The number of parents and children booked into the country’s only immigrant family detention center, in Dilley, Texas, plummeted in February by more than 75% compared with a month earlier, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by ProPublica.

Between April 2025, when President Donald Trump started sending families there, and January of this year, the number of people sent into detention with their families averaged around 600 per month. In February, those so-called books-ins fell to 133. As of mid-March, they dropped again to just 54.

This week there were only around 100 people in family detention at Dilley, compared with an average daily population in January of over 900, the data shows.

Current and former ICE officials and lawyers with clients in Dilley said they were unable to explain the reason for the sharp decline. However, they said the shift followed weeks of mounting public pressure generated in part by the widespread publication of letters written by several of the detained children in which they described the conditions inside Dilley and their despair at being ripped from their homes and schools.

ProPublica published several of those letters on Feb. 9 after visiting the facility — about an hour south of San Antonio — in mid-January. The letters set off a storm of outrage in Washington and across the country. They were raised in congressional hearings and pasted on posters in anti-ICE demonstrations.

Rep. James Walkinshaw, a Democrat from Virginia, read the letters aloud to ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, during a congressional hearing on Feb. 10, pressing him for answers about whether the children’s detention could cause adverse psychological effects. He pointed to one drawing by a 5-year-old Venezuelan girl named Luisanney Toloza of her family.

“My son’s 5. He can’t write many words, but he can communicate through drawings like this,” Walkinshaw said, making special note of the........

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