In Crackdown On Worst Of Worst Children, ICE Raids Kids Who Wrote Letters, Deports Sick Two-Month-Old
DHS insists his parents should have simply self-deported.
Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s war on immigrant children keeps escalating, in ways that are both absurdly petty and unspeakably cruel.
Crackdown On Subversive Crayon Drawings From The Family Gulag
On the absurd pettiness front, guards at the notorious South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, raided family dormitories in the prison Tuesday, to search for and destroy children’s letters or drawings depicting conditions at the family prison.
The goal was presumably to prevent any more letters from making their way to reporters on the outside after those commies at ProPublica published several such letters, which is the only reason anyone might think imprisoning children looks bad. (If you haven’t yet read that story, be sure to catch up on it, unless of course you know it’s too much right now. A lot of things are just too much right now.)
Migrant Insider editor Pablo Manríquez wrote on Twitter Tuesday (archive link) that “Staff at the ICE concentration camp in Dilley, Texas have begun raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children.”
Then MAGA geniuses said that was impossible because Manríquez had attached his report to a retweet of his own earlier post about the separate plight of Juan Nicolás, a two-month-old baby also imprisoned at Dilley (more on that in a moment), and everyone knows babies can’t write letters, you liar.
As we noted when we wrote about the children’s letters from Dilley, one of the remarkable parts of the initial story is that the letters had to be smuggled out of the family gulag by a detainee who was being released. The raid and destruction of letters simply underline how badly the administration fears information getting out. The children wrote about the literally rotten food they were given, their constant loneliness, and their treatment by staff, which ranged from indifferent to verbally abusive. Notes added by parents pointed out that the children had been imprisoned with their families for 50 days, 60 days, 70 days, and in one case 113 days, even though a federal court settlement limits children to 20 days in detention, as if mere laws matter to the Trump administration.
Ender, a 12-year-old girl from Venezuela, wrote that she’d been in Dilley for 60 days, and 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.” Forensic MAGA experts on Twitter dismissed all the letters as fake and written by adults, because the handwriting looked too neat to them.
While the administration isn’t admitting to having ordered raids that treat children’s letters and drawings like contraband, Univision reporter Lidia Terrazas spoke by video with 15-year-old Cariexis Quintero and her mother, who showed the torn-up scraps of drawings, all that was left of some of Cariexis’s drawings.
The New Republic notes that Cariexis has the intellectual capacity of a seven-year old (apparently no reason not to hold her in prison) and summarizes the video:
“They threw away all of my drawings,” [Cariexis] said tearfully. “My mom liked them.”
“They noticed we were writing letters asking for freedom,” Quintero’s mother said as she held up a pile of colorful scraps. She described how guards had “stormed” into her room searching for drawings and letters, and had torn what they found to shreds.
As of yet, International Business Times reports, there’s been no federal documentation of any kind — “no federal court complaint, legal docket, sworn affidavit or verified video recording” — made public to verify raids aimed at confiscating children’s letters or drawings. And so far, none of the detainee families has formally discussed the raids as part of a legal filing.
DHS and CoreCivic, the for-profit prison company that runs Dilley, have only issued the usual bland statements that everyone at Dilley is receiving treatment that comports with legal standards (never mind the illegal length of imprisonments). Neither has addressed the specific allegations that guards are searching for and destroying kids’ drawings and letters, so maybe the story will just go away, especially in light of greater horrors that DHS also insists are just fine, and there’s your transition to our next story.
Deport Your (Eight-Week-Old Baby) Troubles Away
And now we get to the even more troubling case of baby Juan Nicolás, who is all of two months old and until this week had been the youngest child imprisoned at Dilley. He spent three weeks there, getting sicker and sicker because he’s a newborn with hardly any immune system in a facility where disease is rampant. By 3:00 a.m.Saturday, his mother said, Juan was in respiratory distress and “choking on his own vomit.” Despite CoreCivic’s insistence that medical care is “available” 24/7, no doctors were at Dilley’s onsite clinic.
Prison staff did at least check on him every hour, so everything was fine, just fine, until Monday night, when Juan’s condition got so bad that he was finally taken to a hospital. Univision’s Lidia Terrezas, who has been something of an information saint in the struggle to get news out of Dilley, reported that baby Juan and his mother were at a hospital under armed guard.
Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro, who had been fighting to get the family released even before the medical crisis occurred, said Tuesday afternoon that Juan had been diagnosed with bronchitis, and that at one point while he was at the hospital, he became unresponsive, but was nonetheless discharged after a few hours and sent back to Dilley with his mother, Mireya López Sánchez.
As of February 8, before Juan got sick, López Sánchez was sent before an immigration judge and ordered deported. That was all the justification DHS needed to deport him as soon as it could once he was released from the hospital, presumably to teach would-be asylum seekers that the USA can be every bit as ruthless as a drug cartel or the government of a banana republic.
According to Castro, by late Tuesday night, the entire family — Juan, his 16-month old sister, and both his parents — had been whisked out of Dilley and deported to Mexico, dumped across the border “with only the money that they had in their commissary [account] —a total of $190.”
Again, Terrezas played a pivotal role in finding out what the fuck was going on.
After losing track of the family for several hours and “fear[ing] the worst,” Univision reporter Lidia Terrazas said via social media that the family had been “practically abandoned” across the border in Mexico and had to borrow a phone from a stranger in the street to call her and update her on their situation.
In a Tuesday evening update, Terrazas said the family had found a hotel for the night with the little commissary money they had left. The family plans to seek immediate medical attention for baby Juan, who’s still sick with bronchitis, the reporter noted.
Since then, the family has told Terrezas that they’re going to try to make their way to Guatemala, the home country of Juan’s father, because they believe they’re in too much danger in Mexico. Because of the publicity around their horrifying experience, a GoFundMe for the family has far exceeded its original $15,000 goal, and has now raised nearly $85,000. (We would suggest a donation to RAICES, the Texas immigrant legal aid nonprofit that’s helping detained families get lawyers.)
The Cruelty Is The Victims’ Fault, Say Monsters
Juan and his family were arrested at the border in January, and his mother had requested asylum in the US, as if we allowed that anymore. Under ICE’s 2021 written policy prohibiting detention of nursing and postpartum mothers, they should not have been imprisoned at all, as if policy or basic human decency mattered.
2021 was the Before Times, and because Joe Biden’s refusal to imprison pregnant, postpartum, and nursing mothers is the sole cause of unhappiness in America, that policy, like asylum protections, vanished in a 2025 revision of ICE detention standards. Stop your whining; the new document generously states that pregnant and postpartum women shouldn’t placed in restraints, “absent truly extraordinary circumstances that render restraints absolutely necessary,” so don’t you dare call ICE Nazis.
Besides, before going on to whatever job she’ll have at a right-wing think tank, or in Hell itself, departing DHS propaganda minister Tricia McLaughlin explained to the Independent that it’s perfectly normal to dump sick infants across the border in the middle of the night, especially if you can do it before an interfering federal judge can stop you. The baby “was in stable condition and medically cleared for removal,” McLaughlin said in a statement, adding that “Pediatricians gave the parents a nasal saline spray with a nasal bulb syringe to continue care upon their removal,” and clearly that’s the best medical care possible for a two-month-old in respiratory distress, who was unresponsive just hours before his deportation.
Then it was time for the boilerplate lies: “ICE does NOT separate families. Parents are given a choice to either take their child with them or place them in the care of someone they designate. This is consistent with past administration’s immigration enforcement,” McLaughlin wrote, presumably while chuckling at what a great zinger that “no family separation” line was.
On Twitter, DHS’s rhetoric got even uglier as outrage spread over the deportation of an eight-week-old baby in medical distress. In reply to a tweet by Jim Acosta about Juan’s treatment, DHS’s Twitter account crowed (archive link) that it was all his irresponsible criminal mother’s fault. As this screenshot shows, DHS loved the message enough that it just had to repost it.
When Acosta replied that, sure, it’s not family separation, it’s “family devastation,” and nothing like the DHS claim that it’s focused on “the worst of the worst,” DHS doubled down (archive link) on blaming the terrible illegal criminal invader mother, who isn’t even a person, just a rhetorical object. If only she’d asked, the terrible woman could have gotten a free flight back to her home country (never mind that she was in danger there; she was obviously lying like they all do):
Maybe McLaughlin, who admitted she approved of all the department’s social media, stayed on for a while so she could rationalize the unspeakable one more time, for sentiment’s sake.
Do we even need to point out DHS is outright lying, and that it most certainly doesn’t just take people from prisons and put them on a plane if they only ask? That’s propaganda, not policy, with virtually no actual data to back it up.
But rightwingers on Twitter loved the lies so much that they immediately started citing them in reply to any tweets about Juan, including those by Acosta, so the circle of propaganda is complete. MAGA believes that whatever might become of little Juan Nicolás, it’s clearly his criminal mother’s fault, and in fact aren’t the American people wonderful for choosing a wise, benevolent leader who takes care even of vermin like the little invader baby?
This regime is unforgivably evil.
[ProPublica / San Antonio Current / New Republic / Migrant Insider / San Antonio Current / New Republic / Center for Migration Studies]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time (or recurring) donation to help us keep screaming into the void.
"(If you haven’t yet read that story, be sure to catch up on it, unless of course you know it’s too much right now. A lot of things are just too much right now.)"
As a retired political scientist, I consider it my duty to keep reading these harrowing reports, but I don't know if I can continue much longer. I seem to be beyond outrage; my most frequent responses to these news items are nausea and despair. If the arc of the moral universe truly bends toward justice, there must and there will be a REQUITAL for these atrocities. I just hope I'm still alive to see it....
This whole regime is filled with evil people, but DHS and ICE are the worst.