Months after handwritten letters from detained children drew national attention to the conditions at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, a new court filing says conditions at the same Texas facility have not improved — and that the federal government has filed a starkly different account with the same court.
Attorneys who represent all children in federal detention — and who have visited Dilley nine times since the facility opened last April — submitted the filing on March 20. Children there “continue to suffer,” the filing states, with nearly 600 held for more than 20 days during December and January.
The latest publicly available Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, from early February, shows 900 people have been detained at Dilley, though The New York Times has since reported that the number of detainees there has dropped significantly: The federal government has been quietly releasing families from Dilley, MS NOW recently reported.
The filing describes inadequate medical care for the children, inability to sleep due to lights being left on at night, children feeling hungry, exhausted and persistently ill, lockdowns, guards confiscating and destroying children’s drawings during aggressive room searches and mental health deterioration, including panic attacks, suicidal ideation and one suicide attempt.
The suicide attempt, first reported by the Associated Press, involved a 13-year-old girl who tried to cut her wrists with a plastic cafeteria knife after guards took away her drawing materials. The teenager was deported to Colombia last month after nearly two months in confinement, according to the AP story, which was attached to the court filing. AP reported that the eighth grader stopped eating after finding a worm in her food, at times did not received her anxiety medication and had a breakdown when a lockdown was imposed and a guard blocked her from joining her mother and sister.
The government’s account of Dilley — the only federal family detention center in the nation — was starkly different.
In a filing submitted to the same court on March 13, attorneys representing the Department of Homeland Security said children at Dilley are housed in “safe, sanitary, and appropriate conditions,” with compliant medical care, education, recreation and legal access. The government’s report says during the period from November 2025 to February 2026, there was no evidence of worms in the food, “no placements on suicide watch” and “no reportable critical incidents.” DHS did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment. The agency previously acknowledged to AP that there was “a case of self-harm” at the facility but declined to provide further details. CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates Dilley under contract with the federal government, denied that a suicide attempt occurred, and said in an email that no child has been denied or delayed medical treatment. On its website, CoreCivic has denied claims that it provides inadequate food or medical care to detainees. Handwritten letters and drawings from children held at Dilley drew national attention in February after ProPublica published them in full, describing conditions children said they were experiencing inside the facility. The March 20 filing states that guards have since begun confiscating and destroying such drawings during room searches. CoreCivic has denied that staff confiscated or destroyed children’s personal artwork and supplies.
Rosa Flores is a national correspondent for MS NOW.
Sara Weisfeldt is a field producer for MS NOW. Recommended
