In the desert south of San Antonio, a bunch of trailers and dorms might be a peek into the future of family detention in the United States. The Dilley detention center is one of only a few facilities designated solely for immigrant families and children.
In new reporting from ProPublica, journalists visited the center and got to talk with some of the kids inside, who say they feel hopeless and are desperate to get back to their lives.
“What stood out to me about hearing these stories from the inside is that the kids, even very young kids, feel like they are imprisoned,” says ProPublica reporter McKenzie Funk.
The center originally opened during the Obama administration, but the Biden administration closed it down, saying the “U.S. shouldn’t be in the business of detaining families." That was, until last year, when President Trump re-opened the center.
Since April, ProPublica says there have been as many as 3,500 people cycling through the center, which also indicated a shift in why certain people are being held.
In the Obama years, it was used as a sort of holding site for an overflow of migrants at the southern border. Trump is using the site to detain families who’ve been in the country for years — sometimes most of their lives — and who are also being arrested in the interior of the county, not at the border. They are held sometimes thousands of miles from home.
Funk says there’s also a long-agreed-upon settlement that prohibits kids from being held in detention longer than 20 days. He says that’s not the case at Dilley, where some of the families have been held for four to eight months or longer.
“There’s this huge uptick in habeas corpus cases,” says Funk. “People going to a judge saying, ‘Hey, I'm being held way too long, [can] someone review whether I should be detained this long?' And that is stemming totally from the fact that people are going in and they're not getting out in the same way.”
In Milwaukee, there's a struggle brewing over an ICE facility on the northwest side of the city. What could all this mean for places like Wisconsin, when ICE’s budget in 2026 includes over $400 million for detention sites?
McKenzie Funk says the pressure to build and detain is coming from the top with President Trump and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
DHS has responded to ProPublica’s reporting with it’s own press release to “debunk” the findings. It calls Dilley "safe, human and family friendly," saying in most cases, this is the best care people there have ever received in their entire lives. DHS has also encouraged people to self-deport.
