Illness Is Rampant Among Children Trapped in ICE’s Massive Jail in Texas

Amid growing calls from lawmakers and human rights groups to shut down the sprawling Dilley Immigration Processing Center in southern Texas, an analysis shows the number of people incarcerated at the notorious immigration jail for children and families has nearly tripled in recent months.

Texas lawmakers and attorneys for immigrant families say a growing number of children at the facility are suffering in dangerous and inhumane conditions. People incarcerated at Dilley were quarantined after at least two became sick with measles last week. In another recent case, an 18-month-old girl was hospitalized with a life-threatening lung infection after spending two months in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the migrant jail. The girl was reportedly returned to Dilley after spending 10 days at the hospital and denied prescribed medication, according to a federal lawsuit. She was only freed after lawyers filed an emergency petition demanding her release.

As the nation’s main large immigration jail designed to hold families — though the Trump administration is racing to build more — families are transferred from across the country to a remote part of Texas as they wait weeks or months to see an immigration judge. Recent federal data show that the average daily population exploded from an average of 500 people a day in October to around 1,330 a day in late January, according to Detention Reports, a new tool that maps data on 237 immigration jails nationwide.

“This geographic concentration means children and parents arrested in places like Minnesota face detention in rural south Texas, more than 1,000 miles from their communities, legal counsel, and family support networks,” noted Austin Kocher, an immigration data expert at Syracuse University, in a post on February 9. “As many people have said previously, the rural location of detention facilities serves as a barrier to oversight, accountability, and due process.”

ICE does not release the number of children held in its custody, including at Dilley. However, the facility requires at least one parent be held along with each child. Adult women vastly outnumber adult men in the latest data. Kocher estimates that about 800 children are held there on any given day, and a ProPublica investigation estimates Dilley was holding about 750 families as of early February.

The Dilley facility garnered national attention after the incarceration of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, whose arrest in Minnesota and transfer to Texas became a national symbol of the Trump administration’s brutality. The two were released on February 1 after lawmakers and attorneys intervened, with U.S. District Judge Fred Biery issuing an almost poetic yet scathing rebuke of the Trump administration in his ruling freeing the father and son.

Children held inside Dilley organized protests in solidarity with Liam Conejo Ramos as the case hit the headlines. Immigration attorney Eric Lee posted a viral video in mid-January recording the sound of hundreds of children shouting for freedom from behind the prison walls. Meanwhile, journalists, families incarcerated at Dilley, and their attorneys have reported inedible food, undrinkable water being mixed with baby formula, and medical neglect of children with severe illnesses.

“Medical professionals have repeatedly documented how any amount of detention has long-term negative consequences for children,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, in an email. “Families should be able to navigate their immigration cases in community, never behind bars in ICE detention where conditions [are] abysmal and abusive.”

Kristin Kumpf, coordinator for the National Coalition to End Family and Child Detention, recently told The Marshall Project that it’s “only a matter of time” before a child dies inside Dilley or another federal facility.

“The guards are just as tough as the guards at the adult facilities,” Lee told Texas Public Radio in late January. “This is not a place that you would want to have your child be for even 15 minutes.”

After making a visit to the facility in late January, Texas Democrats Rep. Joaquin Castro and Rep. Jasmine Crockett said children are incarcerated under “inhumane” conditions at Dilley. In a statement on February 3, Castro said the Trump administration’s plan to convert a large warehouse outside of San Antonio into another 1,500-bed jail for migrant families is unacceptable and repeated his call to shut down Dilley.

“We should be closing down the facilities where children and families are being held in inhumane conditions — not building more of them,” Castro said. “These warehouses that are being branded as ‘processing centers’ are just another way for the administration to indiscriminately lock people up and give the profits to its cronies.”

Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, has defended conditions at the immigration jail, calling it a “nice facility, nicer than some elementary schools.” Meanwhile, similar problems have been reported at ICE jails for adults across the country. At least 38 people have died while in ICE custody since President Donald Trump took office, including from preventable conditions such as drug withdrawal. Research on the incarceration of immigrants during much of Trump’s first term found that the vast majority of deaths in ICE custody were preventable.

Since Trump returned to office, the daily average number of children incarcerated with adults fighting deportation orders has grown at least sixfold, according to The Marshall Project. That growth is part of a general explosion of the incarceration of immigrants as the Trump administration systemically dismantles legal avenues for bonding out of immigration jail, fights review of removal orders to maximize deportations, and moves to revoke legal status and protections for hundreds of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers.

There were 70,766 people in ICE custody as of January 25, nearly double the highest number of people incarcerated for immigration violations during the Biden administration, according to TRAC Immigration.

Over the past 12 months, the number of people granted asylum by immigration courts was cut in half while the Trump administration attempted to remove protections for immigrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Somalia, and other parts of the world. Attorneys general from multiple states and advocates for refugees have challenged the changes in court, but the legal status of tens of thousands of people remains in limbo and under threat.

Meanwhile, the administration changed a policy that goes back decades to make incarceration mandatory for people charged with immigration violations. Judges across the country rejected this approach as petitions for release flooded the system, but the conservative majority on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the changes in a February 6 ruling.

In a furious dissent, Judge Dana Douglas warned that the court’s reading could further turbocharge immigrant incarceration. “Congress did not secretly require two million noncitizens to be detained without bond, when nothing like this had ever been done before, and the whole history of American immigration law suggested it would not be,” Douglas wrote. The issue may ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.

Most recently, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) proposed a rule on February 6 that would make it difficult if not impossible to appeal removal decisions to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which operates independently from ICE and is the last option for people set for deportation to push back against errors made by lower courts. The rule would require “summary dismissal” of all cases appealed to the board unless a majority of the members vote to hear the appeal based on the merits, a change experts say would direct a flood of petitions for release from immigration jail into a federal court system that is not built for the job.

“The goal is clear; mass deportations over due process,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a post about the rule on February 5.

🚨HOLY CRAP. The Trump admin just took a SLEDGEHAMMER to due process, largely eliminating the Board of Immigration Appeals process and MANDATING DISMISSAL of ALL appeals (which cost $1,000 thanks to OBBBA) filed after March 9 unless a majority of the BIA votes to hear the case. pic.twitter.com/PAxmCAdcvD

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) February 5, 2026

Pablo Manríquez, an immigration journalist and editor of Migrant Insider, called the Board of Immigration Appeals the “last line of defense” for people navigating the expensive and often hostile administrative legal system that handles immigration violations — which are civil, not criminal offenses. Under new rules, the window for filing an appeal would be reduced from 30 days to 10 days.

“By forcing the Immigration Judge’s decision to become the ‘final agency decision’ almost immediately, the DOJ is clearing the path for rapid deportations,” Manríquez wrote.