A young Ecuadorian mother and her 7-year-old daughter were detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center for a month after being sent 1,300 miles from their Minnesota home, according to multiple reports. Her husband was deported to Ecuador soon after they were taken into custody. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis detained a 5-year-old boy wearing a bunny hat and carrying a Spiderman backpack. Liam Conejo Ramos and his father were sent to Dilley and released after 10 days when members of Congress and a judge intervened, multiple reports indicate. ICE has been holding hundreds of children at Dilley — many for months. Christian Hinojosa and her 13-year-old son were held at Dilley for more than four months before being released this month.
The Obama administration opened Dilley in 2014, and it was scaled back by the Biden administration in 2021 before being closed three years later, according to multiple reports. Dilley was reopened by President Donald Trump’s administration last spring. The number of detained families at Dilley has risen sharply since last fall. Joe Biden's administration stopped holding families at the facility in 2021, multiple reports indicate.
The government is holding many children at Dilley well beyond the 20-day limit set by longstanding court order, according to multiple reports. About 5,600 immigrants, more than half of them children, have been detained at Dilley since it reopened last year, multiple reports indicate. More than 300 people, including 77 children, are currently locked up at Dilley, according to advocates and lawmakers.
Emergency crews have been dispatched to Dilley nearly a dozen times over the last six months for medical emergencies including children with severe fever, broken bones, and respiratory distress, according to call logs reviewed by ProPublica and NBC News. The calls involve children with symptoms such as respiratory distress, fever, lethargy, allergic reactions, leg fractures, low oxygen levels, and seizures. In at least three cases, children were transferred more than an hour away to a specialized pediatric hospital in San Antonio. Most of the children were taken to a nearby community hospital. In one case, a 22-month-old in respiratory distress was so serious that first responders wanted to fly him by helicopter but couldn't due to bad weather. A two-month-old boy with bronchitis was deported to Mexico with his mother and sister shortly after he was released from a hospital during their stint at Dilley.
Olivia, a 19-year-old asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been at Dilley for more than four months, according to multiple reports. She was apprehended with her mother and two younger siblings in November, then separated, reunited at Dilley, and separated again after ICE agreed to release them but not her. Olivia was separated from her family because she was 19, legally an adult, and moved between detention centers while wearing an orange jumpsuit.
A Venezuelan mother of two, referred to as Flora, was allegedly trafficked to the US and has been unlawfully detained by ICE and could soon be deported, according to her lawyers. Flora has applications in process for asylum and a visa designed for victims of trafficking, multiple reports indicate. She was arrested at a routine check-in with the authorities this January and separated from her two children, aged 18 months and four. Her lawyers allege that her rights to due process have been violated and have filed a petition of habeas corpus on 11 February.
Transportation and Security Administration staff alerted immigration authorities to a Guatemalan mother and her 9-year-old daughter before agents descended on them inside San Francisco’s airport, according to multiple reports. The family was preparing to board a flight to Miami when they were arrested, moments after TSA agents flagged their names on a passenger list to ICE, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times. Under the Trump administration, TSA is providing ICE with the names and birth dates of travelers believed to have been ordered out of the country by an immigration court judge.
Donald Trump’s administration revised Biden-era guidelines for detained parents last summer, making one critical change that has radically shifted how ICE handles families, according to multiple reports. Deported parents previously could decide whether they wanted their children to join them, but now ICE will only support those arrangements if they are 'operationally feasible.' More than half of the parents interviewed said ICE never asked about their children at any point during their arrest, detention or removal, across dozens of interviews in a report.
A 3-year-old girl suffered alleged sexual abuse at the foster home where she’d been placed after immigration officials separated her from her mother, according to multiple reports. The girl's father, a legal permanent resident, waited five months for her release and learned of the abuse when he turned to the courts. The girl allegedly said she was sexually abused by an older child staying with her in foster care in Harlingen, Texas, and it caused bleeding, according to court documents.
Meenu Batra, a Texas court interpreter, was arrested by ICE after living in the US for more than 35 years and fears being deported to a country where she has never been, according to multiple reports. Batra is the only licensed Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu court interpreter in Texas and has served as an interpreter for hundreds of people in immigration court. She was stopped by immigration agents at Harlingen international airport last month, put in handcuffs, and transferred to El Valle detention facility.
Authorities in Minnesota are investigating the detention of US citizen ChongLy 'Scott' Thao by ICE as a possible kidnapping, burglary and false imprisonment, according to multiple reports. Masked ICE officers broke down the door of Thao’s house in St Paul without a warrant and dragged him into the street in his underwear in subfreezing conditions, his family said. Thao said agents drove him 'to the middle of nowhere' and forced him from the car in frigid weather to photograph him, before realizing their mistake and dropping him back at home.
Tania Warner and her seven-year-old daughter, Ayla, were released after nearly three weeks of detention by ICE, according to multiple reports. Warner and Ayla were held in two ICE facilities in south Texas alongside families from various nations. They were originally held at Rio Grande valley central processing center in McAllen, Texas, before being transferred to Dilley on 20 March.
A report by Human Rights First and RAICES found that more than 5,600 people had been imprisoned at Dilley between April 2025 and February 2026, including toddlers and newborn babies, according to multiple reports. The report found that families at Dilley were regularly detained for months in violation of court limits, pressured to abandon asylum claims, and subjected to threats of separation.
Many detainees at Dilley have lived in the U.S. for several years, with roots in neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, according to lawyers and other observers.
The Dilley Immigration Processing Center is growing 'more secretive' under new leadership at DHS, while children and families face 'cruelty' and lack of adequate medical treatment, according to Democratic members of Congress.
The Dilley Immigration Processing Center is run by private prison firm CoreCivic, according to multiple reports.