OUR DAILY THREAD: Detaining For Dollars
Prison profit motives
THE SET-UP: “There’s nothing about detaining children that is humane. It certainly does nothing to make any of us safer. If the inhumanity of it isn’t enough to compel you, the fact that we are paying a for-profit institution to really traumatize children – we should all have challenges with that.”
That’s what Rep. Maxine Dexter recently told Houston Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg after the Oregon Democrat visited a 7 year-old detainee at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. Located about 75 miles to the south and west of San Antonio, Dexter made the trip to secure the release of the Crespo-Gonzalez family. They were taken into custody in Portland while seeking medical attention for their 7 year-old’s chronic nosebleed and fever. But instead of arriving at a local urgent care, they were grabbed and eventually dumped into CoreCivic’s family-style prison.
Rep. Dexter, who was initially denied entry, was ultimately successful in securing the family’s release and escorted them back to Oregon. But back in Dilley, roughly 450 parents and 500 children continue to languish while the nation’s second largest private prison company profits off their internment. In Trump’s first year, CoreCivic has seen its ICE-related business grow by a staggering 45%. That, in turn, translated into $269 million in contracts … which is not a bad return on the $3.69 million CoreCivic invested in lobbying throughout 2025.
Amazingly enough, that growth is only good enough for fifth place on The Project For Government Oversight’s “top ten” list of companies profiting off Trump’s attempt to cleanse immigrants from the population:
That list is found in a completely overlooked analysis by POGO Investigates and the Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) published amidst increase scrutiny of the inhumane conditions inside CoreCivic’s Dilley facility.
If you believe their website, the children detained at Dilley are enjoying comfortable lives in CoreCivic’s care:
CoreCivic is responsible for providing residential services in an open and safe environment that offers residents indoor and outdoor recreational activities, life skills, counseling, group interaction, and access to religious and legal services.
They even have a reassuring “virtual tour” through Dilley’s amenities. But, as The New York Times reported, the stories coming out of Dilley describe a far “different reality” of “inadequate medical care, lights kept on all night, scant drinking water and little education.” Here’s more from the Times:
The detention center is surrounded by barbed wire, and most families sleep in rooms shared with other families. Children often lose weight and get sick. Recently, there were two confirmed cases of measles. Some children have become suicidal and had panic attacks, families and lawyers say.
The Houston Chronicle’s Falkenberg was a bit more specific:
The morning porridge has worms – not all the time but enough that the kids remember. Food is often moldy, expired, repetitive and lacking in adequate nutrition. Water has a putrid smell, and moms say it’s making their kids sick.
Falkenberg also notes:
That’s not the worst of what parents and kids have reported to lawyers, legal aid groups, journalists and visiting Congress members about the conditions at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas.
Here what one of those lawyers told her:
[Michigan attorney Eric] Lee, who represents a mother and her five children confined at Dilley for eight months, said the 5-year-old twins are hardly eating and the 9-year-old is verbalizing suicidal thoughts. Schooling is virtually non-existent, he said, and even urgent medical care has been denied. When one of the twins had appendicitis, the child was initially given only Tylenol, Lee said, and later was forced to “writhe in pain” for hours at urgent care before finally being taken to San Antonio for surgery.
Obviously, there is a significant gap between the “virtual” and the “reality.” The problem for DHS is that the gap is starting to be filled-in by the kids they are often holding for weeks and months beyond the court-mandated limit of twenty days.
On the 9th of February, ProPublica published drawings and letters from eight children currently trapped inside CoreCivic’s glorified ATM machine. The despair expressed in their handwritten letters struck a chord. It sparked renewed scrutiny of both Dilley and the growing population of warehoused children, which has increased six-fold since Trump returned to the White House. It also sparked a crackdown by official at Dilley, who, according to reports, raided “the cells of families to confiscate and destroy children’s letters and drawings depicting the inhumane conditions of their imprisonment.” Per Truthout:
Univision correspondent Lidia Terrazas shared a video of a mother explaining what guards had done to items belonging to her developmentally disabled child.
“15-year-old Cariexis Quintero, who has the intellectual capacity of a 7 y/o, described how guards in the Dilley Detention Center stormed in her room looking for drawings and letters, they destroyed what they found,” Terrazas said in her post.
“This is just one of several similar complaints I’ve received,” Terrazas added.
The incident has not been widely reported and, therefore, no official statement has been made about the raid. As for conditions inside Dilley, the DHS told The New York Times:
“Detainees are provided with three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap and toiletries.”
“Children have access to teachers, classrooms and curriculum booklets for math, reading, and spelling. All of this is generously funded by the U.S. taxpayer.”
It appears that taxpayers’ “generosity” is not trickling down to the kids. Instead, DHS Secretary Noem plans on lavishing some of that generosity on herself.
The story of Noem’s coveted luxury jet plane offers a telling juxtaposition to Dilley’s dire conditions. While she’s emboldened to open a “mile-high club” on the taxpayer’s dime, the companies clamoring for contracts have little motivation to do less than the bare minimum. Both benefit from the complete lack of oversight by the GOP-led Congress. An oft-troubled company like CoreCivic is probably further emboldened by the Trump regime’s rhetoric and, more importantly, its unconstitutional approach to rounding-up immigrants. - jp
ICE, Inc.: The Top Companies Profiting from Trump’s Immigration Crackdown
https://www.pogo.org/investigates/ice-inc-the-top-companies-profiting-from-trumps-immigration-crackdown
ICE-Cold Cash: Private Prison Companies and Executives Have Donated Millions to Members of Congress
https://theappeal.org/ice-cold-cash-private-prison-congress-donations/
Immigration officials plan to spend $38.3 billion to boost detention capacity to 92,000 beds
https://apnews.com/article/ice-detention-facilities-expansion-warehouses-c61c3e23c4246e94a760b4d979cb9c48
The Next Phase of ICE’s $38 Billion Detention Plan: Centralized, DHS-Owned Warehouses
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-19/trump-s-immigration-push-to-warehouses-could-cut-out-corecivic-geogroup
More to Every Story: How some cities are restricting private immigration detention facilities
https://www.krem.com/video/news/special-reports/more-to-every-story/more-to-every-story-how-some-cities-are-restricting-private-immigration-detention-facilities/293-b2306419-67c4-46ac-b150-bcebf5ed2e89
Hundreds protest Romulus ICE detention center ahead of council meeting
https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2026/02/hundreds-protest-romulus-ice-detention-center-ahead-of-council-meeting.html
Spokane city council members discuss ordinance proposing ICE detention ban
https://www.krem.com/video/news/local/spokane-city-council-members-discuss-ordinance-proposing-ice-detention-ban/293-9e5872ca-b542-4cc6-8810-aec5007b3d4d
911 calls offer glimpse of medical emergencies at family ICE detention center
https://www.scrippsnews.com/investigations/ice-inc/911-calls-offer-glimpse-of-medical-emergencies-at-family-ice-detention-center
ICE deported a nearly 9-month pregnant woman from Dilley over the weekend
https://www.sacurrent.com/news/san-antonio-news/ice-deported-a-nearly-9-month-pregnant-woman-from-dilley-over-the-weekend/
“I Have Been Here Too Long”: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility
https://www.propublica.org/article/ice-dilley-children-letters