Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
While Donald Trump’s administration continues to celebrate the $240 billion it now has for its detention and deportation operations, recent reports revealed that 500 children and infants have been among those detained since the president began his second term in January 2025.
The analysis by MS Now and The Marshall Project illustrates the cruelty of the president’s immigration policy—a policy that, during his first term, separated babies and children from their parents, and now imprisons them without providing adequate food, medical or psychological care when needed, or timely medication, resulting in physical and mental health issues at a time when these children are still developing.
We are already familiar with the ruthlessness with which this administration operates: it is not merely about detaining and removing people from the country, but about inflicting harm.
This Monday, June 15, marked the 14th anniversary of the implementation of DACA, which grants work permits and protection from deportation to those who were brought to the country as undocumented children. Because Trump wants to eliminate it at all costs and cannot do so automatically, he makes life impossible for the beneficiaries by delaying the renewal of their permits. Many lose their jobs and, as a result, are vulnerable to arrest and deportation.
Between January 1 and November 19, 2025, ICE arrested 261 DACA recipients and deported 86 of them, according to DHS. Organizations claim the numbers are higher.
Furthermore, horror stories from detention centers operated by private groups of dubious reputation have led to hunger strikes in at least four states.
The situation has turned deadly: it is estimated that 52 people have died in detention centers since January 2025—33 in 2025 and 19 so far in 2026. This includes those who have committed suicide while in ICE custody.
The situation for children is among the most critical because they suffer trauma from witnessing their parents’ detention during violent immigration raids, being placed in foster homes or with relatives and acquaintances, or being detained alongside their parents.
The Dilley detention center in Texas, where detained families are sent, has so many issues that it was even closed during the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden. Trump then reopened it as soon as he took office for the second time.
The analysis by MS Now and The Marshall Project notes that “since the Trump administration took office last year, at least 500 infants and young children have spent part of that crucial stage [of development] in ICE custody.”
“ICE has dramatically increased detentions of children aged 3 and under, holding 25 of them in custody on an average day between January 2025 and March of this year,” according to records obtained by the Deportation Data Project.
According to the parents interviewed, the appalling conditions “left their young children sick, isolated and regressing in their physical and intellectual development.”
“Having such young children in a prison setting with hundreds of other kids and parents, it just makes them repeatedly, constantly sick. So they have fevers, they’re coughing, they’re vomiting, they have diarrhea. They are just miserable,” Elora Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia Law School who has represented more than 80 children and parents detained in Dilley, told analysts.
The document details harrowing cases that show the anxiety children suffer and the physical and mental consequences.
One such case is that of Amalia, a girl with a severe fever who was already lethargic; at the Dilley clinic, she was given only Tylenol, and her parents were told to stop complaining. The girl lost consciousness.
Amalia’s mother, Kheilin Valero Marcano, asked them, “Are you going to let her die?”
“According to the family, Amalia eventually spent more than a week in an outside hospital, after her oxygen levels dropped to dangerously low levels. There she was diagnosed with COVID-19, an ear infection, pneumonia, bronchitis, and RSV, a common but potentially serious childhood illness that affects the lungs,” the report notes.
Under the Trump administration, the harm knows no bounds, and even babies seem to be considered “the worst of the worst.” Amalia and her parents were released in February, but the long-term consequences for Amalia and the other children remain unclear.
The original Spanish version is here.
