An average of 25 children age 3 or younger are in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody daily while no fewer than 500 infants and toddlers have been detained since President Donald Trump took office last year, according to a study by The Marshall Project and MS NOW.
“Parents in ICE detention have complained of substandard conditions that frequently left their young children sick, isolated and regressing in their physical and intellectual development,” according to the analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Project, a group of attorneys and academics who share federal immigration records.
Marsha Griffin
“Our immigration system is breaking children,” said Marsha Griffin, a pediatrics scholar and co-founder of the executive committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health.
The period from infancy to early childhood is “probably the most harmful time” to detain children because of the importance of brain development during those years, she said.
While ICE did not respond to a request for comment about the research findings, an email from the agency claimed that “families with children receive appropriate food, water and medical care. In a separate statement, CoreCivic — the private company that operates the primary ICE facility used to detain families — echoed that its facilities were safe for infants and toddlers,” MS NOW reported.
However, the critical report cited specific examples of infant and toddler detention at Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, ICE’s main facility for detaining families with children.
One described the ordeal of an asylum-seeking couple taken into custody along with their 2-year-old son. The father was shipped to a detention center in California, and the mother and her toddler were taken to Dilley.
The boy would not eat for 12 days, which the facility’s medical staff attributed to depression. He would throw up when his mother tried to force him to eat, and his face grew gaunt and his eyes receded into their sockets.
“He was so distressed that it manifested in his body in not being able to eat or digest,” said Lori Goodman, CEO of LEAP, a nonprofit that supports families with young children in California.
Goodman, who was able to work with the boy, said children his age typically express trauma through physical symptoms because they lack the language skills needed to express them verbally. “The longer a child is in that setting, the more the long-term damage,” she added.
Records obtained by the Deportation Project found children are being held in detention for periods beyond the maximum 20 days dictated by the 1997 settlement of Flores v. Reno, which outlined the treatment of immigrant children in detention, according to MS NOW and The Marshall Project.
“The most recent data available show many very young children have spent prolonged periods of time in custody. Between Trump’s second inauguration and March of this year, ICE held at least 175 babies and toddlers for longer than a court-mandated time limit of 20 days.”
By comparison, no children under age 3 were held longer than 20 days during the last year of the Biden administration, the report added. “Biden had ended the practice of family detention in 2021, and the Dilley facility, which had mostly housed families, eventually closed. Trump restarted the practice and reopened Dilley shortly after retaking office.”
ICE claimed in a May court filing that it “works to assess cases and discharge minors from custody as promptly as possible.”
However, a couple that fled persecution in Russia ended up in Dilley with their 1-year-old son who began to deteriorate mentally and physically as their detention dragged on, the report said.
“We came here to escape prison. We wanted to be free,” one of the parents said through an interpreter. “But once we arrived in America, we spent four months in detention.”
The facility had few toys for children, and the parents did not have books in their language to read to him. Eventually, the boy’s speech development slowed and the only words he could speak were “mom” and “dad.”
Rahil Briggs
The first three years of life are critical in the development of vocabulary development, Griffen explained. “They don’t want to talk, and no one’s talking to them, not in a normal way.”
“If we miss this foundational time in early childhood when we see all these wonderful things going on in brain development with memory and learning and executive functioning, then it’s just harder than ever to catch up,” psychologist Rahil Briggs said.
Attorney Leecia Welch said she witnessed “gut-wrenching” medical conditions among children at Dilley in addition to mothers struggling with breast-feeding due to a lack of nutritious food.
Lights are left on all night at the facility and toys are prohibited in living areas, Welch added. “They can’t go to sleep with a stuffed animal. They can’t go to sleep with a security blanket, that’s just not allowed.”