted I could get formal approval and suggested I could try showing up there as a visitor. So I did.
Since early December, I’ve spoken, in person and via phone and video calls, to more than two dozen detainees, half of them kids detained at Dilley — all of whose parents gave me their’ consent. I asked parents whether their children would be open to writing to me about their experiences. More than three dozen kids responded; some just drew pictures, others wrote in perfect cursive. Some letters were full of age-appropriate misspellings."
