Inside Dilley

The Dilley Immigration Processing Center in south Texas — closed by the Biden administration in 2024, reopened in 2025 as part of a forty-five-billion-dollar detention expansion — is the only ICE family detention facility in the country. It is run for ICE by the private prison corporation CoreCivic. Journalists are not permitted inside; congressional oversight visits, until earlier this month, required a week’s advance application. The body of evidence about life inside is therefore almost entirely indirect: sworn declarations submitted by detained children and parents to legal aid groups, some of them filed as exhibits in litigation, others collected by RAICES simply for the record.

Those declarations describe food that has caused a woman to vomit blood, denied or delayed medical and mental-health care, sleeping conditions that resist sleep, intimidation by guards, and a four-year-old who hit his head, developed a black eye, and was not assessed for concussion. DHS and CoreCivic have published websites refuting the claims. The methodological difficulty of testing those refutations — when journalists are barred and detainees’ communications are constrained — is itself part of the story. The closure of the channels through which evidence would normally be examined is what permits the official denials to operate as the only public record from inside the facility.