America Is Hurting Little Children Again And MAGA Couldn't Be Happier
Don't worry, ICE says they're being fed, so shut up.
We have now reached the “Children’s Letters From ICE Baby Jails” stage of the second Donald Trump administration, and there’s no sign that anyone in the administration will give a shit this time around. In Trump’s first term, public outrage over the obvious cruelty of the “zero tolerance” family separation program was so widespread and unanimous that Trump tried to save face by issuing an executive order to end the policy that he had put in place, what a hero.
The lesson that Trump and his gang of creeps took from that human rights disaster was that Americans won’t stand for family separations. That’s why in the current mass deportation/ethnic cleansing crusade, the administration constantly reminds us that it wants families to be together. Isn’t that nice?
In reality, of course, it means imprisoning and deporting children with their parents, and if the kids are US citizens because they were born here, then Homeland Security gives the parents a Sophie’s Choice: Leave your kid with a guardian here (maybe in the foster care system if you don’t have relatives with legal status), or your kid will be sent back to your home country with you. Even if the child has a life-threatening medical condition, although maybe not, as long as there’s enough media attention.
There’s another huge difference between Trump I and Trump II: This time, Trump’s goons have also been attacking, arresting, and killing Americans right on the streets and on camera, and that’s taking up a lot of our attention, so what’s going on in the baby jails has so far received less of our increasingly frayed attention.
But then that iconic photo of little Liam Conejo Ramos in his bunny hat suddenly reminded everyone that Trump reopened the baby jails. Liam and his father were sent, like thousands of families have been since the mass deportation sweeps began, to ICE’s family detention prison in Dilley, Texas, and that has brought new attention to just what a rotten place that concentration camp is for children.
Yes, even if they’re imprisoned with their parents, because just as family separation caused serious psychological harm to the children taken from their parents, pediatricians are reminding us (again!) that lockup is not healthy for children, either.
You’d think we wouldn’t need to be told that, not in 2018, not in 2026.
Just as the goal in 2018 was to make America so hellish that no one would want to risk coming here, the cruelty today is all aimed at pushing parents to give up their asylum cases or other efforts to stay, and to sign papers allowing their immediate removal back to whatever they fled in their home countries.
Letters From Baby Jail
The Dilley camp is of course a private prison, run by CoreCivic, one of several private prison operators making out like bandits — or human traffickers — under the Trump regime.
Now that we’re paying more attention to what’s going on in the family detention camps, ProPublica this week released a pair of stories on the first-person perspectives of some of the kids imprisoned there. The first is a selection of letters that eight children wrote about their experiences inside Dilley, in response to a request from a ProPublica reporter. It’s accompanied by an extensively reported piece on what life for imprisoned kids is like in the Dilley camp. Both are mandatory reading, if you ask us. (We should be more careful about saying such things — Crom forbid some high school teacher gets fired for assigning the pieces to their AP social studies class. These are dangerous days, and to teach what you read is to dig your own grave.)
A small detail of the letters project really underlines where we are in America’s journey to a gulag state: In a note at the end, we’re told that reported Mica Rosenberg asked detainees if their kids would be willing to write letters about being in Dilley, and when the letters were ready, “One detainee gathered the letters and brought them out of the center when they were released from Dilley on Jan. 20.”
That’s the same day Liam and his father were grabbed in front of their home in Minneapolis, but what struck us was that the project relied on a detainee bringing the packet of letters out of the camp — presumably to make sure DHS wouldn’t interfere if they were mailed. We aren’t quite to the point where the letters had to be smuggled in a body cavity, at least.
The letters are, of course, heartbreaking, and their age-appropriate spelling errors underline how young some of the kids are. Nine-year-old Susej F writes that she was happy living and going to school in Houston, Texas, and wishes she could return home there, but that “Seen [seeing] how people like me, immigrants are been treated changes my perspective about the U.S. My mom and I came to The U.S looking for a good and safe place to live, and my mom was looking for a Good job.” She’s now resigned to hoping she’ll be sent back to Venezuela, anything to get out of Dilley:
I miss my school and my friends I feel bad since when I came here to this Place, because I have been here too long. I have been 2 years and 6 months in united states, and I was happy with my friends in The school but now I need to leave. I miss my family in my country so now I want To go to Venezuela.
Laws? What Laws?
A lot of the kids know, because their parents know, that kids aren’t legally supposed to be held more than 20 days, because of a 1997 legal settlement that Stephen Miller wants to erase.
But many of the kids have been imprisoned at Dilley far longer than that: 50 days, 60 days, 70 days, and in the case of Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya, aged nine, 113 days. She writes,
I miss my friends and I feel they are going to forget me. I am bored here. I already miss my country and my house, I came on vacation for 10 Days and they took me into an ice office an officer interrogated me 2 hours without my mom, I was traveling with flight attendant because my mom lives in new york, they only wanted to arrest my mom, because my mom didn’t have documents to live in U.S.A., I always traveled with my tourist visa but ice used me to catch my mom and now I am in a jail and I am sad and I have fainted 2 times here inside.
ProPublica notes that at least 300 kids sent to Dilley have been detained more than a month. No worries, since the law is what Team Trump says it is.
And never mind those lies about how ICE is only going after the “worst of the worst,” either. The children sent to Dilley aren’t criminals, and neither are the vast majority of their parents, who have no criminal records in the US, and are accused only of civil immigration violations — if even that. Rosenberg notes,
Some of the parents I spoke to had overstayed visas. Many had filed applications for asylum, had married U.S. citizens or had been granted humanitarian parole and were detained when they voluntarily showed up for appointments at ICE offices. They said that it was unfair to arrest them, and that detaining their children was just plain cruel.
And just as DHS liars in the first Trump term insisted that family separation was just fine, because kids were kept in clean facilities where they were fed and could watch cartoons on TV, we get the same song and dance now. DHS insisted in a statement to ProPublica that all detainees
“are provided with 3 meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries” and that “certified dieticians evaluate meals.” Detained parents are given the option for their families to be deported together, or they can have their children placed with another caregiver, the statement said.
‘Edible’ Is Such A Subjective Term. Kids Are Just Too Picky About Moldy Food
Unlike the baby jails in Trump I, which were mostly run by nonprofit contractors and subject to state inspections because they were part of state foster care systems, the current family prison camps are entirely federal affairs, so no pesky state inspectors are nosing around. Detainees complain that the food given to their kids is often moldy or infested with bugs or worms, and that the water is just plain nasty. Medical care is also iffy, despite DHS claims.
One 12-year-old girl who signed her name as Ender writes of the frustration of “going to the doctor and that the only thing they tell you is to drink more water and the worst thing is that it seems like the water is what makes people sick here[.]” Parents said that their children were sick much of the time, and maybe they received treatment, maybe not.
Christian Hinojosa, the mother of 13-year-old Gustavo Santiago, said that when her son had a fever, medical staff told her he was old enough to fight off the symptoms without medications, so he wasn’t given so much as a Tylenol. Instead, she stayed up with him all night (the lights are always on), using cool compresses to try to control his fever.
Your Baby Can’t Breathe? Or Your Baby Won’t Breathe, Just To Make Trouble?
Then there’s the horrifying case of 18-month-old Amalia Arrieta, the adorable little toddler blowing kisses in the triptych of video screengrabs up top. She and her parents, Kheilin Valero and Stiven Arrieta, were whisked away to Dilley on December 11, after they arrived for a scheduled appointment with ICE in El Paso as part of her parents’ asylum case. They crossed the border legally at a port of entry in 2024, using the now-rescinded CBP One app, but the administration considers them “illegals” because nothing in the Biden administration was legitimate. “Came here legally” therefore means nothing to ICE.
Amalia’s health quickly deteriorated in prison, and for two weeks, the staff nurses gave her ibuprofen, and eventually antibiotics, but her breathing kept getting worse. On January 18, in severe respiratory distress, she was finally taken to a children’s hospital in San Antonio, where she was treated for pneumonia, COVID-19, and RSV. Once she improved, ICE insisted she had to go back to Dilley. As with most cruelty toward detainees, the point is to pressure them to agree to immediate deportation, so letting her parents out on bond was unthinkable.
“She was at the brink of dying,” said Elora Mukherjee, a Columbia Law School professor and the director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, who filed the petition seeking the family’s release.
Yet after Amalia’s return to Dilley on Jan. 28, federal officials “denied her access to the medication that doctors prescribed for her at the hospital” the lawsuit says, forcing her parents to “wait in long lines for hours outside daily” to request the medicine, only to be turned away.
God, these people come here illegally and then they demand medicine to keep their little baby alive. It’s Joe Biden’s fault, you know. (What’s that, New Cato Institute study? The rise in border crossings during Biden’s term started before he was elected, and had little to do with his policies?)
After NBC reported on Amalia’s case last weekend, DHS Reichspropaganda Minister Tricia McLaughlin insisted that no medication was withheld from Amalia. McLaughlin claimed the baby “immediately received proper medical care” at Dilley before she was hospitalized, and that once she was released, the little girl was “in the medical unit and received proper treatment and prescribed medicines.”
Who are you going to believe, some people who fled oppression in Venezuela, followed all the rules, and desperately want their baby to live, or the constantly lying DHS spox?
There’s so, so, much more in both ProPublica pieces, but we’ll just close with this brilliant riposte to the kids’ letters when ProPublica posted samples on Twitter.
Other MAGA replies included “Well those poor kids have some shitty parents,” “Horrible that Biden created this situation, and “Children with irresponsible illegal parents wrote some letters, so we can’t have borders any more.” And of course the brilliant detective work of MAGA folks who thought the children’s handwriting was too neat, so it had to be fake.
Just shut up with your empathy. These children don’t belong here, their parents should have self-deported, and America is full. Exterminate the brutes, as Mr. Kurtz suggested.
[NBC News / ProPublica / NBC News / ProPublica / Cato Institute / Finding Gravity / USA Today]
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I considered using that awful "deport them all" drawing as the main image, but worried that some asshat might love it and start using it. So I went with the faces of the kids and moms
It bears repeating, but it's a miracle that the cross around Tricia McLaughlin's neck hasn't erupted into flames and torched her eyebrows clean off.