In Dilley, Texas, there is a for-profit immigration detention center that holds many families and children. It is run by a prison firm called CoreCivic.
According to Propublica, it first opened under the Obama Administration to house families, but it was mainly used for families that were crossing the border and staying there for a short period of time. Then, former President Joe Biden ended family detention there in 2021. Quickly after President Donald Trump returned to office, he resumed family detentions in March 2025, as a part of his deportation campaign.
The Trump Administration started to increase immigration arrests all over the country, causing the population to rise in the center.
Trump had promised to go after violent criminals but the vast majority of adults detained at Dilley have no criminal record.
Isla Holladay, a Freshman at Skyline, said “I think Trump is going too far with deporting people that are already living here, because if they have been living here for thirty years, they are already impacting society. Most of them are doing no harm to society. And you know, they say there could be criminals or murderers crossing the border, but there’s already criminals and murderers living in the US. It makes no difference—they are still hurting people no matter where they are.”
Trump officials said Dilley was a place where immigrant families would be held together. They thought it would seem “better” that families are being held together instead of torn apart. Some parents were still pulled apart from a few of their children, and families are being treated unfairly in the center.
Ruby Bond, a Freshman at Skyline High School, said, “It’s obviously better to keep the families together, because splitting up the families is a really big concern, because you don’t want to have these small children living alone just roaming when they don’t know where their parents are.”
Holladay said something similar: “I think it does make it better. I think especially for kids, families [are] most important… they are like your home and security. So keeping families together, especially in a scary environment like that would be very important for children.”
Parents and children who have been living in the country long enough to build their whole lives and make connections in the U.S. have been sent to the detention center. It holds about 35,000 people, with more than half of them being children. According to Propublica, kids in the detention center are afraid of being deported when they have friends, family, and schools in the U.S. that they love.
Bond said, “It’s uprooting people from their homes that they have lived in for so long, and they are putting innocent people through pain. It’s depriving kids of education, and it’s also taking kids away from their teachers that care about them, and other families that care about them. It is tearing communities apart.”
Reporter Mica Rosenberg, who writes for Propublica and spoke to the kids in the center, said that some of the kids spoke perfect English.
There have been reports of measles and inedible food; kids talked about repetitive meals and constantly getting sick from possibly the water, according to Rosenberg. Mothers believed the food that they were being given was contaminated and causing their children sicknesses. According to The Department of Homeland Security, the administration, though, says they give the best care to the people in the center, despite these firsthand accounts from children.
According to Rosenberg, parents in the center said that some kids have started to self-harm and speak of suicide, and some older children are wetting the bed and finding themselves unable to sleep well at night.
Rosenberg was sent letters by some of the kids talking about their experiences. Fourteen-year-old Ariana Velasquez wrote, “My younger siblings haven’t been able to see their mom in more than a month. […] They are very young and you need both of your parents when you are growing up.” She added, “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.”
Another letter that was written to Rosenberg by a fourteen-year-old named Gaby, who described how the guards act at Dilley. “They have bad manners of speaking to residents,” she wrote. “The workers treat the residents inhumanly, verbally and I don’t want to imagine how they would act if they were unsupervised.”
One child named Maria Antonia Guerra, who is nine years old, sent a picture of herself and her mother wearing detainee ID badges to Rosenberg and wrote a note on the side, saying, “I am not happy, please get me out of here.”
Children in the center have no clue as to what they did wrong to be held there and treated the way they are being treated.
Another child Rosenberg spoke to said he did not want to go back to Tamaulipas, Mexico. “I have friends, school, and family here in the United States,” he said, speaking of his home in San Antonio, Texas. “To this day, I don’t know what we did wrong to be detained. I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us.”
