After the Letters Were Published

A seven-year-old child from Venezuela, Mia Valentina Paz Faria, was held in the Dilley, Texas family detention camp for seventy days. In a letter to the outside, she wrote: “I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” Hers was one of several letters that reached ProPublica reporters and was published in the resulting story.

The published letters carried the voices of multiple children at the same facility. A nine-year-old held one hundred thirteen days wrote, “Me in dilei [Dilley] am not happy please get me out of here to colombia.” A five-year-old wrote two words: “My family.” Mothers at the camp described children who had begun cutting themselves and talking about suicide, and who were finding worms and mold in their food.

The day the ProPublica story was published, federal personnel raided the camp’s dormitories to confiscate and destroy further letters from the children. The administrative response to the publication was not an investigation of the conditions described, nor an accommodation of the children’s stated wishes, but the elimination of the specific medium that had let those statements escape.