Between January 2025 and March 2026, ICE held 25 children age 3 and under in custody on an average day. That was ten times higher than the previous 12 months under President Joe Biden, when fewer than three babies and toddlers were held on an average day. The number matters on its own, but the deeper harm appears in what confinement does to children who are too young to understand why their world has suddenly been reduced to walls, rules, lights, guards, unfamiliar food, and parents who cannot make the situation stop.
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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