This article is part of “In broad daylight,” an MS NOW series exploring the stories of people whose lives have been endangered, upended or cut short by Trump’s brutal immigration agenda.
Earlier this year, I began representing baby Amalia. She and her parents entered the United States lawfully and complied with all their immigration check-in requirements. They attended church weekly. They were arrested when they showed up at an immigration check-in appointment.
At just 18 months old, Amalia nearly died at Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. After she suffered weeks of persistent high fevers, vomiting and diarrhea, staff at Dilley called 911 on Jan. 18. By that point, her blood oxygen levels had plummeted to the 50s, when they should have been close to 100. At the hospital, doctors diagnosed her with pneumonia, Covid-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), bronchitis and an ear infection. After 10 days of specialized care at the hospital, Immigration and Customs Enforcement returned Amalia to Dilley, where she was denied the medication prescribed at the hospital and where she was again exposed to myriad viruses amid hundreds of detained children and families during a measles outbreak at the facility. After almost two months in detention and after filing federal habeas corpus litigation, Amalia was released.
In the past year, thousands of children and parents have been detained at the notorious family detention center in Dilley, Texas. Ninety-seven percent had no criminal record. These children have been needlessly arrested at their homes, on their way to and from school, at parks, on the street, at immigration courts, at immigration check-in appointments, in hospital parking lots as they have sought emergency medical care, at airports and at the border.
During their time in detention at Dilley — often for months and, for some, close to a year — these children do not have access to sufficient clean drinking water, palatable food, adequate medical care or meaningful educational opportunities. Children and parents have found live worms, bugs and mold in their meals at Dilley. Subjecting children, who have done nothing wrong, to these conditions is un-American, immoral, cruel and illegal.
They asked, “Are we bad people? Do the guards want to kill us? Will we ever get out?”
I am all too familiar with the Dilley detention center. I first began providing pro bono legal services to children and families detained there in January 2015, just weeks after the Obama administration first opened the facility. By the next year, the Department of Homeland Security’s own advisory committee unanimously condemned family detention, concluding that “detention is never in the best interest of children.” During the first Trump administration, family detention continued with children and families detained for prolonged periods in inhumane and deplorable conditions. In December 2021, after extensive advocacy efforts, the Biden administration finally shut down family detention.
But in March 2025, the second Trump administration reinstated family detention. Since then, I have represented about 100 children and parents detained at Dilley. Among them was a 6-year-old boy with a leukemia diagnosis. He was arrested and detained by masked ICE agents when he, his 9-year-old sister and their mother dutifully attended their immigration court hearing in Los Angeles last summer.
Soon after their detention, an agent lifted his shirt and displayed a gun, which terrified the little boy so much that he urinated on himself. He was left in wet clothing for hours before being transported to Dilley, where he was detained for more than a month. It took filing federal habeas litigation and public outcry to secure his release with his sister and his mother.
Nine-year-old Kenek was detained at Dilley for almost three months. He and his mother entered the United States lawfully and were arrested when they were on their way to refill prescription medication for Kenek, who has severe autism. He could not understand why he was detained at Dilley for weeks on end. He grew increasingly distressed and disoriented at Dilley, hitting himself, crying through the night and begging to return to his home and school in Louisiana. Like so many other children, he could not stand the lights being on 24/7 or the noise of guards patrolling at night.
Five-year-old twins Anna and Aleksandr were detained at Dilley for 124 days with their parents, Anastasia and Aleksei, who are political dissidents from Russia. In detention, Anna and Aleksandr repeatedly got sick with fevers, vomiting and cough. They had stomach pain, constipation and diarrhea, and often refused to eat. They had difficulty sleeping, and their mental health deteriorated. They asked, “Are we bad people? Do the guards want to kill us? Will we ever get out?” One night at Dilley, their mother heard noises coming from Aleksandr’s bed. When she checked on him, she found that he had taken a drawstring from a pair of pants and had twisted it around his neck, pulling it tight, believing, at age 5, that it would be better to die than stay detained. He said, “Mama, I don’t want to live.” Like many other children at Dilley, he had not considered suicide until he was detained.
Kamilla spent her 12th birthday in detention, though she and her family had done nothing wrong.
Siblings Konstantin (age 4), Kamilla (age 12) and Kirrill (age 14) were detained at Dilley for 136 days. Kamilla spent her 12th birthday in detention, though she and her family had done nothing wrong. At Dilley, Kamilla lost hearing in one ear after an ear infection, and she struggles with partial hearing loss to this day. At Dilley, her younger brother was terrified of the guards and her older brother suffered from repeated panic attacks.
These children are just eight of the detained children I’ve worked with over the past year. They are just eight of the approximately 3,000 children who have been needlessly detained at Dilley under the second Trump administration. Overwhelmingly these children and their parents do not have access to counsel who can help to secure their release.
We should all be horrified and appalled by the Trump administration’s targeting of children. Americans across party lines should reject such needless cruelty against children and families.
There are ways we can stand against this cruelty and demand to close down family detention now.
First, you can sign this petition calling for the shutdown of Dilley. It has already been signed by more than 350,000 people, including medical experts, celebrities and concerned parents, teachers and community members.
Second, check if your representative joined a letter signed by 111 members of Congress last month calling for the shutdown of Dilley. If your representative signed the letter, thank them for their courage. If they failed to sign the letter, express your concerns. You can use social media, phone calls and letters to reach our to their office and let them know that you and your community will hold them accountable for their failure to protect children against needless cruelty.
Third, share information about Dilley with your community. Overwhelmingly, Americans do not realize that our government is needlessly imprisoning children and families who have not committed any crimes, while a private prison corporation reaps profits from this misery. CoreCivic boasts that it generates $180 million in revenue annually to run the Dilley facility based on its ICE contract. Meanwhile, ICE’s own data shows alternatives to detention programs are far more cost effective and humane than detaining children.
Shutting down family detention is not a pipe dream. We did it five years ago. Now, for the little boy with the leukemia diagnosis, for 18-month-old Amalia, for Kenek, Anna, Aleksandr, Konstantin, Kamilla and Kirrill and hundreds of others, we can and we must do it again.
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