Honest, paywall-free news is rare. Please support our boldly independent journalism with a donation of any size.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Fourteen-year-old Ariana Velasquez had been held at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, with her mother for some 45 days when I managed to get inside to meet her. The staff brought everyone in the visiting room a boxed lunch from the cafeteria: a cup of yellowish stew and a hamburger patty in a plain bun. Ariana’s long black curls hung loosely around her face and she was wearing a government-issued gray sweatsuit. At first, she sat looking blankly down at the table. She poked at her food with a plastic fork and let her mother do most of the talking.

She perked up when I asked about home: Hicksville, New York. She and her mother had moved there from Honduras when she was 7. Her mother, Stephanie Valladares, had applied for asylum, married a neighbor from back home who was already living in the U.S., and had two more kids. Ariana took care of them after school. She was a freshman at Hicksville High, and being detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center meant that she was falling behind in her classes. She told me how much she missed her favorite sign language teacher, but most of all she missed her siblings.

I had previously met them in Hicksville: Gianna, a toddler who everyone calls Gigi, and Jacob, a kindergartener with wide brown eyes. I told Ariana that they missed her too. Jacob had shown me a security camera that their mom had installed in the kitchen so she could peek in on them from her job, sometimes saying “Hello” through the speaker. I told Ariana that Jacob tried talking to the camera, hoping his mom would answer.

Stephanie burst into tears. So did Ariana. After my visit, Ariana wrote me a letter.

“My younger siblings haven’t been able to see their mom in more than a month,” she wrote. “They are very young and you need both of your parents when you are growing up.” Then, referring to Dilley, she added, “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.”

Dilley, run by private prison firm CoreCivic, is located some 72 miles south of San Antonio and nearly 2,000 miles away from Ariana’s home. It is a sprawling collection of trailers and dormitories, almost the same color as the dusty landscape, surrounded by a tall fence. It first opened during the Obama administration to hold an influx of families crossing the border. Former President Joe Biden stopped holding families there in 2021, arguing America shouldn’t be in the business of detaining children.

But quickly after returning to office, President Donald Trump resumed family detentions as part of his mass deportation campaign. Federal courts and overwhelming public outrage had put an end to Trump’s first-term policy of separating children from parents when immigrant families were detained crossing the border. Trump officials said Dilley was a place where immigrant families would be detained together.

As the second Trump administration’s crackdown both slowed border crossings to record lows and ramped up a blitz of immigration arrests all across the country, the population inside Dilley shifted. The administration began sending parents and children who had been living in the country long enough to lay down roots and to build networks of relatives, friends and supporters willing to speak up against their detention.

If the administration believed that putting children in Dilley wouldn’t stir the same outcry as separating them from their parents, it was mistaken. The photo of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from Ecuador, who was detained with his father in Minneapolis while wearing a Spider-Man backpack and a blue bunny hat, went viral on social media and triggered widespread condemnation and a protest by the detainees.

Weeks before that, I had begun speaking to parents and children at Dilley, along with their relatives on the outside. I also spoke to people who worked inside the center or visited it regularly to give religious or legal services. I had asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for permission to visit but got a range of responses. One spokesperson denied my request, another said he doubted I could get formal approval and suggested I could try showing up there as a visitor. So I did.

Since early December, I’ve spoken, in person and via phone and video calls, to more than two dozen detainees, half of them kids detained at Dilley — all of whose parents gave me their consent. I asked parents whether their children would be open to writing to me about their experiences. More than three dozen kids responded; some just drew pictures, others wrote in perfect cursive. Some letters were full of age-appropriate misspellings.

Among them was a letter from a 9-year-old Venezuelan girl, named Susej Fernández, who had been living in Houston when she and her mother were detained. “I have been 50 days in Dilley Immigration Processing Center,” she wrote. “Seen how people like me, immigrants are been treated changes my perspective about the U.S. My mom and I came to The U.S looking for a good and safe place to live.”

A 14-year-old Colombian girl, who signed her name Gaby M.M. and who a fellow detainee said had been living in Houston, wrote a letter about how the guards at Dilley “have bad manner of speaking to residents.” She wrote, “The workers........

© Truthout