The Trauma of Family Detention on Children

Federal agent holding Liam Cornejo Ramos. Photo credit: Columbia Heights Public Schools

Over the past year, we’ve watched the horror of mass deportation unfold in communities across the country. Yet few images have been as disturbing as that of a five-year-old who was detained in Minneapolis alongside his father in January. Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrián were taken to the Dilley Family Residential Center in Texas and held there for weeks. Lawmakers who later visited the facility shared photos showing Liam looking pale and listless.

Photo of Congressman Joaquin Castro, Adrián, and Liam during a congressional delegation visit to the Dilley Family Residential Center.

Two weeks ago, a federal judge ordered Adrián and Liam’s release from detention. The judge’s order condemned the administration’s “ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.” Below his signature, he attached a photo of Liam taken the day he was arrested, and referenced two verses from the New Testament, including Matthew 19:14, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

Liam and his family entered the United States legally from Ecuador after securing an appointment through the CBP One mobile application. The program allowed asylum seekers to present themselves for lawful processing at the U.S.–Mexico border during the Biden administration. Even though their asylum case is pending, the administration is moving to terminate it early to deport them – a practice they have successfully used against countless other asylum seekers.

The image of Liam, wearing a Spider-Man backpack and an oversized fluffy blue bunny hat, being held by federal agents in his driveway was shocking to many. But Liam is one of hundreds of children who have been arrested and detained. We just haven’t seen the pictures of the moments they were taken.

As former administration officials, we know all too well that immigration detention, even when done carefully and in compliance with the rules and standards in place, is harmful to children. Immigration enforcement may be complicated, but that doesn’t justify traumatizing children when effective and humane alternatives exist. Lawmakers outraged by Liam’s story should focus on implementing policies that protect innocent children rather than detaining them.

We Have Decades of Evidence that Family Detention Harms Innocent Children

In a recent interview, Liam’s father said that his son “has not been the same” since he left Dilley. The family is fearful for their safety and has been in hiding since their release. In interviews, Adrián said his son is terrified of being separated from his father, has nightmares, and wakes up crying. He has not returned to his elementary school, which has received bomb threats since his arrest and detention.

The trauma that children suffer in family detention is easy to understand. Watching a parent be arrested, searched, and stripped of autonomy and the ability to make even the most basic decisions about daily life is profoundly destabilizing for a child. Being detained with one parent, but separated from another — as Liam was— adds another layer of trauma.

This past week, ProPublica published letters they received from other children being held at Dilley. A 9-year old girl from Venezuela, who has been detained for over 40 days, wrote that after seeing how the United States treats immigrants, she wants to go back home. Another girl from Colombia has been detained for over a hundred days with her mother.

The harms of family detention have been extensively documented by medical and child welfare experts. A study by the Harvard School of Public Health, which examined the medical records of 165 children detained during the Obama administration found that those held for an average of 40 days experienced inadequate medical care, malnutrition, and exposure to tuberculosis.

In 2018, UNICEF USA reported that even when children were detained alongside their parents, they suffered acute trauma that impaired their ability to learn and play after release. The American Psychiatric Association also warned the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that detaining children for more than 20 days can inflict trauma so severe that it may shape their mental health and well-being into adulthood.

We have seen no evidence that the nation benefits from family detention, and we should all be worried about the ripple effects this practice will have on the lives of children long after their release. Choosing to detain children when humane alternatives exist is indefensible.

A History of Family Detention from Bush to Biden

Donald Trump was not the first president to detain families. The practice began on a limited scale during the Bush administration in 2001, when immigrant families in need of temporary housing were placed at a small facility in Berks, Pennsylvania. Most of these families arrived at major East Coast airports and sought asylum upon arrival, but they had no community ties and no place to live in the United States. At that time, Berks bore little resemblance to today’s family detention centers. The facility could hold 96 people, residents had relative freedom of movement, and some were thankful for a place to sort out next steps. For many years, it was the only ICE facility that held parents and children.

In 2006, amid increased border arrivals, the Bush administration expanded family detention by opening the T. Don Hutto facility in Taylor, Texas. Unlike Berks, Hutto was a converted jail. Families were confined in cells and treated like prisoners. The ACLU, upon learning about the conditions there, moved to sue the Bush administration on behalf of 26 detained children. The lawyers argued that the facility violated Flores v. Meese, a 1997 court settlement (the Flores Settlement) that established minimum standards and conditions for the housing and release of all minors in federal immigration custody.

They won the suit, and in 2007, secured the Hutto Settlement, an agreement that required officials to allow children to wear regular clothes rather than prison uniforms, to possess small toys, and to have greater freedom of movement and access to education. The Bush administration worked to improve detention conditions under the agreement, and established new standards for holding families in detention, including new requirements for medical care, education, and training for staff. However, in 2009, early in the Obama administration, Hutto was converted back to an adult women’s detention center, leaving Berks as the nation’s only family detention center.

That changed in 2014, when the Obama administration embraced family detention as a tool to deter asylum seekers from coming to the U.S. First, DHS converted a Customs and Border Protection training site in Artesia, New Mexico, into a family detention center designed to hold families for extended periods of time while ICE pursued removal orders. Conditions at Artesia were dire, particularly for children. Human rights advocates, attorneys, and government watchdogs reported that children were repeatedly denied adequate medical care and warned the administration that children would die if conditions were not improved.

While the administration closed the facility after a few months, it simultaneously expanded family detention elsewhere — converting an adult detention center in Karnes, Texas, and constructing a large new facility in Dilley, Texas — eventually bringing total family detention capacity to more than 3,500 beds. While Berks was the best of the family detention facilities, it too had problems. Families detained at the facility experienced serious mistreatment as they were held for longer periods of time.

In 2015, lawyers challenged the Obama administration’s usage of family detention under the Flores settlement. A federal judge ruled that children could be detained for no more than 20 days unless the government had a final order of removal. That decision sharply limited how family detention could be used. In response, the administration made operational changes to only detain families through the credible fear process– a legal requirement to continue to pursue an asylum claim — and if they had a positive fear finding, the families were released within 20 days to continue their immigration cases outside of custody.

The Obama administration’s practice of detaining families for 20 days was a costly spectacle that did little to deter others from arriving at the border —the ostensible reason for its existence. In fact, the number of families crossing only decreased when the administration asked Mexico to increase its enforcement efforts against migrant families in Mexico.

President Trump sought to eliminate the 20-day limit in his first term, but he was unsuccessful. Instead, as the number of families arriving at the southern border began to grow, he pursued more punitive measures to deter families from crossing the border, including family separation. After Trump ended family separation after a national outcry against the practice, he sent newly-arriving families to wait for their asylum hearings in Mexico under the Migration Protection Protocols, known as Remain in Mexico. MPP stranded families in some of the most dangerous cities in the world without housing, security, or any protection from the drug cartels that threatened and kidnapped migrants.

Even though President Biden promised to reverse many of Trump’s cruel immigration policies, he did not commit to ending family detention. Instead, leadership at ICE determined that family detention was not only prohibitively expensive, but operationally unnecessary since most families were released within days after passing credible fear screenings. ICE officials who had worked through each phase of family detention came to believe that the harms to children far outweighed any asserted government benefit. Over two years, ICE converted family detention centers into short-term processing facilities which temporarily held families prior to their release into communities.

The agency ultimately ended family detention altogether, developing an alternative process called Family Expedited Removal Management (FERM). Under this new program, families were released with instructions on how to report to ICE and placed in an Alternative to Detention program with the head of household on electronic monitoring— including a phone application and ankle monitor — while their cases wound their way through immigration court. Karnes was converted to an adult detention center, and both Dilley and Berks were closed. This shift reflected a consequential moral decision by ICE to treat immigrant families with greater humanity during the immigration process.

How Trump is Using Family Detention

Upon returning to office, the Trump administration reinstated family detention. It reopened the Dilley Family Residential Center, and again converted the Karnes facility in Texas to hold families. But the logistical and operational difficulties of detaining families quickly resurfaced. Karnes has already been converted back into an adult detention facility, and Dilley is now using part of its capacity to detain single adults. Even so, hundreds of children remain in government custody every day, and the administration has made clear that it intends to expand family detention using the tens of billions of dollars Congress appropriated in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA).

In prior administrations, these facilities were primarily used to detain families who had recently crossed the border. Now, the government is detaining families who have lived in the United States for years, have deep ties to their communities, and in some cases, like Liam’s family, entered the country legally. This new approach to family detention cannot even be justified on public safety grounds, given that adults with serious criminal records are categorically barred from family residential centers because they could pose a danger to other children.

So what purpose does family detention serve? It functions as a tool of intimidation that spreads fear in immigrant communities and pressures families to leave the country on their own. In Minnesota, at least one family signed their own deportation orders rather than continue subjecting their two-year-old daughter to detention.

It’s Time to Build Alternatives to Family Detention

For more than twenty years, administrations of both parties have turned to family detention in moments of political pressure. Each time, the evidence has been the same. It harms children and fails to achieve its stated goals.

We acknowledge that the question of how to humanely manage families in the immigration system is a challenge. As Trump has repeatedly shown, policy tradeoffs can make family detention seem like the more defensible option. For example, is a child better off in a U.S. detention facility than stranded in Mexico under a revived Remain in Mexico program? But children should not be detained simply because the alternative could be worse. Congress bears a moral responsibility to enact effective, humane policies that prevent a new generation of children from being traumatized.

In our next piece, we will examine the alternative approaches ICE tested under the Biden and Obama administrations and assess what worked. We will share policy solutions that allow the government to enforce immigration law while protecting children from unnecessary harm.