While Donald Trump's government continues to celebrate the $240 billion it now has for its detention and deportation machinery, in recent days it was revealed that 500 children and babies have been detained since the president assumed his second term in January 2025.

The analysis by MS Now and The Marshall Project illustrates the level of cruelty of the president's immigration policy, who in his first administration separated babies and children from their parents, and now imprisons them without offering adequate food, medical or psychological care when required, or medication on time, resulting in physical and mental problems when these minors are fully developing.

We already know the viciousness with which this government operates because it is not only about detaining and removing people from the country. It's about inflicting damage.

This Monday, June 15, was the 14th anniversary of the implementation of DACA, which grants work permits and protection from deportation to those who were brought as children without documents. It is a program that Trump wants to eliminate at all costs and since he cannot do so automatically, he chooses to make life impossible for beneficiaries with delays in renewing their permits. Many lose their jobs and, in the process, are vulnerable to being detained and deported.

Between January 1 and November 19, 2025, ICE arrested 261 DACA recipients and deported 86 of them, according to DHS. Organizations claim that the figures are higher.

Likewise, horror stories in detention centers operated by disreputable private groups have given rise to hunger strikes in at least four states.

It is estimated that since January 2025, 52 people have died in detention centers, 33 in 2025, and so far in 2026, there are already 19. That includes those who have committed suicide in ICE custody.

The situation of children is one of the most critical due to the trauma they suffer when witnessing the detention of their parents in violent immigration operations, when they are placed in foster homes or with relatives and acquaintances, or when they are detained together with their parents.

The Dilley detention center in Texas, where detained families are sent, is so flawed that it was even closed during the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden. But Trump reopened it as soon as he took office for the second time.

Analysis by MS Now and The Marshall Project notes that “since the Trump administration came to the White House last year, at least 500 babies and toddlers have spent part of that crucial stage (of growth) in ICE custody.”

“ICE has dramatically increased detentions of children under 3 years old, keeping 25 of them in custody on an average day between January 2025 and March of this year,” adds the report based on data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.

According to the parents interviewed, the terrible conditions “left their young children sick, isolated and with a setback in their physical and intellectual development.”

"Having such young children in a prison environment with hundreds of other children and parents just causes them to get sick repeatedly and constantly. So they have a fever, they cough, they vomit, they have diarrhea. They just feel very bad," Elora Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia Law School who has represented more than 80 children and parents incarcerated at Dilley, told analysts.

The document recounts shocking cases of the anxiety suffered by children and the physical and mental consequences.

One of those cases is that of Amalia, a girl with a severe fever who was already lethargic and at the Dilley clinic they only gave her Tylenol and told her parents to stop complaining. The girl lost consciousness.

Amalia's mother, Kheilin Valero Marcano, asked them: “Are you going to let her die?”

"According to the family, Amalia ended up spending more than a week in an outside hospital after her oxygen levels dropped to dangerous levels. There she was diagnosed with COVID-19, an ear infection, pneumonia, bronchitis and RSV, a common but potentially serious childhood disease that affects the lungs," the report states.

Under the Trump administration, harm does not discriminate and even babies seem to be considered “the worst of the worst.” The girl Amalia and her parents were released in February. What is not clear are the long-term consequences that Amalia and the rest of the minors will suffer.

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