Most people saving for retirement are not choosing to fund ICE detention centers. They are choosing what they have been told to choose: a 401(k), a mutual fund, an ETF, a retirement account, a default investment plan, or whatever option their employer and fund manager make easiest to select.

That is what makes the finding so important. A BreakThrough News and More Perfect Union analysis found more than $1 billion in retirement-linked mutual funds and ETFs invested in GEO Group and CoreCivic, two private prison companies tied to immigration detention. The analysis reported that, as of September 30, 2025, mutual funds and ETFs held about 35 million shares of GEO Group worth roughly $543 million, along with CoreCivic holdings valued at about $472 million.

The issue is not only that GEO Group and CoreCivic profit from detention. The issue is that ICE detention profit can be buried inside ordinary retirement infrastructure, where workers may never see the connection between their paycheck deductions and the companies that benefit from immigrant confinement.

The pathway is simple enough to describe, but easy for ordinary account holders to miss.

A worker contributes to a retirement plan. That plan places money into mutual funds, index funds, or ETFs. Those funds hold baskets of stocks. Inside those baskets can be shares of companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic. The worker may never directly choose GEO Group. They may never directly choose CoreCivic. They may never see ICE detention on a retirement statement. But their money can still flow into companies whose business model depends on incarceration, detention contracts, and the expansion of confinement.

The fund-tracking method matters. Prison Free Funds describes a screening process that examines thousands of mutual funds and ETFs, checks their holdings against companies tied to the prison and border industries, and calculates both dollar exposure and portfolio percentage. The point is not guesswork. The point is that fund holdings can be examined, screened, and traced. When those holdings include private prison operators, the connection between retirement investing and detention profit becomes part of the public record.

BreakThrough’s reporting also identified examples of major investment-firm exposure, including Vanguard-linked GEO Group holdings and Fidelity-managed CoreCivic exposure. Those examples should not be read as a claim that every fund from every firm contains detention-company stock. They show something narrower and more important: some of the most ordinary investment products in the retirement system can carry exposure to companies tied to ICE detention.

That hidden pathway matters because ICE detention does not operate only through uniforms, buses, raids, facilities, deportation flights, and government paperwork. It also operates through contracts, revenue, investors, asset managers, and public markets. The people detained inside immigration facilities are part of one side of the system. The investors who profit from that system are part of the other.

GEO Group and CoreCivic are not passive bystanders in immigration enforcement. They are detention contractors whose business has long been tied to government confinement. When ICE expands detention capacity, when federal immigration enforcement grows, and when detention contracts become more valuable, private prison companies can benefit. That is not an abstraction. It is the financial logic of privatized detention.

The public is often asked to understand ICE violence only at the moment of visible harm: the raid, the arrest, the cell, the deportation, the death in custody, the family separation, the missing person, the mother taken from her child, the worker pulled from a job site, the asylum seeker transferred into a remote facility. But the system does not begin there. Visible enforcement rests on funding, contracts, political permission, and profit structures that make detention expandable.

The BreakThrough News and More Perfect Union analysis pushes that profit trail into the retirement system. It shows how ordinary workers may be financially exposed to ICE detention without clear knowledge, direct consent, or meaningful control over the structure.

The result is a consent problem built into the structure of retirement investing.

A person can oppose ICE detention and still hold a retirement account that indirectly invests in companies tied to detention. A worker can reject family separation and still be placed in a fund that owns detention-company shares. A person can want safety for immigrant communities and still be routed through a financial system that treats private prison stock as just another holding inside a diversified portfolio.

That does not make ordinary workers the architects of ICE detention. It makes them another population whose money can be captured by systems they did not design.

That distinction matters. This article is not blaming workers for saving for retirement. It is naming the machinery that turns ordinary savings into exposure to public harm. Most workers do not have the time, tools, access, or employer-plan freedom to audit every holding inside every fund. Many retirement plans are designed to make passive investing feel neutral, automatic, and frictionless. But passive investing is not morally neutral when the basket includes companies that profit from cages.

Even passive investing can carry active public harm when the holdings include companies that profit from detention.

A fund can passively track an index. An account holder can passively contribute to a retirement plan. An investment manager can passively hold a stock because it is part of a broader market product. But the detention center is not passive. The person locked inside it is not experiencing an index. The family separated by detention is not living inside a portfolio theory. The harm is physical, legal, psychological, and public.

ICE accountability has to extend beyond the agency itself.

It has to follow the private contractors that run detention centers, the companies that profit from confinement, the investment firms that hold their shares, and the retirement systems that can hide those holdings inside ordinary accounts.

Investor-facing materials from detention companies show that this risk is not invisible to the companies themselves. GEO Group and CoreCivic report to investors, file disclosures, and describe business risks in the language of public scrutiny, litigation, government contracts, reputation, human rights, and operations. The companies know that public attention can matter to their business. They know detention is not just a facility issue. It is a revenue issue, a reputational issue, and an investor issue.

BreakThrough reported that GEO Group and CoreCivic did not respond directly to its requests for comment. Instead, the Day 1 Alliance, a trade group representing major private prison contractors, responded by defending services at ICE processing centers and criticizing the report. That response matters because it shows the industry understands this as a fight over public legitimacy, not only portfolio math.

But the average worker may not know any of this.

They may know their employer offers a retirement plan. They may know a percentage of their paycheck goes into it. They may know the name of a target-date fund, an index fund, a large mutual fund, or an ETF. They may not know whether that fund holds GEO Group or CoreCivic. They may not know whether their money is exposed to companies running detention centers. They may not know that the same financial system marketed as retirement security can also help stabilize the profit structure behind immigrant confinement.

That gap is what the reporting makes visible.

The gap is not only informational. It is structural. The retirement system places ordinary people inside investment pathways they do not fully control, then treats the consequences as too technical for public accountability. It allows detention profit to move behind layers: employer plan, fund manager, index provider, ETF, mutual fund, public stock, detention contractor, federal contract, ICE facility.

Each layer creates distance, and that distance makes the system harder to see and harder to challenge.

When detention profit sits inside a retirement account, the harm is harder to see. The investor does not see the cell. The worker does not see the contract. The retiree does not see the transfer bus. The account statement does not show the detained father, the asylum seeker, the child waiting for a parent, the person held in medical distress, or the community living under the threat of raids and disappearance.

The account shows a balance, while the violence behind that balance is made distant enough to deny, technical enough to ignore, and profitable enough to defend.

This is also why the private prison industry’s relationship with ICE deserves public pressure beyond the usual limits of immigration policy coverage. ICE detention is not only a government program. It is a market. It creates demand for beds, guards, transportation, surveillance, construction, food, medical contracts, and facility management. Public money moves into private companies. Private companies report to investors. Investors look for returns. Funds hold shares. Retirement accounts become part of the chain.

The financial chain matters because it shows how detention profit can move through ordinary retirement systems without appearing plainly on an account statement.

The point is not that every person with a 401(k) knowingly funds ICE detention. The point is that the system can make people participants without clear disclosure or meaningful choice. That is an accountability failure. It lets private detention companies benefit from public ignorance. It lets investment managers treat detention exposure as a normal holding. It lets employer retirement plans pass moral risk down to workers who may never be told what they own.

That silence protects the profit structure by keeping workers separated from the detention companies their funds may support.

If a company profits from ICE detention, the public has a right to know who is financing it. If retirement-linked funds hold detention-company shares, workers have a right to know whether their savings are exposed. If investment firms claim neutrality while routing money into companies tied to immigrant confinement, that neutrality deserves scrutiny. If private prison companies warn investors about public backlash, human rights scrutiny, litigation, and reputation, that warning should not stay buried in filings while ordinary account holders remain in the dark.

ICE abuse is not only what happens inside detention centers. It is also what happens around them: the contracts that expand them, the companies that run them, the investors that sustain them, and the financial products that hide them inside ordinary life.

A detention center does not have to appear on a retirement statement for retirement money to reach it. That is the danger. The violence is made distant enough to deny, technical enough to ignore, and profitable enough to defend.

Americans Against ICE tracks ICE harm because enforcement abuse is not only a street-level event. It is an infrastructure. It is raids and custody deaths. It is detention beds and deportation flights. It is contractors and surveillance. It is public money and private revenue. It is also the possibility that millions of Americans are connected to detention profit through accounts they use to prepare for old age.

That connection belongs in the public record.

If ICE detention profit can live inside retirement accounts, then ICE accountability has to follow the money all the way there.

Americans Against ICE documents immigration enforcement abuse, detention profiteering, contractor harm, and the systems that allow ICE violence to disappear into paperwork, contracts, and financial infrastructure.

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Before most of Santa Barbara was fully awake on Father’s Day, immigration enforcement had already turned parts of the city’s Westside and Eastside into zones of fear, pursuit, detention, and public uncertainty.

The harm described in local reporting is not limited to the people ICE agents meant to arrest. It stretches across the neighborhoods where the raids unfolded: workers moving through the morning, families beginning a holiday, residents watching federal vehicles move through public streets, community monitors trying to document what was happening, and a reported U.S. citizen who was allegedly caught in the operation before being released at a hospital.

According to the Santa Barbara Independent, South Coast activists monitoring ICE activity said seven ICE vehicles entered the Westside and Eastside before 7 a.m. on Sunday, June 21. The report said 9 to 11 people were detained or arrested on unspecified immigration-status-related charges.

The Santa Barbara report said three early-morning mariachi musicians were among those apprehended near San Pascual and Mulberry streets. Accounts differed on whether they were already serenading fathers as part of a Mexican immigrant Father’s Day tradition or were on their way to do so. That uncertainty should not erase the larger point: ICE entered a neighborhood on a family holiday and, according to local reporting, detained workers whose morning was tied to one of the most personal rituals of the day.

The raid also reportedly reached the people watching ICE. Near San Pascual and Sola streets, a woman connected to one of the groups monitoring ICE activity was reportedly bear-sprayed by an ICE agent. A spokesperson cited by the Independent specified that bear spray, not pepper spray, was used. That claim remains attributed, but it raises a direct accountability issue: when people documenting federal enforcement are exposed to force, the public record itself becomes harder to protect.

That risk did not appear out of nowhere. Earlier this year, local reporting in Santa Barbara also described ICE officers using force against community observers during an Eastside immigration enforcement operation. That pattern matters because the people watching ICE are part of the public record. When observers, witnesses, or people filming federal agents are pushed, sprayed, threatened, or exposed to harm, the community loses another layer of protection against disappearance, denial, and silence.

Local reporting also said ICE agents apprehended a U.S. citizen during the Father’s Day action and later released him at a hospital in Oxnard, where he was treated for unspecified injuries after it reportedly became apparent that he was a citizen. That allegation remains attributed unless confirmed by records or a named statement. Its public significance is still clear. Immigration enforcement can harm people before the government sorts out who they are, what status they have, or whether they should have been detained at all.

The public safety questions extend beyond the detentions. Monitors cited in the report alleged that ICE vehicles moved through Santa Barbara streets at dangerous speeds, including claims of 80 miles per hour on San Andres Street and speeds above 100 miles per hour entering Highway 101. They also alleged agents performed donuts under a freeway overpass. Those claims remain attributed to monitors, but they belong in the record because raids do not happen inside paperwork. They happen in neighborhoods, on streets, near homes, and around people who did not choose to become part of a federal operation.

Santa Barbara Police Chief Kelly Gordon told the Independent that local police had not been notified ICE was in town and had no calls for service from 1 a.m. onward that matched the Westside allegations. Gordon also said that did not mean the reported events did not happen. That statement leaves an accountability gap: if federal agents moved through the city without local notice, and the clearest public account came from monitors and local reporting afterward, residents are left reconstructing what happened after the raid already passed through.

That is the harm Americans Against ICE tracks. ICE raids are often described as enforcement actions, but the lived impact is wider than a case file. A raid can turn a holiday morning into a public safety event. It can pull musicians, observers, drivers, neighbors, and reported citizens into the same danger field. It can leave hospitals, local officials, and community groups dealing with the aftermath while federal agencies control what they choose to confirm.

The Santa Barbara Father’s Day raids belong in the public record because immigration enforcement does not stay confined to immigration status. It changes the safety of the street. It changes who feels watched. It changes who feels free to work, drive, observe, gather, celebrate, or document what the government is doing.

Immigration enforcement does not end when federal vehicles leave a neighborhood.

It leaves families searching for answers, workers exposed to detention, observers facing force, and communities trying to document what happened before the record disappears.

Americans Against ICE documents these harms because ICE violence is not only physical. It is bureaucratic, public, and reputational — and it can follow families long after federal vehicles leave.

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ICE wants the Supreme Court to let it keep certain immigrants locked in detention for months or years without bond hearings while deportation proceedings are still pending.

The Court has agreed to hear a Trump administration appeal involving lawful permanent residents who were detained for months without a chance to ask for release on bond. A lower court ruled that prolonged detention without bond hearings violated due process protections. The administration is now asking the Supreme Court to reverse that ruling.

This is not a technical court dispute for the people inside detention. A bond hearing can be the only chance to ask a judge to look at whether continued detention is justified. Without that hearing, ICE can keep someone locked up while the immigration case moves slowly through the system.

The case sits inside a larger fight over immigration detention. The Trump administration has already pushed policies that expand detention without bond hearings in other immigration contexts. Immigrant-rights advocates warn that the result is mass detention without meaningful review.

ICE and the government may frame this as detention authority during deportation proceedings. But the harm is direct: people can lose months or years of their lives inside immigration detention before a final decision is reached in their case.

That kind of detention changes everything. It separates families, disrupts work, cuts people off from legal support, and turns pending deportation proceedings into punishment before the case is even over.

The Supreme Court has not ruled yet. But the question now before the Court is severe: whether ICE can be given more power to keep certain immigrants detained for long periods without giving them a real chance to seek release.

ICE detention without bond hearings does not stay inside court filings.

It becomes months or years away from family, work, legal support, and ordinary life while the government keeps people locked inside immigration detention.

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ICE has rewritten detention standards governing immigration detention facilities, including changes that affect detainee labor, communication access, language services, facility admissions, and private detention operators.

The revised standards come as ICE continues expanding detention capacity and relying on private contractors and local jails to hold immigrants. According to AP reporting, ICE said the changes were designed in part to “reduce the burden” on detention operators.

That phrase matters. ICE detention is already built through a web of private prison companies, local jail contracts, federal standards, and limited public oversight. When the agency rewrites rules to reduce burdens on operators, the people most exposed to the consequences are the detained immigrants living under those rules.

One of the most direct changes involves detainee labor. The revised standards make clear that detained people in voluntary work programs are not employees and are not entitled to wages and benefits. Experts cited in reporting said the changes could strengthen contractor defenses in legal fights over detainee labor.

The standards also allow some use of AI tools for noncritical communication or informal interactions with detained people. Critics warned that communication inside detention is not a small administrative detail. Grievances, intake questions, language access, and housing-unit conversations can involve health, safety, abuse, or basic survival inside custody.

ICE framed the revisions as streamlining standards and aligning practices across detention systems. But the public record shows a different pressure point: the agency is revising the rules around detention while private operators continue to profit from holding immigrants.

For detained people, these standards are not paperwork. They shape work, communication, oversight, legal access, disability accommodation, isolation, discipline, and the daily power of guards and contractors inside ICE custody.

A rule change written in bureaucratic language can still change how detention feels on the inside. And when those changes reduce burdens on contractors, Americans Against ICE will document who carries the burden instead.

ICE detention policy does not stay on paper.

It becomes labor without real protection, communication filtered through systems detainees do not control, and rules that private contractors can use while people remain locked inside.

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ICE agents conduct a street enforcement action in New York City. A City Reporter investigation reviewed 430 ICE street arrests in the New York-New Jersey region and found that more than 93% involved Latino people.

An investigation of ICE street arrests in the New York-New Jersey region found that more than 93% of reviewed arrests involved Latino people, raising new allegations that immigration enforcement is operating through a racial-profiling pattern in one of the country’s most diverse regions.

The City Reporter investigation reviewed 430 ICE street arrests across the region. According to the findings, 402 of the people arrested were Latino. That share far exceeded Latinos’ estimated share of the undocumented population in the region, which the investigation reported at about 66%.

The numbers cut through the usual language of “targeted enforcement.” This was not a review of isolated arrests. It was a five-month pattern of ICE street enforcement in New York and New Jersey, including sanctuary jurisdictions where immigrant communities are already forced to navigate surveillance, courthouse arrests, workplace threats, and street-level fear.

Critics and legal experts described the findings as evidence of systemic racial profiling. DHS denied the accusation, but the public record still shows the pattern: ICE street arrests overwhelmingly fell on Latino people in the region reviewed.

That matters because racial profiling in immigration enforcement is not just a data point. It changes how people move through public life. It tells Latino immigrants and Latino communities that a walk down the street, a commute, a courthouse appearance, or an ordinary public moment can become an ICE encounter.

ICE’s denial does not erase the enforcement pattern documented in the review. When more than 93% of reviewed street arrests involve Latino people in a region where Latinos are a much smaller share of the undocumented population, the public record has to name what those arrests show.

This is the work Americans Against ICE exists to document: the raids, arrests, detention systems, private contractors, racialized enforcement patterns, and immigrant communities forced to live under ICE power.

ICE street arrests do not disappear when the news cycle moves on.

They become fear in immigrant neighborhoods, silence in public spaces, and records the government would rather leave scattered.

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Women detained at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention facility in Newark operated by GEO Group, have joined a hunger and labor strike after accusations that a female guard sexually assaulted at least 10 immigrant women.

The strike at Delaney Hall began in May, led by detained immigrants protesting conditions inside the private ICE facility. According to advocates and reporting by Democracy Now, detained women joined the strike in its third week and demanded the removal of the guard accused of sexual assault.

The allegation cuts straight through the usual language of “detention operations.” These are immigrant women held in ICE custody, inside a GEO Group facility, saying a guard accused of sexual assault should not remain in a position of power over detained women.

Advocates also say ICE and facility officials have transferred hunger strikers to other detention centers in retaliation. Those claims should be treated as retaliation allegations, but the pattern is familiar: detained people report abuse, organize inside custody, and then face removal from the place where the abuse was exposed.

Delaney Hall has already been under scrutiny. New Jersey officials sued GEO Group seeking broader health inspection access to the Newark facility, citing concerns over conditions and state oversight. The facility is part of the expanding private detention infrastructure ICE uses to hold immigrants while shielding much of what happens inside from public view.

A guard accused of sexually assaulting detained immigrant women is not a “facility issue.” It is a custody abuse allegation inside a private ICE jail. And when women inside that jail go on strike because they say the accused guard remains employed, the public record should name the institution, the contractor, the harm, and the women forced to fight from inside detention.

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The Afghan wartime ally and father of six died less than 24 hours after ICE took him into custody. His brother says the family still has no explanation.

More than 90 days after Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal died in ICE custody, his family is still waiting for the government to explain what happened.

Paktiawal was 41, a father of six, and an Afghan wartime ally who fought alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan for more than a decade. He came to the United States after years of service beside American soldiers and after the U.S. promised protection to Afghan allies.

In March, ICE took him into custody in Texas. Less than 24 hours later, his family was told he had died at a hospital in Dallas.

His brother, Naseer Paktiawal, said the family has waited long enough.

“When someone dies, there is supposed to be explanation. There’s supposed to be accountability,” Naseer Paktiawal said during a press briefing organized by AfghanEvac, an organization that advocates for Afghan wartime allies.

That demand now carries the story forward. Paktiawal’s death was reported months ago, but his family still does not know what happened after ICE took him into custody, what medical care he received, or why he died before a full day had passed.

Family members say Paktiawal needed an inhaler. They say his wife tried to give it to arresting officers before he died. Because the official cause of death has not been released, that claim remains part of the family’s unanswered demand, not a settled medical conclusion.

Paktiawal was reportedly taken into custody in front of his children while he was taking them to school. Less than a day later, the family received the call that he had died. His children saw him taken. His family was left with grief, questions, and no clear explanation from the agency that had control over him.

DHS has not publicly released the cause of death and says the investigation is ongoing. That answer does not give Paktiawal’s family a timeline of care or an explanation of what happened between his arrest, the family’s reported attempt to provide an inhaler, and his death before a full day had passed.

ICE publicly describes medical care as a detention priority. Paktiawal’s family says the care he needed did not reach him before he died in government custody.

When the government takes custody of a person, it takes control of that person’s movement, access, medical care, and safety. A family should not have to spend months trying to learn basic facts after a loved one dies under that control.

Advocates have described the lack of answers as a betrayal of Afghan allies who fought alongside U.S. forces and were promised safety. Paktiawal’s service deepens that betrayal, but it is not what creates the government’s duty to answer. He was a father and brother who died after ICE took custody of him, and that custody is enough to require accountability.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal said the way to uphold American values is to demand the facts. Shawn VanDiver of AfghanEvac said the family is asking for facts, transparency, and the same answers any family would expect after a loved one died in custody.

Paktiawal’s death also sits inside a broader crisis of ICE custody accountability. Scripps News reported that deaths in ICE custody have surged, oversight inspections of detention centers have dropped, and death reports have grown shorter with less information. That pattern matters because weaker oversight and thinner reporting leave families with fewer facts when they are already grieving.

By this point, the public record should be moving toward clarity. Instead, Paktiawal’s family is still facing the same gap: no clear timeline of care, no full explanation, and no public accounting of what happened after ICE took him into custody.

More than 90 days later, the government still owes Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal’s family a clear public accounting of what happened after ICE took custody of him.

Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal’s family should not be left waiting for basic facts while the government points to an ongoing investigation.

Americans Against ICE documents ICE custody deaths because government custody carries a duty to account for what happens inside it. Every unanswered death leaves a family carrying grief, questions, and the burden of forcing the public record open.

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Friedrich Castillo-Ormeno says one part of the federal government verified that he was back in Peru. ICE still put his name into a New Jersey enforcement story.

That contradiction is the center of this case. It is also why the government’s self-deportation pitch deserves scrutiny. CBP Home asks immigrants to trust the government with departure tracking, location verification, incentive payments, immigration records, and possible future consequences for family paperwork or legal status. If that verification does not protect someone from being pulled back into an enforcement narrative after leaving the country, then the promise of a clean exit is far weaker than the government wants the public to believe.

Castillo-Ormeno, a Peruvian national, told Noticias Telemundo that he left the United States in early March after an immigration judge issued a final removal order in January. According to NBC News and Noticias Telemundo, he said he left with his girlfriend and child, arrived in Peru the next day, and later received CBP Home incentive payments after officials verified that he was back in his home country.

The payment matters because it turns this from a simple dispute over location into a government-records question. Castillo-Ormeno was not only saying he had left. He was saying the government confirmed it and paid him through a federal self-deportation program.

Weeks later, ICE named him in connection with a Manahawkin, New Jersey, enforcement stop in which an ICE officer was allegedly struck by a vehicle and fired his weapon. Castillo-Ormeno was in Peru, according to his account. Relatives began contacting him after his name appeared in connection with the incident, and he told Noticias Telemundo he worried about being tied to something serious from thousands of miles away.

That is not a minor paperwork problem. It is reputational enforcement harm.

The government has power not only when it detains someone, removes someone, or files a charge. It also has power when it names someone publicly, links someone to an enforcement operation, and leaves that person to explain the difference between being a target, a suspect, a driver, a charged defendant, and someone who says he had already complied with the government’s own departure program.

That distinction is necessary here. Castillo-Ormeno should not be described as the driver, and he should not be treated as the person charged in the federal complaint. Federal prosecutors later charged Eduardo Cruz Garcia with assaulting a federal officer after the Manahawkin incident. DHS also said ICE had not claimed Castillo-Ormeno was the driver. According to DHS, officers were conducting a targeted immigration enforcement operation at Castillo-Ormeno’s last known address when they saw someone who looked similar to the target get into a van that left the residence.

That explanation still leaves the accountability question untouched. If the federal government verified Castillo-Ormeno’s return to Peru through CBP Home, why was his name still attached to an enforcement target at a former address in New Jersey?

This is where the story becomes larger than one man. CBP Home is being promoted as a managed exit pathway. The government offers travel assistance and financial incentives to people who leave voluntarily. That pitch depends on more than a plane ticket and a payment. It depends on whether the government’s own records can keep up with the departure it claims to verify.

Castillo-Ormeno’s case raises the opposite possibility. A person can leave, be verified, receive payment, and still have his name appear in an ICE enforcement account connected to a serious incident at a former address. If that can happen, then self-deportation does not necessarily end the reach of immigration enforcement. It may simply move the harm into records, public statements, family paperwork, and future uncertainty.

That matters because immigration enforcement is built on databases, addresses, officer assumptions, agency statements, and public narratives. A stale address can become the basis for a targeted operation. A similar appearance can become the basis for action. A public statement can attach someone’s name to an incident before the full record is clear. A later clarification may not travel as far as the original claim.

The burden then falls on the immigrant and the family to repair what the government put into motion.

Castillo-Ormeno told Noticias Telemundo he feared the incident could affect him later, including any future process connected to returning to the United States or securing documents for his young daughter, who was born in the United States. That fear is not abstract. Immigration records, public allegations, and agency narratives can follow people into applications, background checks, consular processes, custody questions, family documents, and future attempts to correct the record.

This is a form of harm Americans Against ICE tracks because it is easy to miss when the focus stays only on raids, arrests, detention centers, and deportation flights. ICE harm is also bureaucratic. It is also public. It is also reputational. It can follow people through records and statements long after the government claims a case has been resolved.

The government’s verification should mean something. If CBP Home confirmed Castillo-Ormeno was in Peru, the public deserves to know whether ICE had access to that information before the Manahawkin operation. If ICE had access, the public deserves to know why his name remained attached to the target. If ICE did not have access, the public deserves to know why agencies are asking immigrants to trust a self-deportation system that does not reliably protect them from later targeting confusion.

There should also be a correction process with real force. When ICE publicly ties a person’s name to an enforcement event and another person is later charged, the person named should not be left to defend himself through news interviews from another country. The correction should be clear, public, searchable, and strong enough to reduce future harm.

That is the standard the government should face when its own systems create confusion around someone’s name.

Castillo-Ormeno’s case is not about defending ICE’s operation. It is about the damage that happens when immigration enforcement machinery moves faster than accountability. It is about a self-deportation program that asks people to comply while offering no clear public assurance that compliance will protect them from stale addresses, contradictory records, or enforcement narratives that attach their names to later events.

A government that asks immigrants to leave voluntarily cannot also leave them exposed to public claims they must fight from abroad. If verification does not prevent that harm, then the question is not only whether Castillo-Ormeno complied. The question is what the government’s verification was worth.

Immigration enforcement does not end when the government says a case is closed.

It follows people through records, public statements, family paperwork, reputation, and fear. When the government gets the story wrong, immigrants are often left to defend themselves from the damage.

Americans Against ICE documents these harms because ICE violence is not only physical. It is also bureaucratic, public, and reputational — and it can follow families long after the government claims a case is closed.

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Armed ICE agents stormed a family horse-racing event in Wilder, Idaho, while children watched.

Helicopters and armored vehicles descended on La Catedral Arena as federal, state, and local officers moved through the crowd with guns, flashbang grenades, and rubber bullets. Families who had gathered for a community event suddenly found themselves surrounded by immigration enforcement.

Juana Rodriguez, a U.S. citizen, later described the raid as a nightmare. The Marshall Project reported that agents zip-tied her hands and kept her from feeding her three-year-old child for hours. The government said the operation was aimed at illegal gambling. Instead, more than 100 people were arrested, all on civil immigration charges.

That is where this story has to begin: not with the government’s language about operations, targets, or enforcement priorities, but with the children who watched adults with weapons turn a family outing into a trauma scene.

The question is not complicated. Before the raid was approved, who accounted for the children who would be forced to witness it?

Every immigration raid where children are present carries a mental-health consequence. ICE changes the emotional world around the children who watch it happen. Ordinary places become scenes of force. A family event becomes a site of fear. A child learns that safety can disappear without warning.

The government often treats raids, detentions, deportations, and family separations as legal or administrative events. Families experience them as fear, grief, shock, and chronic stress. Children absorb that fear through what they witness at home, at school, and in public spaces, where a knock, a siren, a uniform, or a rumor can become a warning that their family’s life may change.

That harm is often treated by officials as collateral, even though it is part of the enforcement system children are forced to experience. Immigration policy has to be treated as children’s mental-health policy because children are living with the consequences long after agents leave.

The Idaho raid made that harm visible because children were there to witness it. For immigrant families, the mental-health impact of enforcement does not begin or end at one raid scene. It follows families into homes, schools, workplaces, hospitals, and neighborhoods, shaping sleep, trust, public life, and whether parents feel safe enough to ask for help.

ICE enforcement turns uncertainty into a daily condition for children who do not need to understand immigration law to understand fear. The difference between a criminal charge and a civil immigration arrest means little to a child who knows only that someone they love may not come home. Detention can harm children even when they are not the ones placed behind locked doors.

Recent reporting has shown how direct that harm can become. The Marshall Project reported that ICE detained more than 6,200 children during Trump’s second term, including children whose ages and circumstances place them among the most vulnerable people in the immigration system. A separate Marshall Project investigation with MS NOW found that more than 500 babies and toddlers under age three had been detained by ICE since January 2025.

For children, those numbers can become part of memory, behavior, sleep, appetite, school, and trust. A toddler may experience custody through confinement and confusion. An older child may carry the image of a parent’s arrest or the threat of deportation into daily life long before any separation actually happens.

The public-health consequences become clearer when those fears are placed beside the country’s existing youth mental-health crisis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified suicide as one of the leading causes of death for young people, including children and adolescents. Pediatric and psychiatric organizations declared a national emergency in children’s mental health years ago, warning that children were facing rising anxiety, depression, grief, isolation, and crisis.

Immigrant children and children from immigrant families face that crisis while also carrying the added pressure of anti-immigrant rhetoric, family separation, detention threats, economic instability, and bullying tied to immigration status.

When political leaders demean immigrants, mock asylum seekers, describe families as threats, or build policy around mass detention and deportation, children hear it. So do the classmates, neighbors, and adults around them. That language does not stay inside speeches. It moves into classrooms, neighborhoods, playgrounds, and social media, giving cruelty a permission structure.

The death of Jocelynn Rojo Carranza shows what that can mean. Jocelynn was 11 years old when she died by suicide in Texas. CNN reported that her mother said Jocelynn had been bullied by other students who claimed her family was in the country illegally, after rumors and speculation about ICE raids spread at her school.

Her death should not be used as a statistic and then forgotten. It should force a public question about what happens when immigration fear becomes a weapon used against children by other children.

In many homes, that fear is already part of daily life. Children hear classmates threaten deportation, watch parents avoid public agencies out of fear, translate adult panic before they have language for their own, and learn that asking for help can feel dangerous.

Even children with legal status, U.S. citizenship, or mixed-status families can internalize the threat. The state does not have to target a child directly for the child to feel hunted. When enforcement moves through a community, fear spreads beyond the arrest list.

Family separation deepens the harm because enforcement can interrupt even the final moments families should be allowed to share. Arlit Maria Martinez was detained by ICE on her way to work, and two days later, her 15-year-old son died of cancer. She did not get to say goodbye, while her surviving children were left inside a grief that no public-health system can cleanly measure.

A child dying without a detained parent at the bedside is a human consequence of enforcement. Siblings left behind after a parent is taken are not footnotes. They carry the loss, the confusion, the anger, and the terror of knowing that a government decision can interrupt even the most sacred moments of family life.

ICE harm does not stop at the arrest. It moves into the bodies of children who cannot sleep, the schools where they cannot focus, the homes where parents disappear, and the grief that follows families long after the official paperwork is filed.

Parents carry the trauma too. A parent who fears ICE may avoid seeking mental-health care. A parent who survives a raid may blame themselves for not protecting a child from what that child saw. A parent living under deportation threat may constantly calculate which public places are safe, which appointments are necessary, and which risks are too great.

Over time, that fear shapes where families go, what children overhear, whether a parent reports abuse, and whether people feel safe seeking therapy, attending school meetings, appearing in court, or asking for help. When immigration enforcement makes basic survival feel dangerous, mental-health advice becomes hollow because the same system telling families to seek support also makes support feel unsafe.

Community care matters, but it cannot be asked to repair trauma while ICE raids, detention, family separation, and deportation fear keep producing the crisis. Reducing detention, keeping families together, ending armed raids at family events, and refusing to terrorize children in the name of immigration enforcement are public-health interventions.

The government cannot separate ICE policy from children’s mental health. Every public raid, every parent taken from a child, every child placed in detention, and every family forced to live with deportation fear becomes part of the mental-health landscape children are expected to survive.

The Idaho raid should have forced that accounting before the operation was ever approved. Before agents stormed a horse-racing event with children present, officials were willing to accept the risk that families would be surrounded, children would witness armed force, and the terror of that scene would be treated as secondary to the enforcement goal.

By accepting that risk, officials treated the children’s fear as an acceptable cost of the raid.

The story is not only the number of arrests. It is the harm carried by the three-year-old whose mother said she was kept from feeding him, by the children who watched adults zip-tied, and by families who learned that a community gathering could become an immigration raid.

ICE is not only removing people from homes; it is putting fear inside children who are learning that the government can take their family at any moment. That fear is produced by policy, reinforced by rhetoric, carried by children, and serious enough to be treated as a public-health emergency.

Immigration enforcement does not end when agents leave the raid scene.

The harm follows children into classrooms, bedrooms, doctor’s offices, family gatherings, and the quiet moments when they wonder whether someone they love will be taken next. It becomes fear, grief, silence, panic, shame, missed care, and chronic stress no child should be forced to carry.

Americans Against ICE documents these harms because ICE violence does not only exist in detention centers or deportation orders. It lives in the children who watch raids happen, the parents who are taken, the toddlers placed in custody, the families separated at the worst moments of their lives, and the communities told to survive trauma while the government calls it enforcement.

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Federal prosecutors have charged 15 Minnesota anti-ICE activists in a broad conspiracy case tied to protests, patrols, and resistance around immigration enforcement during Operation Metro Surge.

The indictment, announced by U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen and Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Michael McCarthy, accuses the defendants of conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers. Prosecutors say the case centers on activity around the Whipple Federal Building, where ICE is headquartered in Minnesota.

The charges arrive after other federal protest cases in Minnesota have already fallen apart. Federal prosecutors have dismissed or downgraded a significant share of earlier cases brought against anti-ICE protesters, including cases dropped for lack of evidence and one abandoned in a way that led a judge to bar the government from refiling to prevent prosecutorial harassment.

That history matters because the new indictment is not limited to one alleged incident outside one federal building. It reaches across protest planning, Signal messages, blockade logistics, patrol activity, trainings, political language, and alleged confrontations with federal agents.

The Justice Department is using conspiracy law to build a case around anti-ICE organizing.

According to the indictment, the defendants are members or participants in a group called Direct Action Minnesota, also referred to as DAMN. Prosecutors allege that defendants used Signal messages to coordinate meetings, trainings, patrols, and blockade materials connected to anti-ICE actions near the Whipple Federal Building.

The indictment cites plans for “shield” trainings and “de-arrest” trainings, as well as messages about bringing blockade materials to the area. It also describes protesters blocking streets, forming human chains, and flipping a trailer to obstruct roadways near the federal building.

Those allegations have not been tested in court. They are the prosecution’s claims.

What makes the case broader than the individual allegations is the structure prosecutors are building around them. Group chats, meetings, patrol coordination, protest training, and planning for direct action are being presented as evidence of a criminal agreement.

That is where the public danger sits: the infrastructure of protest is being pulled into the architecture of a federal conspiracy case.

Four defendants face additional charges tied to specific alleged conduct. Prosecutors allege that William Morgan and Isaac Sant separately followed ICE officers from the Whipple Building to Hudson, Wisconsin. Both face interstate stalking charges. Morgan is also accused of knocking notes from an ICE agent’s hand and kicking a federal vehicle, leaving dents, leading to additional charges including assault on a federal officer and destruction of federal property.

Another defendant, Natasha Rakotz, is charged with assaulting a federal officer for allegedly brake-checking and side-swiping a federal vehicle while following it. Kyle Wagner, who was already in custody on earlier charges, is accused by prosecutors of posting an inflammatory Instagram video calling on anti-ICE protesters to arm themselves and stop federal agents.

Those allegations are serious and must be reported as allegations. They are not convictions. They are not the full public meaning of the case.

The larger issue is how federal prosecutors are using the most inflammatory claims in the indictment to support a broader theory that anti-ICE organizing belongs inside a conspiracy prosecution.

At the press conference announcing the charges, Rosen declined to say whether any federal agents were injured in relation to the events described in the indictment. That refusal matters because prosecutors are using grave federal charges while leaving a basic injury question unanswered in public.

The federal government has already shown how weak some of its Minnesota protest cases were. According to reporting on Operation Metro Surge cases, more than one-third of federal charges tied to alleged assaults or resistance against federal agents have been dismissed or are moving toward dismissal, and many others have been downgraded.

Last week, prosecutors dropped assault charges against Juan Carlos Rodriguez Romero for lack of evidence. Days later, prosecutors abandoned another assault case against Nasra Ahmed, a U.S. citizen. In Ahmed’s case, the judge barred prosecutors from bringing the charge again to prevent prosecutorial harassment.

That history is not background noise. DOJ already tried to turn anti-ICE protest moments into assault cases. Some of those cases collapsed. Now prosecutors are reaching for something larger: anti-ICE coordination itself as conspiracy.

Operation Metro Surge created the enforcement conditions that produced the rapid response networks, community patrols, and public resistance now being pulled into the indictment. People in the Twin Cities organized because ICE activity was tearing through communities, and because federal agents were operating inside a national deportation crackdown.

Community patrols and rapid response networks were not created in a vacuum. They emerged because people were trying to document ICE activity, warn neighbors, follow federal vehicles, track raids, and keep immigrant communities from being taken quietly.

The indictment now turns that protest ecosystem into evidence. It treats group chats, trainings, planning meetings, patrols, and blockade preparation not only as signs of political resistance, but as components of a criminal theory.

The issue is not whether every allegation will survive in court. The issue is that the federal government is choosing to turn a wide field of anti-ICE activity into one sweeping prosecution.

Federal prosecutors and HSI officials have tried to present the case as a line between lawful protest and criminal conduct. But the government’s line is not neutral when the government is the actor using ICE-adjacent power, criminal charges, surveillance, press conferences, and federal court to punish people who organized against immigration enforcement.

Terms like “clashes” or “unrest” flatten the power imbalance and move the moral center toward federal agents instead of the anti-ICE organizers facing a sweeping indictment after months of aggressive immigration enforcement and failed protest prosecutions.

The federal government is now using the case to send a message beyond the 15 defendants. The message is aimed at the infrastructure of resistance: the people who watch ICE, follow vehicles, warn neighbors, show up at federal buildings, organize rapid response, and refuse to let deportation machinery operate without public opposition.

If anti-ICE organizing can be treated as conspiracy, community defense becomes a target before a person ever steps into a courtroom. Under that theory, group chats, trainings, protest plans, patrols, and demands to stop ICE can all be pulled into the government’s evidence map.

That is how repression works when it leaves the street and enters the courtroom.

The Justice Department’s escalation shifts public attention away from the enforcement system people were protesting: raids, detention, deportations, family separation, surveillance, and the violence of immigration enforcement. The federal government narrows the story to the conduct it wants to prosecute while moving ICE’s underlying harm out of the center.

This case reaches across alleged incidents, protest messages, direct action planning, federal vehicle tracking, social media posts, and community organizing. It presents anti-ICE resistance as a coordinated criminal project. It arrives after prosecutors already had to retreat from other Minnesota protest cases.

For the defendants, the consequences are immediate: arrests, detention, federal charges, legal exposure, and the weight of being named in a major indictment. For anti-ICE organizers beyond the case, the message is also clear. The federal government is watching the networks that respond to ICE, and it is willing to use conspiracy charges against them.

Anti-ICE activists are being criminalized for resistance to a deportation system that already harms immigrant communities. DOJ, HSI, and ICE-adjacent enforcement power are turning protest activity into federal prosecution after earlier cases collapsed under scrutiny.

The case is not only about what prosecutors say happened outside the Whipple Federal Building. It is about how far the federal government is willing to go to punish people who organize against ICE.

Immigration enforcement does not end at the raid scene.

It moves into indictments, conspiracy charges, surveillance of organizers, press conferences, courtrooms, and federal cases built around the people who show up to resist ICE.

The Minnesota charges show how DOJ power can be used against anti-ICE organizers after the streets have already been cleared. Protest logistics, rapid response work, community patrols, group chats, trainings, and blockade planning can be pulled into a federal conspiracy frame and used to punish resistance.

Americans Against ICE documents that machinery because ICE violence does not only harm the people taken by ICE agents. It also targets the people who try to stop the raids, document them, follow the vehicles, warn the community, and refuse to let immigration enforcement happen quietly.

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Gov. Bill Lee’s administration is attaching an immigration reporting threat to a medical program used by sick and disabled children.

Families whose children rely on Tennessee’s Children’s Special Services program were told last week that if the program continues paying for care after June 30, their child’s information may be shared with the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, according to Tennessee Lookout reporting. The department houses the state’s Centralized Immigration Enforcement Division, which works with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The notice reached about 400 families whose children do not have permanent legal status. Many of those children are medically fragile. Some rely on feeding tubes, ventilators, metabolic formula, medications, specialists, therapy, and other supports that cannot be replaced by a last-minute handoff or a trip to the emergency room.

The choice placed before families is not really a choice: continue care and risk exposure to immigration enforcement, or leave the program and risk losing the medical support that keeps a child stable.

Children’s Special Services is a decades-old public program for children with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and, in some cases, terminal diagnoses. It serves uninsured and underinsured children across Tennessee and helps pay for care that families often cannot obtain on their own, including hospitalizations, specialists, therapists, medications, medical supplies, social workers, and in-home support.

More than 4,600 children are enrolled statewide. The reporting threat targets a smaller group of immigrant children without permanent legal status, but the harm is not abstract. It lands on families already managing complex medical needs and already living with the fear that contact with government systems can expose them to immigration enforcement.

That is what makes Tennessee’s decision so dangerous. The state is not simply changing paperwork. It is attaching immigration fear to pediatric medical care.

Among the families affected is Gabriella’s. Tennessee Lookout identified her only by her first name because she fears her family could be targeted by immigration officials for speaking publicly. Her family has a pending asylum claim.

Her 10-year-old son has complex medical conditions, including spina bifida, autism, and kidney disease. He uses a wheelchair and has relied on Children’s Special Services for seven years.

After receiving the state’s notice, Gabriella and her husband decided to withdraw him from the program.

The decision came from fear. Fear that continuing care could expose the family to immigration officials. Fear that detention would interrupt her son’s care. Fear that the system asking for information about her child could become the system that separates him from the people keeping him alive.

“I don’t want immigration to come to my house,” Gabriella told the Tennessee Lookout. “I don’t want them to put us in detention. In detention, my son wouldn’t get any care.”

She later used a translation app to explain what she wanted people to understand.

“They are innocent children,” the translation read.

That sentence is the center of this story. The children affected by Tennessee’s decision are not immigration policy talking points. They are children with kidney disease, cancer treatment, disabilities, feeding tubes, ventilators, therapies, braces, catheters, medications, and parents trying to keep them safe.

The state’s notice cited a new Tennessee law that the Department of Health says requires reporting immigrants seeking or receiving public benefits who do not have legal permanent status. Legal advocates for low-income patients dispute that interpretation and say the law applies only to adults.

That dispute matters because the state’s interpretation is already changing family decisions. The Tennessee Justice Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy firm, has been searching for plaintiffs willing to join a legal challenge. As of Friday, according to Tennessee Lookout, the group had not found a family willing to join.

Michele Johnson, the organization’s executive director, said families are scared. Even if parents are not fully identified in public court filings, their identities would have to be shared with lawyers defending the state during litigation.

That is how enforcement pressure works even before a raid, detention, or deportation order. It can make families afraid to seek help, afraid to challenge the state, and forced to weigh a child’s medical stability against the possibility that a government form could expose them to immigration enforcement.

Public health workers and providers are now trying to prevent children from losing care. Dr. Morgan McDonald, who sits on Nashville’s Metro Health Board, described nurses scrambling for ventilators, feeding tubes, metabolic formula, and other supports to keep children out of the hospital and alive.

Public health staff have been working around the clock, she said, but the resources available to families are shrinking.

That scramble is the consequence of Tennessee’s decision. A child who needed care last week still needs care this week. Feeding tubes, catheters, braces, medications, specialists, and infection-prevention care do not become optional because the state attached immigration reporting to the program.

The Republican sponsor who defended the health department’s interpretation pointed to emergency rooms as an alternative, saying federal protections for emergency and lifesaving medical services remain in place.

That answer collapses when placed next to the actual needs of the children in this program.

Emergency rooms may treat emergencies. They do not replace ongoing specialty care. They do not replace feeding tube supplies, ventilator support, metabolic formula, kidney medications, catheters, annual leg braces, physical therapy, in-home care, social workers, or the care coordination that keeps medically fragile children stable before a crisis becomes an emergency.

Gabriella made that point plainly. Her son needs therapies and doctors the family cannot afford. Emergency rooms do not provide the ongoing supports stacked inside his bedroom: catheters, gloves, diapers, kidney medication, infection prevention medication, leg braces, and equipment to help lift him out of bed.

“My husband pays taxes,” she told Tennessee Lookout. “We are not trying to take anything from other people. We are just trying to help our son, as any parent would.”

That is the reality Tennessee’s policy is pressuring families to abandon.

The Tennessee Department of Health did not respond to repeated requests for information from Tennessee Lookout last week. State Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Nashville Democrat, said the department also stopped answering her questions, citing potential litigation.

Campbell said lawmakers have a right and obligation to know whether state agencies are operating within their authority, especially when 400 seriously ill children may have been swept into immigration reporting beyond what the law requires.

The lack of answers adds another layer of harm. Families are being forced to make urgent medical decisions while the state refuses to fully explain how it is applying the law, what information will be shared, when it will be shared, and what protections, if any, exist for children who depend on the program.

That uncertainty is not separate from the policy. It is part of the pressure.

For families already afraid of immigration enforcement, the line between a health department notice and an enforcement threat is not theoretical. Gabriella said that since immigration sweeps in Nashville detained more than 100 people, she and her husband usually drive separately so their children do not lose both parents if one of them is detained. They travel together only to church on Sundays.

Each day, when her husband leaves for work, they embrace and pray for his safe return.

That is the atmosphere Tennessee is placing around a children’s medical program. Not a neutral benefits update. Not ordinary verification. A reporting threat delivered to families whose children need care.

Immigration enforcement does not have to enter a home to change how a family lives. It can shape how parents drive, how they respond to letters, whether they keep appointments, whether they seek legal help, and whether they trust public health systems designed to keep children alive.

Tennessee’s policy shows how state enforcement infrastructure can reach medically fragile children through a health department envelope.

It also shows how immigration fear can make families disappear from care before the state ever has to formally remove them. Families can withdraw from the program before any formal enforcement action occurs. Children can lose support, nurses and social workers can be left scrambling, and hospitals can become the fallback for problems that could have been prevented.

For the families affected, the deadline is not an administrative date. It is a medical cliff.

June 30 is the point at which parents must decide whether to keep accepting help through Children’s Special Services knowing the state says information may be reported to an immigration enforcement office. For a child in the middle of chemotherapy, dependent on a feeding tube, using a ventilator, or living with a complex disability, that kind of deadline can destabilize an entire care plan.

The state created that pressure. Tennessee officials chose to apply the reporting requirement to a children’s medical program, sent the notice, and placed the burden on families already caring for some of the sickest children in the state.

The children did not create this crisis. They are the ones being made to carry it.

Immigration enforcement does not only happen when agents knock on doors or stop people in the street.

It can move through health departments, benefit offices, reporting rules, forms, databases, and deadlines that force families to choose between the care their children need and the fear of being exposed to immigration authorities.

Tennessee’s policy shows how enforcement pressure can reach a medically fragile child without an ICE agent ever entering the room. A program built to help sick and disabled children stay stable can become another place where immigrant families are made to feel unsafe.

Americans Against ICE documents these systems because the harm is not limited to raids. It reaches hospitals, schools, county offices, detention networks, public benefits, family homes, and the care systems people depend on to survive.

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Nancy Martinez was taking her children to school when masked federal immigration agents surrounded her car outside her home in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood.

Her daughter and son were already buckled into their seats. Moments later, Martinez was in handcuffs and placed in the back of a vehicle. Her children were left outside, clinging to each other and sobbing as their mother was taken away.

One year and six days later, Martinez is suing the United States.

The federal complaint, filed in Connecticut’s U.S. District Court and announced Monday by Yale Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic, seeks redress for the arrest, the deportation, and the trauma Martinez says federal agents inflicted on her family.

Martinez’s lawsuit is about more than the moment federal agents detained her. It is about the damage that followed her children home.

Martinez, who is originally from Mexico, had lived in the United States for 15 years before she was detained on June 9, 2025. According to the complaint and statements made during Monday’s press conference, she was 37 at the time and was taking her 13-year-old daughter, Monse, and 8-year-old son to school when agents approached.

Martinez said through a translator that masked agents surrounded the car and placed her in tight handcuffs. She said she only understood she was being deported when an agent made a motion with his hands that looked like a plane taking off.

“Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw looking out the window,” Martinez said through a translator. Her children, she said, were clinging to each other and crying out for her as she was driven farther away.

According to Michael Wishnie, a Yale Law professor and supervising attorney for Martinez, she spent about a month in immigration detention before being deported to Mexico City.

Now she is speaking about the case from Mexico by Zoom while her children remain in the United States.

“It pains me to know I cannot give my daughter a hug after she walks across the stage or help with her hair on her milestone birthday,” Martinez said, referring to her daughter’s quinceañera.

That is what family separation looks like after the agents leave: missed graduations, birthdays prepared from another country, school mornings changed, and children left to carry fear after their mother has been removed from daily life.

The complaint says the damage to Martinez’s children has been profound.

Her son, now 9, was described in the lawsuit as having changed from a “bubbly child” into a boy who regularly interrupts class with sobs. Monse, now 14, was described as “a shell of herself,” withdrawn, irritable, and reticent. Martinez herself has begun taking antidepressants and sleep medication to cope with the separation from her children, according to the complaint.

At Monday’s press conference, Monse spoke about the moment her mother was taken.

“One second she was standing next to me. The next second agents were taking her away,” she said.

She also described what the separation has done to her brother.

“He is constantly scared, and he never wants to leave my side,” Monse said.

That is the harm the lawsuit asks a federal court to recognize.

The complaint seeks redress from the United States for what it describes as “the abusive manner in which the agents abducted Ms. Martinez off the street, the terror and trauma they inflicted on her family, and the reckless disregard the agents demonstrated for her and her children.”

The lawsuit also alleges that federal agents used scare tactics intended to intimidate Martinez and other migrants. The complaint cites statements from President Donald Trump, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as part of its argument that federal agencies sought to create an atmosphere of fear that discouraged migrants from asserting their legal rights.

The complaint also alleges that ICE targeted New Haven to punish the city for being a sanctuary jurisdiction.

That allegation matters because immigration enforcement is often described as if it is only paperwork, warrants, detainers, or removal orders. Martinez’s lawsuit describes something more direct: masked agents taking a mother in front of her children, a family left traumatized, and a city allegedly targeted because of its sanctuary policies.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, and National Immigration Law Center President Kica Matos were among the speakers at Monday’s press conference, held in a Yale Law School classroom.

“The administration said it was gonna be deporting the worst of the worst,” Blumenthal said. “Nancy Martinez did everything right. ICE did everything wrong.”

Matos spoke directly to Monse.

“Monse, you are a badass,” Matos said. “Your courage, both when it came to fighting for your mom and protecting your brother, is nothing short of remarkable.”

Then Matos named the harm plainly.

“Arresting a mother in front of her children and leaving them alone on the street — that is not law enforcement. That is cruelty in uniform.”

DHS did not respond to the publication’s questions about why masked agents forcibly detained Martinez outside her home instead of issuing a notice to surrender for deportation.

The legal record also includes a state case from the months before Martinez’s arrest. According to the complaint, Martinez had been attending state court hearings after being arrested by city police in March 2025 and charged with assault in the third degree and breach of peace in the second degree following an altercation with her sister-in-law over a babysitting dispute. The lawsuit says the state dropped all charges in exchange for Martinez attending anger management classes, which she began in May.

That detail belongs in the record, but it is not what Martinez’s federal lawsuit is asking the court to decide.

Her complaint is focused on the manner of the arrest, the trauma to her children, the alleged use of intimidation, and the decision to remove a mother from her family in a way the lawsuit says caused lasting harm.

Family separation does not end when a deportation is complete. It continues in the children left behind, the milestones missed, and the ordinary routines that no longer feel ordinary after a parent is taken.

For Martinez’s family, the damage described in the complaint is not abstract. It is a child crying in class. It is a teenager becoming withdrawn. It is a mother watching from another country as her daughter grows up without her there.

That is what Martinez is asking a federal court to see.

ICE did not only remove Nancy Martinez from the United States. Federal agents took a mother from her children in the street, and the family says the damage followed them home.

Now that family is asking the United States to answer for it.

Immigration enforcement does not end when agents leave the street. It continues through family separation, childhood trauma, deportation, fear, missed milestones, and the long aftermath carried by the people left behind.

Americans Against ICE documents that harm — the raids, arrests, detention systems, deportations, contractors, county partnerships, and family trauma that official statements often flatten or erase.

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Gabriela Soto was already carrying the weight of detention before Delaney Hall guards began blocking her family from visits.

Her husband has been detained inside the Newark, New Jersey, ICE detention center since January. In the months since, Soto has tried to comfort heartbroken children, pay thousands of dollars connected to asylum cases, and make regular weekend visits so her family can stay connected to the person ICE has taken from their daily life.

But Soto says Delaney Hall has rejected her family again and again over clothing.

More than 10 times, she said, either she or her children have been told they could not visit because of what they were wearing. On one visit, she said guards nearly rejected her 11-month-old baby over a onesie. On another, she said her four-year-old daughter was blocked because she wore leggings. When Soto asked why the clothing was not allowed, she said guards called it too “provocative.”

“How is that provocative if she’s only four years old?” Soto said, referring to her daughter.

That question sits at the center of the harm. This is not just a story about shoes, leggings, dresses, or detention-center rules. It is about an ICE detention center where families say clothing enforcement has become another way to separate detained people from the spouses, children, parents, siblings, and relatives trying to reach them.

Delaney Hall is operated by GEO Group under ICE detention authority. In recent weeks, the facility has drawn national attention after protests outside the center, reports of a detainee hunger strike inside, and legal action by the state of New Jersey seeking greater access for health inspectors. New Jersey has alleged problems involving food and drink preparation and storage, and legal filings have referenced a report of possible tuberculosis-control concerns. The Department of Homeland Security has said inspectors were granted access and has denied that there is a hunger strike.

Those conditions matter because visitation does not happen in isolation. Families arrive at Delaney Hall already afraid, already exhausted, already carrying legal costs, detention stress, and uncertainty about whether their loved one will remain in New Jersey, be transferred, or be deported. Then they face another gate: a dress code that visitors and advocates say is enforced in ways that are arbitrary, invasive, and humiliating.

The facility’s rules resemble prison visitation policies, banning clothing described as form-fitting or revealing, including leggings, open-toed shoes, pants with holes, and other items. “Gang colors,” which are not clearly defined in the public rules, are also prohibited. The dress code says it applies to visitors age 12 and older, yet families and advocates say Delaney Hall has rejected much younger children, including preschool and elementary-aged girls, over clothing such as frocks and leggings.

That gap between written policy and reported practice is where families say the cruelty lives. A rule that appears on paper as security becomes, at the gate, a shifting test of obedience. Visitors say they can follow the rules one week and be rejected the next. They say one guard will allow an item of clothing while another will block it. They say every delay cuts into visitation time with loved ones who are already tense, isolated, and detained.

For families, minutes matter. A delayed visit is not a minor inconvenience when someone is locked inside an ICE facility. It is time stolen from a child trying to see a parent, a spouse trying to hold a family together, or a relative trying to reassure someone who does not know what will happen next.

Valeria, a young mother visiting her baby’s father at Delaney Hall, said she had been rejected approximately 10 times over dress-code issues. She said the rules seemed to change depending on which officer was working. She also described visits being delayed for hours, cut short, or threatened with cancellation if she arrived late.

That is how detention reaches beyond the detained person. It trains families to move carefully, speak carefully, dress carefully, arrive early, avoid questions, and accept humiliation because the price of objecting may be losing the visit altogether.

Soto described one of the clearest examples of that power. On her daughter’s fourth birthday, she brought the child to Delaney Hall to see her father. Her daughter had made a drawing for him. Soto said guards refused to let the drawing in. When she handed it over so they could check it, she said the guards ripped it in front of the child, who burst into tears.

“She was destroyed,” Soto said.

According to Soto’s account, a child came to see her detained father with a birthday drawing and left watching that drawing torn apart. That is not ordinary visitation enforcement. It is the kind of humiliation that turns a family visit into another site of punishment.

Advocates outside Delaney Hall have responded by building a kind of emergency clothing station at the gate. Volunteers with #EyesOnIce have handed out free clothes to visitors who were rejected, offering pants, shirts, shoes, and other items so families can change and try again. Their bins have reportedly included everything from baby-sized clothing to plus-sized sweatpants. In the summer, rejected Crocs and sandals can pile up outside the facility as families try to comply with rules they say are inconsistently applied.

That volunteer work has allowed many visitors to see loved ones they otherwise would have been blocked from reaching. But the fact that such a system is needed is itself an indictment. Families should not need an outside clothing bank to survive a detention-center visitation policy. Children should not need emergency wardrobe changes to see a detained parent. Spouses should not have to run through rain, borrow shoes, and return shivering to a gate because one guard objects to footwear another guard might allow.

The clothing rules also carry a gendered humiliation that should not be ignored. Families say women and girls have been told that leggings, dresses, bodysuits, shorts, or other clothing are inappropriate or “provocative.” When that logic is reportedly applied to a four-year-old child, the harm becomes impossible to excuse as ordinary security. It becomes a system projecting suspicion onto children and then using that suspicion to block family contact.

That is why this cannot be treated as a small visitation problem. It is another form of punishment.

ICE detention already separates families by putting people behind walls, fences, locked doors, and transfer systems. When visitation barriers are layered on top of that separation, the punishment expands. It reaches the child waiting outside. It reaches the spouse paying legal fees. It reaches the mother changing clothes in a parking lot. It reaches the elderly relative rejected over shoes. It reaches everyone who learns that seeing someone they love depends on the discretion of guards at the door.

Delaney Hall’s operator, GEO Group, has directed questions about the facility to ICE, according to reporting. ICE and DHS have not answered every allegation raised by families and advocates, and DHS has denied some claims about conditions inside the facility. Those denials belong in the record. But they do not erase the pattern described by visitors: families arriving to see detained loved ones, being rejected over clothing, losing time, borrowing clothes, trying again, and learning that visitation itself can become a site of control.

For Americans Against ICE, the public record here is not only what happens inside the detention center. It is also what happens at the gate.

The gate is where children are told they cannot enter. The gate is where spouses are delayed. The gate is where guards decide whether a skirt, a shoe, a onesie, a pair of leggings, or a drawing can become a reason to keep a family apart. The gate is where detention extends itself outward, turning family contact into another test families must survive.

That is the harm official language often hides. A dress code sounds administrative. A visitation policy sounds routine. A security rule sounds neutral. But when families say those rules are used to block children from seeing parents, humiliate women and girls, and cut into the limited time detained people have with loved ones, the language must change.

This is family separation by procedure.

A detention center that can treat a child’s leggings as a visitation problem is not simply enforcing order. It is extending punishment to the family outside the fence.

ICE detention does not stop at the cell door. It reaches spouses, children, visitors, legal cases, bond money, family contact, and every moment a loved one has to beg for access through a system built to control them.

Americans Against ICE documents the harm behind immigration enforcement — the raids, detention systems, county jail contracts, private detention centers, family separation, and public trauma that official statements often flatten or erase.

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Los Angeles can look normal again if you do not look too closely.

The restaurants are open. Street vendors are back on corners. Families are gathering for graduations. Music is playing again in neighborhoods that, one year ago, were filled with fear as federal immigration agents swept through workplaces, streets, Home Depot parking lots, garment shops, and immigrant communities.

But normal is not the same as healed.

According to Guardian reporting on the one-year aftermath of the raids, Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen from East Los Angeles, still remembers federal agents pinning him against a gate and refusing to accept that he was born in the United States. He still notices white vans with tinted windows. He still carries the memory of a city where immigration enforcement suddenly became visible, mobile, and unpredictable.

His story is not only about one mistaken stop or one terrifying day. It is part of a larger public record of what the Los Angeles raids left behind: fear, lost work, separated families, elevated detention numbers, legal challenges, and neighborhoods still adjusting to the reality that federal force can return at any time.

Last June, federal immigration agents descended on Los Angeles in a wave of raids that reshaped the city’s daily life. Guardian reporting described ICE and Border Patrol agents moving through workplaces, car washes, garment warehouses, day-labor sites, churches, and neighborhoods. National Guard troops entered the city. Protests erupted. Attorneys scrambled to locate detained people before they were transferred out of state or removed from the country. Mutual aid networks formed as immigrants became afraid to leave their homes.

The raids were presented as enforcement. For many Angelenos, they became a rupture.

People were not only arrested. Families lost income. Workers disappeared from job sites. Businesses lost customers. Children were told they could not safely visit parents. Spouses were deported. Relatives searched for loved ones in detention systems that moved faster than families and lawyers could respond.

That is why the story of Los Angeles cannot be reduced to the day agents arrived. The more important question is what remained after they moved on.

Gavidia’s life changed after agents came to the car lot where he worked. His account later became part of a class-action lawsuit challenging racial profiling by federal immigration agents in the Los Angeles area. Afterward, the neighborhood no longer felt safe. Business declined. He eventually had to close his used-car refurbishing business and dealership.

For the first time in years, he had to look for a job working for someone else.

That is the kind of damage that rarely appears in official enforcement statements. A raid count can list arrests. A press release can describe targets. A federal agency can claim it is pursuing public safety. But the public record has to include what happens after agents leave: businesses interrupted, families destabilized, children kept away, and citizens and noncitizens alike living with the fear of being mistaken, targeted, or taken.

Los Angeles was not only a site of raids. It became a warning.

After federal agents moved through the city, similar tactics were reported in other cities, with workplace targeting, roving patrols, aggressive arrests, and militarized presence becoming part of a broader immigration enforcement pattern. What happened in Los Angeles was not an isolated enforcement moment. It showed how far the immigration machinery was willing to go in public space.

The damage is visible in neighborhoods like MacArthur Park, where day laborers still gather near Home Depot hoping to find work. Last year, federal agents targeted Home Depot locations across the region. Guardian reporting described masked agents arriving in white vans and arresting nearly two dozen people at one site. Later, despite a federal court order meant to halt indiscriminate raids in the region, agents returned to the same area using a yellow rental truck, according to that reporting.

For workers, the message was clear: even ordinary places to seek work could become enforcement traps.

That fear changes how a city functions. Workers stay home. Families lose wages. Businesses slow down. Customers disappear. People weigh every errand against the possibility of detention. A parking lot becomes a risk. A van becomes a warning. A routine check-in becomes a possible arrest.

In the fashion district, the scars took another form. The district’s fabric shops, garment businesses, warehouses, tailors, and workshops rely heavily on immigrant labor and immigrant customers. When agents raided Ambiance Apparel, dozens of workers were arrested, including members of Indigenous Zapotec families. The raid rippled outward through families, campaigns for release, legal fights, and businesses that suddenly had to operate under fear.

For shop owners, the harm was economic as well as emotional. Orders were canceled. Foot traffic fell. Workers stayed away. Entire business corridors felt the impact of raids that were never confined to the individuals taken into custody.

That is one of the central truths of immigration enforcement: raids are never limited to the people arrested. They strike families, workplaces, customers, tenants, children, neighborhoods, and local economies. They produce fear as a public condition.

The detention system shows the same pattern. Before last year’s raids, fewer than 1,000 people were detained in ICE’s Los Angeles area of responsibility on a given day, according to data cited by the Guardian. After the raids began, that number more than doubled and remained elevated.

That does not mean every later detention can be traced to one raid. But it does show that the raids marked a turning point. The operation did not disappear into the past. It became part of a broader detention expansion that continued to shape people’s lives long after the first arrests.

Inside detention, the consequences deepened. At the Adelanto detention center, detainees began a hunger strike in May to protest conditions including murky drinking water, moldy food, and lack of medical care, according to advocates cited in the Guardian’s reporting. The Department of Homeland Security has denied there is a hunger strike. Attorneys and immigrant-rights groups have described detention conditions as punitive and coercive, with some detainees feeling pressured to abandon their immigration cases simply to escape confinement.

Bond has become another weapon of pressure. Advocates cited in the reporting said immigration judges have increasingly set bonds far above the minimum, sometimes at $15,000 or $20,000, forcing families and community groups to raise large sums simply to get loved ones released. For people trapped inside detention, the system can become a choice between prolonged confinement, impossible bond amounts, and deportation pressure.

That is the infrastructure behind the raids.

The public may see agents in the street for a day or a week. But the deeper machinery continues in detention centers, bond hearings, transfer systems, court backlogs, deportation orders, and families trying to locate loved ones before it is too late.

The legal fight over the raids is also still alive. A federal court initially ordered agents to stop indiscriminate raids and racial profiling in the region. The Supreme Court later overturned that ruling. Immigrant-rights groups and civil-liberties advocates are continuing to challenge the federal government’s actions, arguing that Angelenos were targeted based on race, language, job site, and appearance.

That fight matters because the raids did not only raise immigration questions. They raised constitutional questions. Who can be stopped? Who can be questioned? Who is presumed deportable because of where they work, what language they speak, what neighborhood they live in, or how they look?

For Americans Against ICE, that is the public record that must not be lost.

The Los Angeles raids were not just a sequence of arrests. They were a demonstration of how immigration enforcement turns cities into zones of suspicion. They showed how quickly workplaces can become targets, how easily families can be separated, how fast people can disappear into detention, and how long the damage can last after the spectacle ends.

A year later, Los Angeles is still living with that damage.

Gavidia is trying to rebuild. Workers are still looking for jobs. Families are still missing people. Advocates are still raising bond money. Attorneys are still fighting racial profiling claims. Detainees are still describing dangerous conditions. Neighborhoods are still carrying the memory of vans, agents, arrests, and fear.

The raids left Los Angeles.

The damage did not.

This reporting matters because immigration raids do not end when agents leave the street. They continue through detention, deportation, debt, business loss, family separation, medical neglect, legal backlogs, and the fear left behind in neighborhoods forced to live under threat.

Americans Against ICE documents the harm behind immigration enforcement — the raids, detention systems, county jail contracts, labor targeting, family separation, and public trauma that official statements often flatten or erase.

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A roof-repair job in Bemidji became a scene of fear when federal immigration agents surrounded a housing development where immigrant workers were repairing storm-damaged homes, sending roofers running from rooftops and into nearby woods as residents watched from their windows and yards.

The workers had been repairing roofs at the Villas at Vista North, a subdivision of 127 townhouses, after last summer’s derecho ripped through the area with winds reported at 120 miles per hour, destroying millions of trees and damaging homes. The work was part of a long recovery process for homeowners who had gone through insurance claims and waited for repairs. Instead, residents saw federal agents swarm the site, workers scatter, and a neighborhood repair project turn into an immigration raid.

Ryan Lamusga, owner of the veteran-owned Rhino Roofing and Siding, said he had assembled a crew of about 30 men for the Bemidji work. After the raid, he said his crew was reduced to seven. Lamusga said more than 20 workers were in custody and that workers jumped from roofs and ran when agents arrived, but the neighborhood had been surrounded.

The harm was not abstract for the people who witnessed it. Patty Eichstadt, 79, said she saw a young man jump from her roof and run. She described crying and yelling at ICE to leave, saying the workers were “just kids” and “just working.” Eichstadt said she had spoken with workers in Spanish while they were working on her roof and remembered them singing as they worked. What shook her was not only that agents came, but that the workers she had seen as happy and working were suddenly being chased, detained, and removed.

Eichstadt said one worker told agents he had papers, but was taken anyway. Her account matters because it cuts directly against the clean official language that often follows immigration raids. The public is told these actions are targeted, precise, and limited. Residents described something far more chaotic: men running, agents moving through a residential neighborhood, and workers pleading that they had documentation while still being taken into custody.

Other residents described the same sense of shock. Sisters and retired teachers Jean Weyer and Betty Novotney said they were stunned to see masked agents moving through the neighborhood. Novotney said the scene was not what the country should be doing, saying people should be working together rather than being ripped apart. Weyer said the roofers had been working since early morning and were rarely off the roof before she suddenly saw several of them running past her window with ICE agents behind them.

Weyer said she heard some workers yelling that they had cards and papers, but that they were still taken. Her account does not prove every person detained had lawful status, and it should not be stretched beyond what witnesses reported. But it does show the central accountability problem: residents saw a raid that appeared broader and more frightening than the official framing of a narrow enforcement action.

The detention trail also matters. Lamusga said he received an updated list from a federal agent showing that 11 men from Mexico were transferred to the Crow Wing County jail and 11 were transferred to the Kandiyohi County jail. Both counties are among the Minnesota counties that contract with ICE to hold detainees. Lamusga said he was still trying to locate other workers and bond people out while a much smaller crew continued the roofing work.

A raid does not end when agents leave the neighborhood. It continues in jail transfers, bond efforts, missing information, frightened families, interrupted jobs, and communities trying to figure out where people were taken. For the workers, the raid meant detention. For the neighborhood, it meant watching men flee from rooftops. For the employer, it meant trying to locate people in a detention system that can quickly scatter workers across county jails.

Bemidji city officials said local police did not coordinate with or participate in the federal operation. Mayor Jorge Prince said no requests were made of the Bemidji Police Department, and that because the action was a federal immigration operation, the city had not been given additional information. The city also confirmed a separate ICE traffic stop early Friday where an unknown number of people were detained.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment about the raid. State Rep. Bidal Duran, a Republican from Bemidji, said he spoke with ICE officials who described the action as focused on specific people with prior removal orders or other immigration violations. He said ICE told him no additional operations were planned in the Bemidji area and called it a precise, intelligence-driven effort rather than a broad sweep.

That official framing belongs in the record, but it cannot be allowed to erase what residents and the employer described. Lamusga said federal agents were detaining people and then letting some go after checking whether they were legal, which he said meant workers were being stopped based on how they looked. Witnesses saw roofers running past windows. Neighbors reported people hiding in their yards. Those are not minor details around the edges of a clean operation. They are the lived reality of how the raid landed on a neighborhood.

The raid also exposes a labor pattern underneath the enforcement scene. These workers were not hiding from work. They were doing it in public, on roofs, in a town still repairing storm damage from a destructive derecho. Construction, roofing, agriculture, cleaning, food service, and disaster recovery all rely heavily on immigrant labor, while the same workers remain visible targets for immigration enforcement. The economy uses their labor, then enforcement systems turn that visibility into vulnerability.

Lamusga said the roofing industry relies on immigrant workers and acknowledged that undocumented workers are part of the industry. His statement reflects a broader contradiction within immigration enforcement: immigrant labor is treated as necessary when homes need repair, food needs harvesting, buildings need cleaning, and disaster damage needs rebuilding, but the workers themselves can be criminalized and removed in public displays of federal power.

That contradiction is why the Bemidji raid is not just a local story about one job site. It is a worker story, a community story, and an immigration enforcement story. It shows what happens when federal agents bring detention power into a residential neighborhood where people are repairing homes, singing on rooftops, talking with residents, and trying to earn a living.

The protest that followed made clear that some Bemidji residents understood the harm as more than paperwork. People gathered near the Paul Bunyan and Babe statues with signs and chants saying immigrants were welcome. One resident held a sign that read “ICE harassing documented workers.” Another described the raid as “malarkey” and pointed to the country’s own immigrant history. The public record may not confirm every claim made in protest, but the community response showed that residents did not experience the raid as distant federal procedure. They experienced it as something that entered their neighborhood and hurt people they had just watched working.

For Americans Against ICE, the public record here is not only that federal agents detained workers. It is that a repair job became a detention scene, residents saw men run from rooftops, neighbors cried and tried to help, and the official language of a targeted operation now sits beside witness accounts of fear, confusion, and workers saying they had papers.

That is the record that should not be softened. ICE did not simply appear in a file or a press statement. ICE arrived in a neighborhood where people were repairing storm damage. Workers ran. Residents cried. Men were taken to county jails that contract with ICE. And a community that thought this kind of enforcement might happen somewhere else watched it unfold outside its own homes.

This kind of reporting matters because ICE raids are not only federal actions on paper. They land in neighborhoods, on job sites, on families, on workers, and on communities forced to watch fear unfold in real time.

Americans Against ICE documents the harm behind immigration enforcement — the raids, detention systems, county jail contracts, labor targeting, family separation, and public trauma that official statements often flatten or erase.

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The death of Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian woman found unresponsive in a Pittsburgh bus shelter days after her release from federal custody, has now been ruled a homicide by the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office. The ruling does not, by itself, declare criminal guilt. But it changes the public record around Michel’s death and places new pressure on the decisions that led to her release, her isolation, and the conditions she was left to navigate before she died of hypothermia.

Michel was found unresponsive around 10 a.m. on March 2 at a Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus shelter on East Carson Street. She was pronounced dead about two hours later. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Michel had been released from federal custody on Feb. 27 after being encountered by ICE and placed in removal proceedings. She was released with an ankle monitor.

The medical examiner’s office said the forensic pathologist concluded that Michel was a vulnerable adult when she was released. A spokesperson for the office cited untreated severe mental health issues, a significant language barrier, and the circumstances of her federal custody release as part of the basis for the homicide ruling. The office also emphasized that, in the medical examiner context, homicide means the death was caused by the actions of another person and should not be read as a declaration of criminal guilt.

That distinction matters legally. It does not make the ruling any less serious. The medical examiner’s finding moves Michel’s death beyond a vague story of exposure and into a sharper accountability frame: what did federal custody know about her vulnerability, what planning existed when she was released, and how did a woman with untreated mental health issues and a language barrier end up dying in a bus shelter days later?

DHS has defended the circumstances of the release. In statements after Michel’s death, the department said she was released with all of her belongings, including a fully charged phone, in sunny weather, in Pittsburgh, where public transportation was available. DHS also said people who are processed have access to phones to call family, friends, and attorneys.

Michel’s attorney, Joseph Murphy, disputed that framing. He argued that a charged phone, public transit, and a description of the weather do not answer the central question of whether Michel could safely navigate the situation she was placed in. Murphy said Michel suffered from mental health issues and likely faced both a language barrier and fear after being released. He also pointed to the cold weather that followed, saying hypothermia is not forgiving when a person is outside for a long period of time without the ability to get help.

Weather records cited in local reporting show why that defense matters. Average temperatures in Pittsburgh were around 40 degrees on Feb. 27 and 48 degrees on Feb. 28, then dropped to 29 degrees on March 1 and 27 degrees on March 2. Michel was not found inside a shelter system, a hospital, or with family. She was found unresponsive at a bus shelter.

Before the ICE release, Michel had been held in Washington County Prison on misdemeanor charges of harassment and making terroristic threats. Court records show those charges were dismissed at a preliminary hearing on Feb. 26, and records noted that she was released from custody. DHS then said she was encountered by ICE, placed in removal proceedings, and released the following day with electronic monitoring.

Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato called Michel’s death a tragedy that could have been avoided “with a little humanity.” She pointed to cascading decisions: the Washington County Jail contacting ICE instead of Michel’s family, and ICE releasing Michel in an unfamiliar place instead of getting her home. That statement captures the core public-accountability question in this case. The issue is not simply whether a person was technically released. The issue is whether the release was safe for the person being released.

The Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office has said it needs to review the official report, the medical examiner’s opinion, and the records relied on before determining what, if anything, follows from the homicide ruling. That response is legally cautious, and it should be. A medical examiner’s ruling is not a criminal charge. But it is still a public finding that Michel’s death occurred because of actions by another person, and that means the release process now belongs in the accountability record.

Murphy said he plans to file a lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of Michel’s family. He described the case as one involving a vulnerable person who did not speak English, had mental health needs, and was released into Pittsburgh without the support necessary to survive. His expected lawsuit will likely force more questions about what ICE knew, what the jail communicated, what release planning occurred, and whether federal officials treated Michel’s vulnerability as a safety issue or a paperwork issue.

AAI previously documented Michel’s death as a release-abandonment case. The homicide ruling now turns that earlier record into an accountability escalation. This is no longer only a story about a woman found dead after release from ICE custody. It is a story about a medical examiner finding that the circumstances surrounding that release mattered enough to classify her hypothermia death as a homicide.

Michel’s case also echoes another recent death after federal release. In Buffalo, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a refugee from Myanmar who was nearly blind and did not speak English, died after Border Patrol agents left him at a closed Tim Hortons. The medical examiner there also ruled his death a homicide. The cases are not identical, but together they raise a dangerous question: what happens when federal agencies release vulnerable immigrants into environments they cannot safely navigate?

For Americans Against ICE, that question is central. Custody does not become harmless because the door opens. Release does not erase responsibility when the person being released is isolated, medically vulnerable, unable to communicate, afraid, or left without a safe path home.

The final question is not whether DHS can point to a phone, an ankle monitor, or a bus route. The question is whether a vulnerable woman was released into conditions that turned freedom into exposure.

That question now belongs in the public record.

Daphy Michel’s death did not end with the first report. It moved into the medical examiner’s record, where her hypothermia death has now been ruled a homicide after federal custody release.

Americans Against ICE documents the systems behind immigration enforcement: custody deaths, release practices, medical vulnerability, language barriers, detention conditions, and the institutional decisions that can leave people exposed to harm after government custody.

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Before customers began pulling money from Citizens Bank, the issue was already human: immigrants held inside ICE detention facilities, families living with fear, and deaths reported inside a private detention system operated for profit. The fight now building around Citizens is not simply about where customers choose to bank. It is about whether congregational money, municipal deposits, customer accounts, and public trust should remain inside a financial system that organizers say helps keep private ICE detention companies bankable.

That pressure is now moving from protest into financial consequence. Faith groups, activists, lawmakers, customers, and Jersey City have either withdrawn funds from Citizens Bank or pledged to do so unless the bank reconsiders financing tied to CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the country’s largest private detention operators. Organizers with the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition say Citizens has helped provide $2.5 billion in financing to the two companies, and they say more than 20 people have died in ICE facilities owned by those companies.

The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization announced that it was withdrawing another $2 million from Citizens accounts, after previously withdrawing $1 million earlier in the campaign. GBIO and its member congregations had previously held more than $20 million with the bank, according to reporting on the pressure campaign. The organization also published a report describing what it called “the human cost of private detention,” arguing that the bank relationships behind detention operators cannot be separated from the conditions and deaths reported inside facilities used by ICE.

The public harm is not abstract. People are detained inside facilities operated for immigration enforcement. Families search for information after loved ones are taken into custody. Advocates report fear, medical neglect, unsafe conditions, retaliation, and a system built to move people out of public view. When private companies run detention centers for profit, the accountability question is not limited to which federal agency signed the contract. It also reaches the banks that help those companies borrow, refinance, expand, and remain acceptable business partners.

That is why the Citizens campaign has widened beyond ordinary protest. Jersey City, New Jersey, announced that it would divest from Citizens Bank over the bank’s ICE detention financing ties, becoming the first municipality to publicly take that step in this campaign. The city’s announcement placed municipal money inside the accountability frame, making the issue not only a private customer decision but a public question about where government funds should sit when private detention is involved.

The local context matters. GEO Group operates Delaney Hall in Newark, an ICE detention facility that has become a focus of public scrutiny, protest, and legal action. GEO announced that ICE awarded the company a 15-year, fixed-price contract tied to the company-owned, 1,000-bed Delaney Hall facility. New Jersey officials later sued GEO Group after state health inspectors were denied full access to the facility, while public reporting has described protests, detainee complaints, and official denials around conditions inside the site.

Delaney Hall shows why the financing fight is not theoretical. The facility connects federal immigration enforcement, a private detention operator, state oversight disputes, local protest, and public concern about conditions inside immigration custody. GEO and government officials have disputed or denied some claims about mistreatment, but the public record around Delaney Hall has already made it a central example of how immigration detention expands when private prison companies receive contracts, financing, and political room to operate.

Citizens Bank has defended itself. The bank has said it is a relationship-based institution with a strong record of corporate responsibility, pointing to affordable housing commitments and grants to nonprofits. Citizens has also said it respects peaceful protest while arguing that banks do not set public policy and that its responsibility is to follow the law and apply standards consistently across clients and industries.

That response belongs in the record, but it does not erase the accountability question. Banks do not write immigration law, and Citizens does not operate ICE detention centers. But banks do choose which companies they finance, which relationships they maintain, and whether private detention operators remain able to present themselves as ordinary corporate clients while their facilities hold people for ICE. The campaign against Citizens is built around that distinction: not that the bank is ICE, but that organizers argue it helps finance companies whose business model depends on ICE detention.

This pressure did not begin with the latest withdrawals. Activists had already been following the money behind Citizens Bank’s ties to private detention operators; the new divestments show the campaign moving from public protest into direct financial consequence. When congregations, customers, lawmakers, and a municipality begin removing funds, the message shifts from objection to leverage.

The broader pattern is clear. ICE detention does not survive on federal contracts alone. It depends on private operators, legal arrangements, political protection, credit, financing, and institutions willing to normalize detention as ordinary business. Public divestment challenges that normalization by forcing banks, elected officials, and public institutions to answer whether the financial infrastructure behind migrant confinement should remain hidden behind corporate language.

For Americans Against ICE, this is the record that matters. Immigration enforcement is not only raids, detention vans, court dates, and deportation orders. It is also the private contractors that profit from custody, the facilities where people are held, the banks that keep those companies financially viable, and the public money that can either sustain or reject that system.

The question is not whether Citizens Bank writes immigration policy. It does not. The question is whether a bank can claim neutrality while financing companies whose business model depends on ICE detention.

Private ICE detention does not survive on federal contracts alone. It survives through the banks, investors, contractors, and public institutions willing to keep the system funded, normalized, and bankable.

Americans Against ICE documents the machinery behind immigration enforcement: detention conditions, custody deaths, private contractors, deportation systems, and the money trail that allows abuse to continue behind bureaucratic language.

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Mamuka Artmeladze had no criminal record.

He was 43 years old, a Georgian national, and had been held for nearly four months inside Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, when staff found him unresponsive on June 4, 2026. ICE said facility staff attempted resuscitation before Artmeladze was taken by ambulance to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

The cause of death remains pending an autopsy.

That is the basic death notice. The public record around it is much larger.

Two days before Artmeladze died, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General released a report on Winn Correctional Center. Federal inspectors had found that the facility did not fully comply with reviewed detention standards involving environmental health and safety, food service, use of force, medical care, classification, voluntary work programs, legal access and materials, staff-detainee communication, and outdoor recreation.

The government’s own watchdog had already documented serious failures at the facility. Then a man with no criminal record was dead inside it.

Artmeladze was not serving a criminal sentence. According to ICE, Border Patrol encountered him in September 2022 and allowed him to remain in the United States under ICE supervision. In February 2026, ICE arrested him in Alabama after determining that he no longer had lawful status. He was then held at Winn, a facility managed by the Winn Parish Sheriff’s Office and private contractor LaSalle Corrections.

He remained there for nearly four months.

On June 4, staff found him unresponsive. ICE’s announcement said lifesaving measures were attempted and that he was transported to Winn Parish Medical Center. He was pronounced dead after arriving at the hospital. ICE said it notified the appropriate officials and that the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility would review the death, as required under detention-death procedures.

Those procedures now sit beside another fact: Artmeladze died at a facility federal inspectors had already flagged.

The OIG report was based on an unannounced inspection conducted from March 4 to March 6, 2025. At the time of the inspection, ICE housed 1,576 male detainees at Winn, the facility’s contractual maximum. Inspectors reviewed conditions across multiple parts of the detention operation and found problems that reached far beyond paperwork.

The use-of-force findings were especially serious. Inspectors reviewed five use-of-force incidents and found that staff used prohibited techniques or failed to follow required standards in three of them. In one incident, an officer applied a chokehold to a detainee, even though the report states that the technique is specifically prohibited under ICE detention standards. In another incident, an officer stabbed a detainee’s thumb with a pen after the detainee refused to remove his hand from a door. A third case involved staff placing mechanical restraints on a detainee without the required medical review being documented on camera.

These are not minor administrative gaps.

They are failures involving force, restraint, documentation, and the treatment of people held in federal immigration custody.

The physical conditions described by inspectors also mattered. The report cited water leaking through kitchen vents, holes and exposed insulation in the ceiling of the intake building, and food stored in freezers above required temperatures. Medical staff also failed to keep updated treatment documents and laboratory testing records, a failure the report warned could negatively affect detainee health care and safety.

That medical-record finding carries particular weight after a death in custody.

When a person dies inside detention, the public is forced to ask what the facility knew, what medical staff documented, what care was provided, what warning signs were missed, and whether the records are complete enough to answer those questions. A detention system with deficient medical documentation makes accountability harder at the precise moment accountability is most necessary.

Winn had already seen another death this year.

On April 11, 2026, Alejandro Cabrera Clemente, a 49-year-old Mexican national, was found unresponsive during a routine security check at the same facility. Staff attempted resuscitation, and he was transported to Winn Parish Medical Center, where he later died. Less than two months later, Artmeladze was taken to the same hospital and pronounced dead.

That makes Artmeladze’s death more than an isolated incident at Winn. It is the second reported death at the facility in less than two months, at a jail already flagged by federal inspectors for use-of-force violations, medical record problems, food safety issues, sanitation failures, and other deficiencies.

Winn is part of the private detention infrastructure that sits beneath ICE’s public-facing custody system. The facility is managed by the Winn Parish Sheriff’s Office and LaSalle Corrections, a Louisiana-based private prison company, under contract with ICE. That structure matters because accountability is spread across government agencies, local detention authorities, and private operators while the person in custody remains trapped inside the system.

ICE holds the detainees. Local and private detention operators run the facility. Federal inspectors document failures. Public officials approve contracts and funding. Families are left with death notifications.

Each death becomes part of the record of a detention system that continues to operate while its failures are documented.

Representative Pramila Jayapal, Ranking Member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement, responded to the OIG report by saying it reflected what detained immigrants across the country had already described: detention centers violating required standards and putting people’s health and safety at serious risk. She called for DHS to withdraw funding from facilities that consistently fail to meet minimum standards and renewed support for legislation to end private, for-profit immigration detention.

That response belongs in the record because Winn is not simply a building with bad conditions. It is part of a detention network funded through federal immigration policy and sustained by contracts with private operators.

A DHS spokesperson said the inspector general report demonstrated the facility’s compliance with detention standards, even though the report documented prohibited force, medical record failures, and other deficiencies. ICE did not immediately provide further public explanation of Artmeladze’s death beyond its initial announcement.

The contradiction sits in the record.

Federal inspectors documented prohibited force, medical documentation failures, food safety concerns, environmental problems, and other deficiencies. DHS still defended the facility’s compliance. Two days after the report was released, Artmeladze was dead.

The death also comes amid a broader rise in deaths in ICE custody. Austin Kocher’s tracking has identified Artmeladze as the 19th person to die in ICE custody in 2026. Other reporting has framed the toll differently, identifying him as the 50th ICE detention death since Trump returned to office in January 2025. Those figures measure different timeframes, but both point to the same public concern: people are dying in immigration custody at a pace that demands scrutiny.

Artmeladze’s case should not disappear into a count.

He was a man with no criminal record. He had been allowed to remain in the United States under ICE supervision after a 2022 Border Patrol encounter. He was later arrested after ICE determined he no longer had lawful status. He spent nearly four months at Winn Correctional Center. He was found unresponsive. He was taken to a hospital. He died.

Those facts matter because immigration detention often turns civil status into a carceral reality. A person can have no criminal record and still be locked inside a correctional center. A person can be held under immigration authority and still be subjected to force, medical failures, unsafe conditions, and the same institutional neglect that defines the broader detention system.

The language of immigration custody can make that harm sound procedural. “No longer had lawful status.” “Held under ICE supervision.” “Transported to a local hospital.” “Cause of death pending autopsy.”

But inside the facility, those phrases become confinement, surveillance, medical dependence, isolation, and risk. For Artmeladze, they ended in death.

The OIG report did not cause his death. The autopsy remains pending, and the full medical facts have not yet been released. But the timing matters because the report documented the conditions of the system holding him. It showed a facility with known failures. It showed a detention center operating at contractual capacity. It showed prohibited force incidents, medical documentation problems, food and environmental concerns, and breakdowns across core detention standards.

That is the accountability question now.

What happens when federal inspectors document serious failures at an ICE jail, DHS defends the facility, the contractor remains in place, and another person dies?

For Americans Against ICE, that question belongs in the public record.

Mamuka Artmeladze was not a criminal defendant or a man serving a prison sentence. He had no criminal record, and he died after months in immigration detention at a facility federal inspectors had already warned about.

The federal government’s own watchdog had documented failures at Winn Correctional Center.

Two days later, Mamuka Artmeladze was dead inside that same detention system.

This article is part of Americans Against ICE’s public record on ICE custody deaths, private detention contractors, and the facilities where people die while held by the federal government.

Mamuka Artmeladze had no criminal record. He died inside a detention system federal inspectors had already flagged for force violations, medical record failures, sanitation problems, and unsafe conditions.

Americans Against ICE documents the deaths, contracts, inspections, lawsuits, and official failures that immigration agencies and private detention operators leave behind.

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Dilley gives that number a human shape. The family detention center in Texas, operated by CoreCivic, became one of the central sites in Trump’s renewed family detention system. Parents described what it meant to care for babies and toddlers inside confinement, including concerns about food, formula, clean water, lights left on overnight, bedding, fear, uncertainty, and children changing under the pressure of detention.

Alsu and Azat fled Russia after opposing the war in Ukraine. They feared prison, separation from their child, and the possibility that their son could be taken from them. They came to the United States seeking safety and freedom. Instead, they spent 118 days in immigration detention with their 1-year-old son, Amir.

Azat described the contradiction plainly: they came here to escape prison, but once they arrived in America, they spent four months in detention. That is the human center of this record. A family fleeing one threat of confinement was placed inside another, with a child too young to understand borders, courts, asylum processing, detention contracts, or political messaging.

Amir is not the only child in this story. He is one visible child inside a larger detention system that has placed hundreds of babies and toddlers into ICE custody. His family’s experience gives the public a clearer view of what “family detention” means when the person detained is still learning how to speak.

His parents said Amir changed after months in custody. They described a child who regressed, withdrew, and could mostly say only “mom” and “dad” after leaving detention. They also described the strain of trying to feed, soothe, and protect a toddler inside a facility built around confinement and control.

Dilley is not just a location. It is part of the private detention infrastructure used by ICE, where federal immigration enforcement, public money, contractor operations, and family custody meet. When babies and toddlers are held there, the harm is not abstract policy. It becomes part of a child’s daily environment during the earliest years of development.

DHS and ICE dismissed claims against Dilley as “media lies.” That denial belongs in the record. So do the parents’ accounts, the child-development concerns, the reporting on conditions, and the documented increase in children age 3 and younger held in ICE custody.

Former DHS official Andrea Flores said there is essentially no safe way to detain a child. That point cuts through the language of “family detention.” Keeping a child with a parent does not make detention safe. It means the child experiences confinement beside a parent who is also trapped, monitored, and stripped of ordinary control over food, sleep, movement, safety, and comfort.

A toddler cannot understand why the lights stay on, why food is unfamiliar, why a parent is afraid, why a bed is not home, or why the family cannot leave. The child experiences the system through the body: disrupted sleep, hunger, fear, stress, silence, regression, and dependence on adults who are also being controlled by the facility. That is what makes detention during early childhood so severe: the harm does not wait until a child can describe it.

Family detention is not an accident. It is reopened, funded, contracted, defended, and expanded through policy choices. ICE holds the families. CoreCivic operates Dilley. Public officials approve the money. Babies and toddlers live inside the consequences.

The number is more than 500. Inside Dilley, that number becomes children like Amir — children held during the years when they are still learning how to speak, eat, sleep, and trust the world around them. When the detainee is a toddler, detention is not routine enforcement. It is developmental harm placed inside a federal system and defended as policy.

This video article is part of Americans Against ICE’s public record on family detention, private immigration detention, and the babies and toddlers placed inside ICE custody.

AAI documents what immigration enforcement does inside detention centers, contractor-run facilities, court records, and families forced to live through the harm.

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More than 500 babies and toddlers have been held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since President Donald Trump returned to office, according to a joint analysis by MS NOW and The Marshall Project.

The analysis, based on records obtained by the Deportation Data Project, found that ICE dramatically increased the detention of children age 3 and younger after Trump restarted family detention. Between January 2025 and March 2026, ICE held 25 babies and toddlers in custody on an average day. During the prior 12 months under President Joe Biden, the average was fewer than three.

That is not only a data point. It is a policy reversal measured in infants, toddlers, parents, and days spent inside federal immigration custody.

The first years of life are among the most developmentally fragile years a child will ever experience. Babies and toddlers are learning language, forming attachments, developing memory, building emotional regulation, and depending on parents for safety, routine, food, and comfort.

Immigration detention interrupts all of that.

Marsha Griffin, a pediatrics professor and co-founder of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health, told MS NOW and The Marshall Project that infancy and toddlerhood may be the most harmful period of life to place a child in detention.

“Our immigration system is breaking children,” she said.

The numbers show how quickly the system changed.

Biden ended family detention in 2021, and the Dilley facility in Texas, once used to hold families, eventually closed. Trump restarted the practice after returning to office and moved to reopen Dilley, reviving a detention model that pediatricians, immigrant-rights advocates, and attorneys have long warned can harm children.

Dilley Immigration Processing Center is now the primary ICE facility used to detain families with children. It is operated by CoreCivic, a private prison and detention company. The facility has become central to the renewed family detention system.

The analysis also found that many very young children were held for prolonged periods. Between Trump’s second inauguration and March 2026, ICE held at least 175 babies and toddlers longer than the 20-day limit associated with the Flores settlement framework governing children in immigration detention.

During the final year of the Biden administration, the analysis found that no children age 3 or younger were held beyond that 20-day limit.

ICE said in a May court filing required under the Flores settlement that it works to assess cases and discharge minors from custody as promptly as possible. The agency did not respond to MS NOW and The Marshall Project’s question about the increase in detained babies and toddlers. In a statement, ICE said families with children receive appropriate food, water, and medical care.

CoreCivic said its facilities were safe for infants and toddlers.

Parents described something very different.

In March, Joani, her husband, and their 2-year-old son, Kaleth, appeared for a required immigration check-in appointment in California. According to the family’s lawyer, they had never missed a required appointment after immigrating and seeking asylum in 2024.

ICE took them into custody anyway.

Kaleth’s father was handcuffed and taken to an adult detention facility in California. Joani and Kaleth were sent to Dilley in Texas.

The family was split apart inside the immigration system.

At Dilley, Joani said her son repeatedly tried to reach a wall-mounted phone, pushing a tiny table toward it so he could climb high enough to use it. She moved the table away each time so he would not fall. Even if he had reached the phone, contacting his father in another detention facility would not have been possible.

Then Kaleth stopped eating.

Joani said he went 12 days without food. When she tried to force him to eat, he vomited. He eventually stopped having bowel movements. She watched his face grow gaunt and his eyes sink.

Facility doctors attributed his refusal to eat to depression, according to Joani.

For a toddler, trauma does not always arrive as words. It can appear in the body. It can appear in appetite, digestion, sleep, silence, regression, fear, and the sudden loss of ordinary childhood behavior.

Lori Goodman, the CEO of LEAP, a nonprofit that works with families with young children in California and has supported Kaleth’s family, told MS NOW and The Marshall Project that his distress manifested physically because children his age have fewer verbal tools to explain what is happening to them.

That is the public record behind the figure of more than 500 babies and toddlers.

This was more than a detention placement or facility assignment.

A toddler was taken from his father, placed inside a private detention system, and became so distressed that his body began shutting down ordinary functions.

Another family’s story shows the same pattern from a different angle.

Alsu and Azat fled Russia with their 1-year-old son, Amir, fearing that their opposition to the war in Ukraine could lead to prison for them and an orphanage for their child. They entered the United States through the southern border without visas and presented themselves to authorities at a legal port of entry.

They expected confinement to last a few weeks.

Instead, they spent months in detention, first in California and then at Dilley.

Azat said they came to the United States to escape prison and find freedom. Instead, the family spent four months in immigration detention.

Amir, once lively, began withdrawing. His parents said he started hitting himself in the face. His speech slowed. Eventually, he stopped saying almost anything except “mom” and “dad.”

His parents said Dilley had few toys for toddlers. Some children played with rocks. They could not find books in Russian, even though they understood that reading and conversation were important for Amir’s development.

Griffin, the pediatrics professor, explained that parents need to talk to children to support language development. But detention can silence both parents and children. Fear, stress, and incarceration can reduce ordinary interaction, disrupt bonding, and change the way a child experiences their parent’s ability to protect them.

That is one of the hidden harms of family detention.

A child does not only experience the facility; they also experience a parent’s loss of control inside it. The adult who normally provides safety is also trapped, monitored, and constrained.

Rahil Briggs, a psychologist with the early-childhood advocacy organization Zero to Three, told MS NOW and The Marshall Project that developmental setbacks in early childhood can create a domino effect. A child focused on safety in a frightening setting may miss foundational learning that later skills depend on.

That is why the age of these children matters.

A 1-year-old or 2-year-old cannot separate detention from the world. The facility becomes the child’s environment. The rules, food, fear, guards, doors, phone access, medical limitations, and parental distress become part of the developmental setting.

For Amir’s family, food became another crisis.

Alsu said employees at Dilley forced her to wean Amir off formula, telling her he was too old. She said the available solid food was not appropriate for a 1-year-old. She described sucking spicy sauce off noodles so she could feed them to her son. She and Azat hid cereal from the dining hall in their clothing so Amir would not go to sleep hungry.

After the parents argued with staff over food, Azat alleged that employees in CoreCivic uniforms woke him in the middle of the night and threatened to send the parents to separate immigration facilities and Amir to foster care if they continued complaining.

CoreCivic has said its facilities are safe for infants and toddlers. ICE has said families receive appropriate food, water, and medical care.

The parents’ accounts raise a different accountability question: what does “appropriate” mean inside a detention system that holds babies and toddlers for weeks or months?

The answer depends on whose standard is being used: a federal contractor’s, an agency managing custody, or a child’s body inside confinement. For parents describing speech regression, food refusal, and fear, “appropriate care” is not an agency phrase. It is a test of whether the system is meeting a child’s basic needs.

That question matters because Dilley is not only a building.

It is part of a detention infrastructure with a federal contract, a private operator, and a public policy choice behind it. The Trump administration did not inherit a fully active family detention system at Dilley. It restarted one.

The Washington Post reported in 2025 that the Trump administration moved to reopen the Dilley, Texas family detention center, operated by CoreCivic, reviving family detention after Biden ended the practice in 2021.

The Houston Chronicle later reported that the Dilley Immigration Processing Center contract pays more than $15.6 million monthly and allows the facility to hold up to 2,400 people, with the contract running through March 2030.

That is the contractor layer of the story.

Every detained child is also part of a funded system. Every family bed exists inside a facility budget. Every day of custody extends the relationship among ICE, the private contractor, the courts, the parents, and the child.

The data from MS NOW and The Marshall Project shows that the renewed system is reaching children during the earliest years of life.

Children age 3 and under are not collateral details in immigration enforcement. They are babies and toddlers. They are learning how to speak, eat, regulate fear, trust adults, and understand safety. They cannot meaningfully participate in immigration proceedings. They cannot understand why a parent was handcuffed, why a phone cannot reach their father, why familiar food is gone, or why they cannot leave.

The federal government can call it family detention. ICE can describe care as appropriate. CoreCivic can defend its facilities as safe.

But the public record now includes a documented set of findings that cannot be dismissed as routine custody.

KEY FINDINGS FROM THE ANALYSIS

• More than 500 babies and toddlers were placed in ICE custody after Trump restarted family detention.

• ICE held 25 children age 3 or younger on an average day, roughly ten times the prior average.

• At least 175 babies and toddlers were held longer than the Flores-related 20-day limit.

• Parents described children becoming sick, isolated, withdrawn, and developmentally regressive inside detention.

• One 2-year-old stopped eating for 12 days after being separated from his father.

• One 1-year-old’s parents said he withdrew, hit himself, lost language, and struggled to get appropriate food.

This is the record AAI exists to document.

Immigration cruelty does not always appear as a raid video, a deportation flight, or a detention death. It can appear in quieter records: a toddler trying to reach a phone he cannot use, a parent hiding cereal in clothing so a child can eat later, or a spreadsheet line showing babies held beyond the court framework meant to limit child detention.

Family detention is often defended as an alternative to separating families.

But holding families together inside immigration custody still places children inside a detention system. It still exposes them to confinement, fear, isolation, disrupted development, limited food options, and the sight of parents losing control over the conditions of daily life.

For babies and toddlers, that is not a temporary inconvenience.

It happens during the years when the brain is building the foundations for the rest of life.

That is the accountability question behind the data.

The Trump administration restarted family detention. ICE expanded custody of babies and toddlers. CoreCivic operates the primary facility used to hold families. Parents described sickness, regression, hunger, and fear. Experts warned that early-childhood detention can cause lasting harm.

A federal immigration system that places babies and toddlers inside private detention during the most fragile years of development cannot be treated as routine enforcement.

That is a public harm, and it belongs in the public record.

This report is part of the public record on ICE detention, family separation, private detention contractors, and the children placed inside immigration custody.

Americans Against ICE documents the systems that turn migrant families, asylum seekers, and children into detention numbers — and the public officials and contractors who keep those systems running.

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