Children left short of clean water and sleep amid 'prolonged' detention by Ice, watchdog groups allege

Children, including the very young, have been spending weeks or months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in a remote part of Texas where outside monitors have heard accounts of shortages of clean drinking water, chronic sleep deprivation and kids struggling for hygiene supplies and prompt medical attention, as revealed in a stark new court filing.

Legal experts able to witness conditions made a barrage of allegations about deprivations, violations of legally agreed basic detention standards and humanitarian concerns at the only known Ice center currently holding families. At the facility in Dilley, a small town an hour south-west of San Antonio, kids and their parents described a “prison-like environment” where the guards reportedly call them “inmates” despite them not being criminals, and said they live in “cell-like trailers”.

In a response to the government’s court-ordered compliance report, attorneys at the legal groups responsible for monitoring child detention asserted on behalf of people held that: “Family detention is not only cruel and fundamentally harmful to children but also unjustified.”

The facility, titled the South Texas Family Residential Center, is run on behalf of Ice by the private corrections and detention company CoreCivic, which expects to make $180m annually in revenue from the property through at least March 2030.

The detailed and disturbing descriptions of the lockup’s allegedly inhumane conditions, filed in a US district court on 15 September and accessed by the Guardian, are a result of routine site visits.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/28/ice-detention-texas-children

It's not a prison, it's merely a concentration camp...oops, "Family detention center"!