One of the most enduring images from the recent ICE operation in Minneapolis is the face of 5-year-old Liam Ramos. Ramos was photographed being detained by ICE agents in a blue winter hat, wearing a Spider-Man backpack — he was later sent to a detention center in Dilley, Texas.
Ramos was ultimately released, but his story added fuel to a growing debate about ICE tactics — in particular, the detention of children and families.
The Department of Homeland Security currently operates two facilities where children are being detained — the one in Dilley, and another in Karnes County, also in Texas. The facilities are officially called Family Residential Centers, and a new report from the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University examines the impact they’re having on kids who are sent there.
Dr. Shantel Meek is the executive director of Children’s Equity Project, and worked on the report. The Show spoke to her and she said that, ostensibly, these detention facilities are governed by a set of standards.
Full conversation
SHANTEL MEEK: Promoting basic health and hygiene and, you know, ensuring kids have access to education, letting parents and children have free access to each other and free mobility around the facility, as we've seen and we've heard. It's unclear if that's actually being followed.
SAM DINGMAN: So one of the things that you point out in this report is that even though these sets of standards do exist, there's very little transparency with regard to whether they are adhering to these standards.
Why is that transparency so difficult?
MEEK: Well, in terms of reports that we have received, obviously, the media has covered quite a bit of this. It's from lawyers who have been let in, who are required to have contact with, you know, families that they're representing within these centers or people who have been released from these centers. Obviously, we've had congressional visits. But beyond those reports, there's not a whole lot of transparency or understanding as to what's happening in here.
And so why? That's a great question. There should be. I think that the other thing I would mention is that because these facilities are detaining children, I think they are required to be licensed by the state. They both happen to be in the state of Texas, the ones that are currently operating.
So Texas has its own set of state licensing standards for these places. And as part of that, there's a requirement to have some oversight, some monitoring, some accountability systems in place. Also unclear if that is happening at the state level.
DINGMAN: So all of this, of course, is happening against the backdrop of a very serious increase, particularly in the last few months, of the number of children who are currently in detention at these facilities. Give us a sense of what that looks like.
MEEK: The first set of data kind of came out in October. We saw 425 kids, and the most recent data that we have from January is 1,304 kids.
DINGMAN: So that's almost three times as many.
MEEK: Three times as many. And in terms of the number of kids who have cycled through them, I think in some places, it is more children that have cycled through them than the entire population in the town where these detention facilities are held.
DINGMAN: How much of this practice of detaining children is unique to the Trump administration?
MEEK: That's a good question. We recently published a report, and we included a little bit of a timeline, at least since the year 2001, when we think the first one of these was open under the Bush administration. It was called the Burks Residential Facility and that one was in Pennsylvania. Another one was open in Texas during the Bush administration.
During the Obama administration, there were increase in the number of, one unaccompanied children who were coming over the border without a parent or guardian, and then families with really young children. There were huge spikes in that.
And during that period of time, they opened a family detention center in New Mexico. And then replaced that one with the one that we see now in Dilley, Texas. The same year, they opened the one in Karnes, which was previously a prison for adults.
In 2021, Biden, the Biden administration closed all three of the ones that were open at the time, and then now it brings us to today in 2025, when the two in Texas were reopened, I believe, in March.
DINGMAN: OK. And what are the current regulations around family separation? Many listeners will probably remember this as one of the biggest scandals of the first Trump administration. You were mentioning the current residential standards that DHS and ICE have established for these facilities, which do call for, quote, preserving and promoting family unity. Do we know what that looks like in practice?
MEEK: What we do know is that in some of these family detention centers, the mother, if there's a mom, the mom and the child get to stay together, and the fathers are often separated into different areas, even if they're still within the same facility.
DINGMAN: Let's talk about what we know about the conditions in these facilities and how this is impacting the kids who are detained.
MEEK: We've seen everything from unsanitary conditions to water that's not clean, food that is not edible, children not getting education as they are entitled to within a whole set of standards, whether that's Texas licensing or ICE's own family residential standards. We saw a measles outbreak, of course, in one of them. And so there's just all of these various reports that are coming out.
Children are scared and worried and anxious and depressed. And, you know, there has been research on this. And so we know that there's a whole set of negative outcomes, obviously, and common sense would tell you this as well, if children are detained, that impacts development. And so you see developmental regression, kids who used to be able to do particular things, go back. You see bedwetting a lot and kids who had been potty training. You see communication differences of kids who might stop talking. Over the course of the last decade or so, there's been children who have died in DHS and CBP custody.
DINGMAN: At 12, right, according to the report?
MEEK: Yep. So I guess we know a lot from what we've heard from non-governmental individuals.
DINGMAN: So the fundamental positioning of this report is that these facilities are having terrible impacts on kids.
Is there ever a situation in which a child can be humanely detained? You know, if you were designing such a policy, do you have a sense of what that would look like?
MEEK: So to the first question, is there ever an instance where a child can be humanely detained? I would say no. There have to be other ways, and there are other ways that the government itself has tested that allow for community-based efforts where we're still upholding immigration laws.
DINGMAN: So what do those community-based efforts look like?
MEEK: Yeah, so back in 2016, the U.S. government piloted a new program for families who are seeking asylum at the U.S. border. So again, this pilot, this particular test case was just for families who are coming in, not for families who are already here.
But it was called the Family Case Management Program. And instead of detaining families or using ankle monitors when we released them, families were enrolled in this program. It was funded by ICE, and they provided a whole amount of kind of mentorship services, supports to families to ensure that, you know, they were going through whatever legal process they needed to go through and had the supports they needed.
What they found was that they had more than 99% appearance rates at ICE appointments and immigration hearings. And it costs about $38 a day to run it, which compared to the estimate of detention, which is $960 to $1,000 a day for a family of three.
So the cost is a no brainer, right? We're not putting children in jails. And you're still complying with immigration laws, right? We had like 99% compliance with that. And so there are other ways, right, and this was again, just for families coming across the border, but why couldn't we build on this model, right, and create something for families who are already here?
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