One of the tests of any nation is how it treats some of its most vulnerable: children. But on that front, under this current administration, our nation is failing. Just last week, federal immigration officials deported a baby who had spent half of his life in ICE custody, the San Antonio Current reported. Two-month-old Juan Nicolás had been detained along with his 16-month-old sister and parents at a notorious, privately-operated migrant family jail in Dilley, Texas, when his health began to rapidly deteriorate.
This baby never should have been there in the first place. No family should be there at all, period. Instead, a combination of cruel mass deportation quotas and government handouts to private prison executives nearly led to this child’s death.
“The newborn’s health suffered while in custody at the facility, where families report ‘putrid’ water and unsanitary conditions,” the San Antonio Current reported. “At approximately 3 a.m. Saturday, he experienced a medical episode in which he was choking on his own vomit and experiencing respiratory issues, [Univision reporter Lidia] Terrazas reported over the weekend.”
But because there were no medical workers on site at that early hour, detention facility staffers simply gave the child’s mother a “‘nasal aspirator’ to help with his phlegm, the report continued. But when little Juan Nicolás became “unresponsive,” he was finally rushed to the hospital. “He was later diagnosed with bronchitis but was released around midnight,” San Antonio Current reported.
But instead of releasing the family so that Juan Nicolás’ care could be the family’s top priority, they were sent back to Dilley the next morning despite the fact that he was not fully recovered. Shockingly, the family was then deported to Mexico. “According to their attorney, the family was deported with only the money that they had in their commissary—a total of $190,” the report continued.
The baby’s mother, Mireya López Sánchez, said they’d use the little cash they had to book a hotel room so this sick baby and his family wouldn’t be forced to sleep on the streets.
“I have nothing,” she said according to the Independent. “I need a house, I need a roof to sleep in or something, more than anything, attention for my children, because they are unprotected.” Elected leaders in the state responded with outrage. “To unnecessarily deport a sick baby and his entire family is heinous,” responded Rep. Joaquin Castro (TX-20). But the horrifying reality is that many more children are also suffering.
In gutting handwritten letters and drawings penned from within Dilley’s confines, children as young as five shared how they’re “missing their friends and teachers, falling behind at school, having unreliable access to medical care when they’re sick — some say they’re sick a lot — and feeling scared about what comes next,” as ProPublica reported Feb. 9.
“The public is rarely given an opportunity to glimpse inside Dilley and get a look at how the kids there are doing,” the report said. “Here, we let the children speak for themselves.”
“Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” said Ariana, a 14-year-old girl detained at Dilley for 45 days as of ProPublica’s publishing date. The girl, who is originally from Honduras and lived in New York until she was kidnapped along with her mom, wrote that detainees at the camp are “always sick.” Alarmingly, the Dilley camp has been the site of a recent measles outbreak. Both Ariana and a second child, 14-year-old Gaby, noted mistreatment by staff, with Ariana commenting that “there are no consecuenses [sic]” and Gaby noting that “the workers treat the residents unhumanly [sic]” and that she doesnt’ “want to imging [sic] how they would act if they where unsupervised.”
“I want to tell you guys how I feel and is hell like I really want to go the food is bad im tired of almots [sic] the same thing,” Gaby continued, who said she’d been detained for 20 days as of ProPublica’s publishing date. “I feel so much sadness and depression of not being able to leave, its really sad to hear that peoples cases are being denied and getting send back to their countrys [sic].”
Luisanney Toloza, a five-year-old girl from Venezuela, shared a picture she drew in crayon depicting her loved ones. It was simply captioned, “Mi Familia” – “My family.”
I've heard directly from hundreds of children at Dilley. One young girl who shared her story with me grew up in the United States and her stepfather is a U.S. citizen. She said that the guards are mean to her, she is afraid, and that she is worried she will die in detention.
— Joaquin Castro (@joaquincastrotx.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T14:04:20.833Z
But following public outrage in response to the ongoing detention of these children and the deplorable conditions they’re being forced to endure by the federal government, Dilley staff reportedly raided their cells in order to confiscate and destroy their letters and drawings. “They threw away all my drawings,” said 15-year-old Cariexis Quintero. “Her mother, displaying a pile of colorful paper scraps, detailed how the guards ‘stormed into her room looking for drawings and letters’ and then ‘destroyed what they found,” Terrazas reported according to the San Antonio Current Feb. 17.
Freedom from harmful conditions like those at Dilley don’t necessarily mean freedom from mental anguish. While five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was initially excited to be released from Dilley and return home to Minnesota, the fact is he was traumatized by the U.S. government. There’d been some speculation online during the recent Super Bowl that the little boy featured in Bad Bunny’s recent halftime show was Liam, but his dad has since said that life is too simply too unstable for the boy to even go to school, much less appear at the biggest sporting event of the year.
“The truth is, he’s not the same boy he was before,” Liam’s dad, Adrian Conejo Arias, told MPR News in a Feb. 9 report. “Ever since he went in there, he’s suffered psychological trauma; he’s very scared. He can’t sleep well at night. He wakes up three or four times a night screaming, ‘Daddy, Daddy.’”
Pediatric experts have stated in their scientific research that even short amounts of detention can be detrimental to children. But intentional traumatization of some of the vulnerable among us would be nothing new for the current president. Recall that during his first term, thousands of children who were seeking safety with their parents and guardians were intentionally harmed under the family separation policy, which career officials warned would be harmful to children. The administration proceeded anyway.
In a 2021 study published in the PLOS ONE medical journal, Physicians for Human Rights said that some children continued to meet the criteria for PTSD two years following their reunification with loved ones.
“The evaluating clinicians noted that the children exhibited reactions that included regression in age-appropriate behaviors,” experts said in the peer-reviewed medical journal, “such as crying, not eating, having nightmares and other sleeping difficulties, excessive parental attachment, clinging to caregivers, urinary incontinence, and recurring feelings of fear following reunification with their parents.”
This cruelty is not an aberration but instead a pattern under this president and his top allies. Trump was just months into his second term when ICE disappeared three U.S. citizen children and their families – including a four-year-old child with stage four cancer. Advocates said that the sick child was illegally removed “without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians–despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs.”
Another U.S. citizen child, just two-years-old, was also kicked out of her own country “with no meaningful process,” according to a Trump-confirmed judge. This mother was explicitly instructed to bring her U.S. citizen child with her to her scheduled check-in with ICE, NBC News reported at the time. In other words, targeting a family that was simply trying to follow the rules. How does that make any one of us safer?
“The vile inhumanity on display is chilling,” America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas recently said in response to the administration’s ongoing attacks on some of our most vulnerable. “Targeting infants and pre-schoolers has nothing to do with immigration enforcement and everything to do with perpetuating a campaign of terror to instill fear in the hearts of immigrants and citizens alike. These loathsome actions are completely disconnected from our values as a country and what American voters want.”
