Detained immigrant children at a Texas family detention facility still face conditions lawyers say are concerning, including inadequate food, medical care and mental health services, even as some children are no longer held there, according to court filings submitted this week. The filings describe a pattern in which stays at the Dilley facility stretched beyond a court-mandated 20-day limit and say that in recent months nearly 600 children were held past that timeframe.
The filings also allege that the conditions at Dilley continued even as the total number of children held there fell in recent weeks. Lawyers said their reports and site visits found virus outbreaks and lasting lockdowns at the facility in December and January, and they provided comparisons for counts seen in early February and mid-March.
About 85 children remained detained at Dilley as of mid-March, according to Mishan Wroe, the directing attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, who said he visited the facility in mid-March. In early February, another legal advocate for the children observed about 280 children, the filings said, placing the later reduction in context with continuing concerns described in the court paperwork.
The case also drew attention beyond the facility after the detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, who had been sent to Dilley earlier this year. Ramos, a preschooler picked up in Minnesota by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while wearing a blue bunny hat, became a focal point for protests over what some described as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, including detainees holding signs inside the yard behind chain-link fences.
Among the allegations detailed in the filings are claims about mental health care. The court papers cited a “poignant” case involving a 13-year-old girl held at Dilley who, the filings say, tried to take her own life after staff withheld prescribed antidepressants and denied her request to join her mother. The government reported there had been “no placements on suicide watch,” according to the filing; the Associated Press obtained Dilley discharge documents that described a “suicide attempt by cutting of wrist” and “self-harm.”
The filings place the Dilley dispute within a long-running legal framework tied to the Flores settlement, describing a lawsuit launched in 1985 that led to court-ordered supervision of standards and ultimately to a 20-day limit in custody. The Trump administration has sought to end the Flores settlement, and in a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said “For years, the Flores consent decree has been a tool of the left that is antithetical to the law and wastes valuable U.S. taxpayer funded resources,” adding, “Being in detention is a choice.”
Attorneys for detainees, according to the filings, cited the government’s data showing longer custody times for immigrant children and described other problems they said included worms in food and limited access to medical care or sufficient legal counsel as reported by families and monitors at federal facilities. The filings also said a report from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed about 595 immigrant children were held in custody for more than 20 days in December and January, with some stretches into months.
The filing said that approximately 265 of those children were detained for more than 50 days and that 55 children were detained more than 100 days. It also said the figure was higher than a previous government disclosure late last year that found that from August to September, 400 children had been held at Dilley beyond the 20-day limit, and it said the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions seeking comment on the data.
A DHS spokesperson said Dilley is retrofitted for families and that detainees receive basic necessities, including adequate food and water, and the spokesperson said the Trump administration is working to quickly deport detainees. Still, advocates characterized the facility as persistently harmful even as the population changed, with Children’s Rights chief legal director Leecia Welch saying, “Dilley remains a hellhole,” and adding that while the number of children has decreased, “the suffering remains the same.”
Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee of the Central District of California is scheduled to have a hearing on the case later this month.