Joel Andre is a 17-year-old immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a soccer-obsessed high school junior who now lives just outside of Portland, Maine. At the moment, for Joel and his younger sister, Estafania, homework is taking a back seat to this summer’s World Cup – which is the perfect distraction at this dinner table for a family that badly needs one. “Every time I’m doing something, I always think about Olivia,” said Joel.
Olivia is their 19-year-old sister. All three, along with their mother, Carine, were detained last November at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.
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The family had fled the Congo after Carine, an activist, was brutalized for speaking out against the ruling regime. They came here seeking political asylum.
Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants Rights Clinic at Columbia University, and the family’s lawyer, says if Carine and her children did not leave the DRC, chances are they would not be alive.
According to Mukherjee, when the family arrived in 2022, they were vetted and released to await their hearing after they were deemed to pose no threat. They complied with all their check-ins. “They showed up for every single appointment, and did everything they were supposed to do,” she said.
But it wasn’t enough.
In February of 2025, a judge ordered them deported. Scared of being sent back to the Congo, they tried to go to Canada, but were denied entry and sent back to the U.S., where they were then sent to Dilley.
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Those accounts have been repeated by dozens of detainees in sworn testimony, written letters, and interviews.
More than 6,300 children under 18, some as young as two months old, have been detained by federal immigration authorities during President Trump’s second term. Nearly half have been detained at Dilley. Ninety-seven percent had no criminal record.
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Dilley opened in 2014. President Obama intended to hold migrant families there who’d been caught crossing the southern border illegally. President Biden closed it a decade later.
When President Trump reopened Dilley in 2025, a for-profit company, CoreCivic, was given a contract worth $180 million annually to run it.
CoreCivic denies the charges of any substandard care or conditions at Dilley, telling “Sunday Morning,” “The conditions described in your inquiry do not reflect the operations, standards or care provided at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center.” [See full statement below.]
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That alone violated something called the Flores Settlement, a federal order that’s been in place for nearly 30 years requiring the prompt release of children. One federal court has said that means no more than 20 days.
Asked if he’d thought that there were laws in place that would prevent them from being held in Dilley more than 20 days, Joel replied, “Yes. But they broke all those laws.”
While a federal court has rejected a White House effort to terminate the Flores Settlement, the administration is appealing.
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This past week, we went with Congressman Castro to Dilley, where families also complain about a lack of health care and a lack education for their kids. “These kids, they’re hugging my leg and they’re asking me to get ’em outta there,” Castro said. “I mean, they are four years old, six years old, and they’re basically in a trailer prison.”
Our CBS News crew got as far as the front gate. The restrictions in place at Dilley say no reporters are allowed. And even those who do get in, like Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, have to surrender their phones upon entry, meaning there are somewhere near 100 children inside Dilley – and not one picture of the conditions in which they live.
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The post Children “Held Like Criminals” Inside ICE Detention Center appeared first on American Renaissance.
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