The three young kids watched with their mother as guards swept through their cell, ripping drawings off the walls and shoving crayons and colored pencils in bags before taking them away. Afterwards, their mother recounted, the children just "cried and cried and cried."
That mother was one of several detainees who described the crackdown taking place at the nation's largest concentration camp for children in Dilley, Texas to ProPublica last week. The guards confiscated children's artwork and the tools to make more -- the crayons, the pencils, the paper.
In the words of another mother, "There were many, many families whose children had their pencils and what they created thrown away."
The reason for the raids is obvious. Last month, ProPublica published an extraordinary piece: handwritten letters and drawings from children imprisoned inside Dilley. Rainbows, family portraits, hearts. And words -- in the shaky handwriting of kids as young as seven -- describing what it is like to be locked inside a concentration camp for children for weeks and months on end.
Valentina, a 9-year-old who drew the picture featured here, wrote: "I feel like I’ve had the worst days of my life I want God to help us get out of here so we can be happy again and study together as a family. Please help us and our parents get out of here thank you." She has been imprisoned for four months.
"I don't want to be in this place. I want to go to my school," wrote Mia Valentina Paz Faria. She is seven years old. She had been imprisoned for 70 days.
"More than 60 days... going to the doctor and the only thing they tell you is to drink more water and the worst thing is that it seems the water is what makes people sick here," wrote 12-year-old Ender.
A 14-year-old named Ariana, who has been imprisoned for 45 days, described how ICE officers don't follow the law and don't provide basic medical attention. She explained that "serious situations happen and the officers can’t take them serious enough there are no consequences, they don’t care.” She added: "Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.”
These children wrote in their own words what hundreds of complaints, federal lawsuits, and investigative reports have independently documented: that conditions inside Dilley are horrific, that medical care is dangerously inadequate, and that children are being held for months in violation of the law.
ProPublica reporter Mica Rosenberg was able to speak with more than two dozen detainees, including over a dozen children. She asked parents if their kids would be willing to write about their experiences. More than three dozen did. A released detainee carried the letters out of the facility. ProPublica verified the children's identities and published them last month alongside Rosenberg's major investigation.
The children's first-hand accounts of being prisoners of the U.S. government reached millions. Three days later, during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Rep. James Walkinshaw read the children's words aloud from the dais and held up their drawings. He then turned to ICE acting director Todd Lyons and asked him to explain why children were being held in these conditions, Lyons could only offer standard Trump administration deflections.
Their real response came the following Monday when guards began raiding cells, confiscating children's letters and drawings. "They noticed we were writing letters asking for freedom," 15-year-old Cariexis Quintero recounted on a video call after a raid. "So they entered our room to rip them up. They threw away all my drawings -- my mom liked them."
Cariexis, who has the intellectual capacity of a seven-year-old, was crying. Her mother appeared on the same call, holding up a pile of colorful paper scraps -- all that remained of her daughter's artwork. She described how guards had "stormed into her room looking for drawings and letters" and destroyed what they found.
ProPublica's investigation found that more than 3,500 people have been cycled through Dilley since it was reopened under the Trump administration. More than half were minors. Their data analysis showed that roughly 300 children were held longer than a month -- in direct violation of the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, which limits child detention to 20 days.
Children inside told Rosenberg they were cutting themselves. Some expressed suicidal thoughts. Facility 911 logs documented breathing emergencies, seizures, and sexual assaults. The facility's sole educational offering was a single one-hour class with 12 slots, first-come-first-served -- for hundreds of children.
The National Center for Youth Law is fighting the Trump administration in court over conditions at Dilley, documenting in court filings food contaminated with worms and mold, water containers thick with algae, lights that blaze all night so children can't sleep, and medical neglect so severe that one child's untreated earache caused hearing loss. Families have filed more than 1,000 complaints about inadequate medical care since the facility reopened last April.
Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who represents an Egyptian family imprisoned at Dilley for nearly nine months -- including five children, from 5-year-old twins to an 18-year-old -- described what his clients are enduring. The 9-year-old has told her mother she wishes she was no longer alive. One of the 5-year-old twins drew a picture of herself and her family trapped in a cage. The 16-year-old boy collapsed from untreated appendicitis after being told to simply take a pain reliever. And after she talked to the press, the eldest daughter, Habiba Soliman, was separated from her family as punishment.
This is the pattern at Dilley: when the conditions become public, the response is not to fix them but to punish those who exposed them and destroy the evidence.
When the ProPublica letters were published, DHS did not address the children's specific accounts -- it issued a boilerplate statement claiming detainees receive "proper medical care" and "3 meals a day, clean water." When Walkinshaw read the letters in Congress, Lyons deflected. When Rep. Joaquin Castro visited the facility, guards warned detainees not to talk to him. When Habiba spoke to the press, she was separated from her family. When the case of the sick 2-month-old Juan Nicolás gained public attention, his family was deported before lawyers could intervene.
And when the children's letters and drawings made it out and were published for the world to see, staff raided dormitories, destroyed them, and confiscated the materials to make more.
The crackdown has also extended to the families' calls to loved ones, lawyers, and reporters. When families make calls, they describe guards stationing themselves in the room -- "every time someone came in to make a call," one mother said, "they practically stood behind you."
The message to every child -- and every parent -- inside that facility is unmistakable: If you speak, we will punish you. If you write it down, we will destroy it. If the world finds out, we will make the evidence disappear.
All of this -- the imprisonment of children for months, the confiscation of their artwork, the medical neglect that has nearly killed multiple toddlers and led to the deportation of a sick two-month-old -- is immensely profitable for the corporation running it.
CoreCivic donated more than $800,000 to Trump's campaign and inauguration. The day after Trump was elected, CoreCivic's stock price jumped nearly 30 percent. Last year, the company posted $2.2 billion in revenue -- an all-time high. CoreCivic's revenue from ICE alone more than doubled in the last quarter of 2025, reaching $244.7 million.
On a recent earnings call, CoreCivic CEO Patrick Swindle reassured investors eager for more: "As that ecosystem grows, it's gonna result in additional bed demand." ICE plans to dramatically expand its detention network with eight "mega-centers" and hundreds of additional sites, a $38.3 billion plan financed through Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill." CoreCivic stands to profit from every new bed.
The cruelty isn't just the point -- it's the business model.
The children inside Dilley cannot write letters or make their voices heard anymore. The guards and the Trump administration made sure of that. But you can.
--> Call your representatives at (202) 224-3121 and demand the immediate release of all children from the Dilley and Karnes detention centers and an end to child detention -- if you don't reach a staffer, be sure to leave a message
--> To read ProPublic's new piece on the retaliation toward Dilley's imprisoned children, visit https://www.propublica.org/.../dilley-detention-center...
--> To read ProPublica's powerful expose "The Children of Dilley," visit https://www.propublica.org/.../life-inside-ice-dilley...
--> For more about DHS' current efforts to vastly expand their detention facilities -- including ones for children -- you can learn about their efforts to buy massive warehouses around the country at https://wapo.st/3OfarSk
-- and about community opposition to their plans at https://wapo.st/3OIfSJn
--> The first step to oppose such expansion is to learn about any plans for your state, and then connect with others to oppose warehouse detention centers in your state. Connect with local immigrant rights groups and/or local Indivisible chapter to see if there are current efforts already underway to support. To find an Indivisible group in your area, visit https://indivisible.org/groups
--> The National Center for Youth Law is fighting the Trump administration in court over conditions at Dilley. To support their critical work, visit https://youthlaw.org/
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For children's books that encourage empathy and understanding of Mighty Girl immigrants of the past and present, visit our blog post, "A New Land, A New Life: 25 Mighty Girl Books About the Immigrant Experience" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12855
For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
For books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history that will help them appreciate how precious democracy truly is, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
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To read more about the private prison contractors celebrating 'growth opportunities,' visit https://time.com/.../ice-immigration-detention.../
For an in-depth article by The New York Times about ICE's detention of children, visit https://www.nytimes.com/.../migrant-children-ice...
To read more about Amalia, the toddler who nearly died after being imprisoned at Dilley, visit https://www.nbcnews.com/.../toddler-hospitalized-dilley...
To read about Juan Nicolás' deportation, visit https://www.newsweek.com/2-month-old-family-deported-to...
