What's Still Happening With ICE And Why It Matters Here Part 2

The Children, the Money, and What We Can Do

The Children

 The most important thing to understand is what is happening to the children.

Dilley in Texas, the South Texas Family Residential Center, is the largest ICE family detention facility in the country. It is built to hold up to 2,400 people, and almost a thousand have been held there at a time, including many children. Congressman Joaquin Castro, who has visited multiple times, says conditions are worse now than on his earlier trips and that the agency has grown more secretive. After visiting in early May, he said children were sobbing during much of his time with one family.

Here is some of what visiting lawmakers, attorneys, and detainees themselves have reported about life inside Dilley:

• Little meaningful outdoor time, and lights that stay on around the clock, making sleep difficult

• Poor quality food, with detainees and members of Congress reporting moldy food and, in multiple accounts, worms in it

• Water that detainees and at least one member of Congress have said is not safe to drink

• Education that is limited or does not function

• Guards yelling at parents when children make noise or ask for an extra apple, and, according to ProPublica, seizing and tearing up children's drawings and listening in on calls

Two cases put faces on this. Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, who are from Ecuador, were detained after an arrest in Minnesota and flown to Dilley. Castro described the boy as lethargic and depressed, not eating, and asking about his family and classmates. And the El Gamal family was held at Dilley for nearly a year. According to their attorney, Eric Lee, with Reps. Castro and Greg Casar calling for their release, the mother was at risk of death without proper care, the family's 5-year-old was denied treatment for 13 cavities, and a 16-year-old with acute appendicitis was told to take Tylenol. The whole family was reported to be suffering from depression.

Members of Congress say the facility is sometimes staged in a "nothing to see here" way, with clean surfaces and tidy, empty medical areas, while detainees describe something very different. The oversight findings keep piling up:

• A court filing in an ongoing federal lawsuit, reported by the Associated Press, showed that hundreds of children have been held at Dilley past the court-mandated time limit set by the long-standing Flores agreement.

• Court-appointed monitors have counted more than 2,300 children placed in detention with their parents, the large majority at Dilley.

• After a late-May oversight visit, Rep. Greg Stanton, with Castro and Rep. Nanette Barragán, reported three children under the age of three locked up, and said ICE was making oversight harder. Castro put it bluntly: "For ICE, cruelty is the point."

So here is a fair question for the people running these places. If this administration is so proud of these facilities, why won't they let cameras inside? Why aren't members of Congress, or anyone else, allowed to see or speak with the pregnant women and girls being held there? Facilities you are proud of don't usually need that much darkness around them.

Pregnant and Nursing Mothers ICE has its own policy, Directive 11032.4, that says it should not detain pregnant, postpartum, or nursing women except in very limited circumstances. That policy is being ignored.

In response to an oversight letter from Senator Patty Murray, DHS released data covering January 1, 2025 through February 16, 2026:

• 363 pregnant, postpartum, or nursing women were deported.

• 498 were "booked out" of ICE detention, meaning detained and then released or removed.

• 16 miscarriages were recorded.

• As of February 16, 121 such women were still in custody, nine of them in their third trimester.

Some of these women were nursing newborns. Some babies were born here, making them U.S. citizens, and their mothers were deported anyway.

The Money and Who's Getting It 

Congressional leaders keep talking about the money, over and over, hoping to get the attention of people who might look away from human suffering but will pay attention when it is their tax dollars being spent. That's such a sad commentary on our society.

The private prison company CoreCivic runs Dilley. The Biden administration ended the contract and idled the facility in 2024; CoreCivic reopened it in 2025 under a new agreement with ICE that runs through 2030. The key numbers:

• The contract is expected to bring in roughly $180 million a year once the facility is fully activated.

• CoreCivic is paid a fixed monthly amount, on the order of $15 million a month, whether or not the beds are full.

• Food service is handled by Target Hospitality, and CoreCivic is responsible for onsite medical care.

What do detainees report getting for that money? Moldy food, food with worms, water they say is unsafe, limited medical care, and education that does not work. With a fixed payment regardless of conditions, there is little built-in accountability. And the contract structure itself has drawn scrutiny: the DHS Inspector General has criticized the Dilley arrangement for routing money through a small Texas city rather than contracting directly, calling it an unnecessary middleman that wasted taxpayer 

money. CoreCivic and other detention companies also have political ties to the administration and have been among its donors. No surprise there!

Nationally, ICE has held in the range of 60,000 people daily in custody recently, down from higher levels. Mullin wants to push those numbers back up and is asking for more money to do it, even though billions already allocated have not been spent.

Here is the hopeful part. Communities across the political spectrum have organized against new ICE detention warehouses, and in a number of places they have blocked or stalled them. Rachel Maddow on MS NOW has tracked this closely, reporting that everywhere the government tries to build these facilities, including in some of the country's reddest areas, people are pulling out all the stops to stop them. In deep-red Hanover County, Virginia, a county Trump won by 26 points, the board of supervisors voted to oppose the warehouse sale after residents spoke out. Maddow has pointed to the fight in Hagerstown, Maryland as a possible blueprint for the rest of the country. But her message, and the organizers' message, is not that the fight is won. It is that this is the moment to increase pressure, not let up. A pause can look like a victory while the project quietly keeps moving. The lesson is simple: public pressure works, so keep showing up.

What This Is Doing to Our Communities This is not just about immigrant families. It is about an entire generation of children.

A May 2026 report from the Brookings Institution, drawing on roughly 400,000 detentions from interior arrests between January 2025 and April 2026, estimated:

• About 205,000 children in the United States have had a parent detained by ICE.

• About 145,000 of those children are U.S. citizens.

• More than 22,000 have had every parent living with them detained, leaving them with no co-resident parent.

• About 36 percent of the affected citizen children are younger than six.

Brookings stresses that the government does not consistently track these children, so the real numbers are almost certainly higher. ProPublica, using a more conservative method, separately documented at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children with a detained parent in just the first seven months of 2025. As for how many of these children end up in foster care, no one can say for sure: the federal government does not track it, which is its own kind of answer.

Consider what the government itself named one of its operations. In January 2026, DHS launched an ICE push in Maine and officially called it "Operation Catch of the Day." Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine condemned the name as showing a callous disregard for humanity. DHS said it targeted "the worst of the worst," but people with legal status and no criminal records were among the roughly 200 swept up. Pingree had also been fighting to free Olivia Andre, a 19-year-old student from Maine detained at Dilley since November. She is finally free. When a government picks a name like "catch of the day" for human beings, it tells you how it sees them.

Children are being picked up near bus stops. Families say they feel hunted. That fear does not stay in one family or one neighborhood. Kids stop going to school. Teachers and classmates notice. And it is not only Latino children. It reaches white, Black, Asian, and every child in a community where ICE is operating. The emotional toll and the disruption to daily life touch everyone, but especially the children.

Shared Ground 

Before I close, I want to speak directly to my readers here in Southwest Virginia and Appalachia.

As I mentioned before, you may look at this and think it does not affect you. But think about what you value, because the families being torn apart in these facilities value the same things you do. Strong families. Hard work. Self-reliance. Deep roots. Faith. Resilience in the face of people looking down on you.

Appalachian people and Latin American people have more in common than most folks realize. Both have been stereotyped, dismissed, and looked down on by people who do not understand them or care to. Both know what it means to struggle and to hold a family together through hard times.

What is happening in these facilities is simply vile. Children are being warehoused and treated, in Congressman Castro's words, with cruelty no child should face. This is being done in our name, with our money, by an administration more interested in using immigration as a weapon and a cash cow for his cronies, than in fixing it.

The corruption needs to stop. Dilley needs to be shut down. We will never make it up to these beautiful families, but shutting things down is a start.

Why aren't we out in the streets? Appalachians need to stand up. I know we are all overwhelmed with so much corruption, but we need to put these families near the top of our priorities, and now.

Please reach out to your representatives. The number of phone calls get their attention more than almost anything. The reason the number of detainees came down is because of public pressure. Please help.

Call (202) 224-3121 for the U.S. Capitol switchboard. They can connect you to your representative or senators.

Sources: Brookings Institution (May 2026 report on detained parents and their children); ProPublica ("The Children of Dilley," seized art and eavesdropping reporting); Associated Press and court-appointed monitors (children held past the Flores limit); CoreCivic investor releases, ICE contract documents, and DHS Office of Inspector General (Dilley contract structure); DHS data released to Senator Patty Murray, first reported by The 19th (pregnant and postpartum figures); Rep. Chellie Pingree's office (Operation Catch of the Day; Olivia Andre); Reps. Greg Stanton, Joaquin Castro, and Greg Casar, and attorney Eric Lee (Dilley oversight visits and the El Gamal and Liam cases); Rachel Maddow on MS NOW, NPR, and Stateline (community resistance, including Hanover County, Virginia and Hagerstown, Maryland); KFF Health News and The 19th (lack of federal tracking of children entering foster care); PBS NewsHour, Texas Public Radio, KSAT, and FOX Austin/Dallas (Dilley conditions and family accounts).