The Long-Lasting Trauma of Family Detention Centers 

Crowded detention facilities filled with families and children defined President Donald Trump’s first term in office. These same facilities could define his second as well.

As The New York Times reported in early March, U.S. Border Czar Tom Homan and others have ramped up their efforts in response to Trump’s frustration over the “pace of deportations.” Buried in Trump’s barrage of attacks on immigrants and their loved ones is the alarming practice of family detention in Texas.

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Shortly after taking office, President Joseph Biden halted the practice of jailing undocumented families at two of the most controversial family detention facilities in Texas: South Texas Family Residential Center (known as Dilley) and Karnes County Detention Facility (known as Karnes). Under Trump’s leadership, the practice has restarted. 

As the CEO of RAICES—an immigration legal service agency working in communities across Texas—I can confirm that Karnes resumed holding families this year before families were transferred earlier this month to the even more remote Dilley, which is not a licensed childcare facility. We’ve been providing legal access to people detained in Karnes since it opened in 2014, and our team recognized the signs early this year that family detention was imminent once more.

We’ve seen dozens of families arrive since the beginning of March, some with children as young as one, and we fear that hundreds, if not thousands, more are likely to join them soon.

Over the last two months, our legal team has advocated for more than three dozen detained families and successfully secured the release of half, who can now pursue their immigration cases with their freedom. Because we have a line of sight into detention conditions, we can confirm that families with legal counsel are being released from government custody, while those who do not have access to lawyers are, unsurprisingly, more likely to remain confined or face swift deportation. 

Many families that are released are being placed in “alternative to detention,” meaning that they are forced to wear ankle monitors—some of which are notably inactive based upon what we’ve seen to date, meaning that they serve little purpose other than a loud symbol to brand their wearers as “criminals”—despite never being convicted of a crime.

In 2024, following several years of alarming reports of inadequate care for children and families at facilities like Karnes, we released a groundbreaking report on the long-term mental and physical health impacts of prolonged detention. We partnered with the Child Health Immigration Research Team at the Massachusetts General Hospital Asylum Clinic and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University to analyze the medical records of 165 children detained at Karnes to analyze the records of children between the ages of six months and 18 years who were detained between June 2018 and October 2020. 

In just one of several individual studies, the report examined the case of an 8-year-old child from Honduras. On his 21st day in detention, he was taken to the detention center’s acute medical care facility and was seen by a mental health provider for reported “inappropriate touching by another adult resident.”

In 1997, the Flores Settlement Agreement established national minimum standards for the treatment of children in immigrant detention in the U.S.—the resolution of a landmark case that ensured some basic consideration for the welfare of detained kids. The judge in that case determined that in order to comply with the settlement, children must be released from unlicensed congregate settings such as ICE’s Family Residential Centers, “with all deliberate speed.” Our report found that the Flores Settlement Agreement was violated many times during the first Trump Administration, prolonging and exacerbating the severe health impacts children experienced while in custody.

Our concerns about conditions for children in federal government custody are deepening by the day as a result of this administration’s indiscriminate assault on legal and social service providers nationwide like RAICES. The degree by which we are targeted was made clear on March 21, when the Trump Administration cut legal aid for unaccompanied migrant children.

In an instant, decades-long federal funding was immediately cut off nationwide, leaving service providers like us forced to wind down our work with unaccompanied children. Children, some as young as infants, will now have to navigate our immigration system alone. It is unconscionable.

Just a few short months into this second Trump Administration, we are seeing with striking clarity the cruelty  of anti-immigrant attacks. Redefining who is deemed  “illegal” and deportable,destroys the very fabric of our communities. 

Through devastating rhetoric and action, The White House is harming children like Jocelynn Rojo Carranza, an eleven-year-old who tragically died by suicide after relentless bullying over her family’s immigration status. They are also harming men, such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who have been wrongfully disappeared to El Salvador without any due process. They are even threatening to deport Ukrainian families who lawfully found refuge in the U.S. after fleeing relentless Russian attacks.

Across the country, we are hearing from parents who are afraid to take their children to the doctor or drop them off at school; from workers who won’t speak out against dangerous labor violations for fear of being deported. We are hearing from people trying in earnest to lawfully apply for citizenship but who are being detained when they show up for ICE check-ins; from longtime immigrants who fear being targeted or dutifully paying their taxes for years without being able to access the public benefits they are helping to fund.

The first Trump Administration’s family separation directive under the Zero Tolerance Policy felt to me as though we’d collectively hit the shameful rock bottom of our nation’s modern immigration policy. I will never be able to fully wrap my mind around the fact that our government weaponized the potentially permanent kidnapping of children in order to deter parents seeking safety for their families.

I desperately wanted to believe that this could be the final straw; that it would galvanize enough righteous outrage to effectively shift the lens through which our nation views the people hoping to find refuge on our shores. 

But after a powerful initial repudiation of this horrific policy, our collective attention on this issue has once again faded. Our silence has empowered the Trump Administration to ramp up more brutal anti-immigrant attacks, spewing blatant lies and trusting that his political opponents and the American public will sit quietly on their hands and let it happen. 

We cannot stand for this. Back in 2018, the Trump Administration only rescinded its intentionally traumatizing family separation policy after forceful public outcry. We know that the White House is furious over attempts to make sure our immigrant neighbors know their Constitutional rights. We know that judicial rulings limiting Trump’s power to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport people without due process have gotten in the way of the administration’s most dramatic plans.

As Americans, we once again have the opportunity to wield our collective power in opposition to callous efforts to strip us of our humanity. At a time when the White House is counting on us to be silent and complicit, we must hold our values close and fervently push back against this heartless agenda—again.