The Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas first entered the national spotlight after a photo of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat, spread widely online. Liam and his father were sent to Dilley from Minneapolis in late January. Protests, congressional visits and widespread media attention put Dilley at the center of a national conversation about the impact of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies on children.
ProPublica had already been investigating Dilley for weeks.
Reporter Mica Rosenberg had begun speaking to parents and children at Dilley late last year, along with their relatives on the outside, to document what life was like for the kids being held in America’s only detention facility for immigrant families. A long-standing legal settlement generally limits the time children can be held in detention to 20 days. A data analysis by ProPublica found that about 300 kids sent to Dilley by the Trump administration were there for more than a month.
In mid-January, Rosenberg visited the facility and asked families whether their children would want to write about their experiences. The stories she wrote used recorded video calls, voice memos, letters and drawings by dozens of kids. Moms told her that their kids had lost their appetites after finding worms and mold on their food, had trouble sleeping on the facility’s hard metal bunk beds in rooms shared by at least a dozen other people, and were constantly sick. Children told her about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the United States and the fear of what comes next.
In a series of videos, we let the children’s words speak for themselves.
