Soon after immigration officials arrested him along with his wife and kids at the U.S. border and dropped them off at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas, Aleksei began counting down the days.
“OK, 20 days. We just wait and pray for God to release us please after these 20 days.”
The U.S. isn’t supposed to hold minors for longer than that, the Russian asylum-seeker had been told, under a decades-old legal settlement intended to shield children from the harms of detention.
But 20 days came and went. Aleksei and his wife, who asked to be identified only by their first names out of fear of retaliation should they be deported, watched their 5-year-old twins unravel at the remote, prisonlike facility. When he approached an ICE officer and asked why the deadline had been ignored, the officer said to take it up with his boss.
“Who’s that?” Aleksei asked.
“Trump.”
The officer declined to provide the president’s phone number. When Aleksei followed up with a written complaint, another ICE officer responded in writing that the court agreement that established the 20-day rule “is not applicable anymore.”
That isn’t true. But since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, officials routinely violate the limit, according to data collected by court-appointed monitors and shared with NBC News and NBC Dallas-Fort Worth. Children like Aleksei’s twins get confined for weeks or months in conditions advocates say can be traumatic and developmentally harmful.
As of January, more than 900 children had been held in family detention for longer than 20 days, according to the data. Roughly 270 of those children were confined for more than twice as long.
Lawyers representing families at Dilley say the prolonged stays reflect a broader strategy by the Trump administration to use detention as a deterrent, pressuring parents to abandon asylum claims rather than continue fighting their cases. As days stretch into weeks — and weeks into months — they say, the psychological and developmental toll deepens for children trapped inside a facility where detainees have complained of spoiled food, lax medical care and limited education.
Vilma Bautista Torres, who fled Honduras and sought asylum in the U.S. in 2021, said she and her 9-year-old son, Kenek, spent more than 80 days at Dilley before their release on parole last week. Kenek, who has severe autism, grew increasingly disoriented and distressed as the weeks dragged on without access to therapy, she said, hitting himself, crying through the night and begging her to let him return to his school in Louisiana.
In another case, Habiba Soliman, 18, and her four younger siblings — including twin 5-year-olds — have been detained at Dilley for more than nine months alongside their mother as they fight in court to return to their adopted home in Colorado rather than be deported to Egypt.
“This place broke something in us — something that I don’t know if we will ever be able to fix,” Soliman said in a phone call from the facility last week.
The 20-day threshold traces back to a 1985 class-action lawsuit, Flores v. Meese, which accused the federal government of holding immigrant children in unsafe conditions. The case dragged on for more than a decade before a landmark 1997 settlement established nationwide minimum standards for the detention of minors.
Under the Flores Settlement Agreement, children may be held only for the time reasonably necessary to arrange their prompt release or deportation — a process that federal courts have interpreted to mean no longer than 20 days. But immigration lawyers say the Department of Homeland Security’s adherence to that limit has been wildly inconsistent over the past year. Some families are released within days; others remain detained for months, with little explanation for the disparity.
At the same time, the Trump administration has been fighting in court to overturn Flores, arguing it incentivizes migrants to bring children to secure faster release into the U.S., fueling surges in border crossings and limiting the government’s ability to detain and remove families. A federal judge rejected that legal challenge in August; the administration has appealed.
In a statement, DHS attacked the Flores settlement as “a tool of the left that is antithetical to the law and wastes valuable U.S. taxpayer funded resources.” The department has dismissed allegations of poor care at Dilley as “mainstream media lies,” writing in February that the facility is “purpose-built to ensure that families in detention are comfortable and have all of their needs cared for.”
CoreCivic, which manages Dilley under a federal contract that’s expected to earn the company $180 million annually, said it’s not responsible for how long children are held. It referred reporters to a statement from last month defending the quality of accommodations, food and medical care provided at the facility. “Nothing matters more to CoreCivic than the health and safety of the people in our care,” the statement said.
Becky Wolozin, a senior attorney with the National Center for Youth Law and a member of the legal team responsible for enforcing the Flores settlement, said she and her colleagues have documented significant regression among minors held beyond 20 days. Parents report school-age children wetting the bed again, sucking their thumbs and experiencing frequent night terrors. Some withdraw and become despondent.
“One parent told us that their 5-year-old asked, ‘Are we bad people? Are they going to kill us here?’” Wolozin said. “That’s what these children are feeling as time goes on.”
Children trapped in ICE detention
- Families have complained of inedible food, lax medical care and no school at the Dilley, Texas, detention center.
- A toddler hospitalized with respiratory failure was returned to ICE detention and denied prescribed medication, a lawsuit says.
- A detained couple who fled oppression in Russia say their children found worms in their food and endured hourslong waits for medicine.
- 911 calls capture kids burning with fever, struggling to breathe at ICE facility.
Attorneys for families held at Dilley argue that in many cases there was no justification for detaining them in the first place. Many had been living in the U.S. for months or years without incident, checking in regularly with immigration authorities while pursuing asylum or other relief. Some were arrested at immigration appointments — encounters that in prior years might have resulted in continued monitoring outside detention rather than confinement.
“Where is the public safety risk?” said Sergio Perez, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, which helped bring the original Flores case. “Where is the threat that a 5-year-old, 13-year-old, 14-year-old presents? There is none.”
Bautista Torres said the nearly three months she and her 9-year-old spent at Dilley were the hardest they have ever endured.
Her son, Kenek, has Level 3 autism — the most severe classification — and relies on specialized schooling and daily therapy to regulate his emotions and behavior. At Dilley, she said, those supports vanished. He struggled to understand where he was or why he couldn’t leave. The lights stayed on through the night, and the constant noise of patrolling guards left him agitated and afraid. The unfamiliar food on his plate often went untouched.
“He would tell me, ‘Let’s go to my house,’” Bautista Torres said in Spanish. “As a mother, it made me feel terrible.”
She said his distress escalated as the weeks passed. When she took him outside to the small playground, Kenek believed they were finally leaving — then became frantic when forced back inside. He began hitting himself, pulling at his clothes and screaming. The meltdown lasted for hours, she said, until he lay exhausted on the floor.
After that, Bautista Torres said, she stopped taking him outside altogether, afraid that the cycle of hope and panic would trigger another episode. Weeks passed without sunlight touching their skin.
“No one would like to go through what we went through,” she said.
Child psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert Kliman, an autism expert who has evaluated minors in immigration detention, said the prolonged confinement of any child — particularly one with severe autism — is the “antithesis of good treatment” and risks inflicting irreparable harm. Many autistic children experience the world as overwhelming or threatening, he said, and depend on highly structured, predictable environments — not isolation, uncertainty and constant sensory stress.
“I could hardly think of a worse way to treat an autistic boy,” said Kliman, who visited Dilley during the first Trump administration to interview detained children.
In a statement, DHS denied withholding education, specialized therapy and other care. When the mother and son arrived at Dilley, the agency said, Bautista Torres "informed the facility’s staff that her child had a history of autism and took medications. The medications were provided and treatment was continued by the facility’s staff."
Like other detainees, Bautista Torres said she struggled to secure legal help while in custody. After she finally connected with a pro bono law clinic, the team filed a parole request detailing Kenek’s autism diagnosis, his missed therapy and the episodes of self-harm. ICE released the family with an ankle monitor two days later.
Now back in Louisiana, Kenek has returned to school after missing months of classes. His mother worries about how much he may have regressed — and whether the trauma will linger.
“It’s lost time that we cannot recover,” she said.
In November, after an ICE officer falsely told Aleksei that the Flores protections were no longer in effect, he and his wife, Anastasia, said their 5-year-old twins began reverting to behaviors they had long outgrown, with frequent meltdowns and growing fear of strangers. The children struggled to sleep, refused food and lost weight, they said. Their son asked if they were bad people and if the guards planned to kill them.
The uncertainty — not knowing when, or if, they would be released — deepened the strain, Anastasia said. Even people serving criminal sentences know when their time in prison will end, she said. “But we don’t know.”
DHS didn't answer questions about the family's case.
After months searching for legal help, the family secured an attorney to file a parole request. They were released in February after more than 120 days in custody — six times the limit set by Flores.
Some families have been held even longer.
Soliman was 17 — just days removed from her high school graduation — when she and her family were arrested in Colorado and taken to Dilley in June. Her siblings were 16, 8 and 4-year-old twins. All of them have marked birthdays inside the facility in the nine months since, but there were no cakes or presents.
Their father was charged with carrying out a firebombing terror attack in Boulder last year at a Jewish event supporting Israeli hostages in Gaza. He has pleaded not guilty. Afterward, DHS arrested the man’s wife and five children and announced it was investigating whether they aided in his plot.
The family has repeatedly denied any knowledge of their father’s plans and publicly disavowed his alleged actions. An immigration judge initially determined they were neither a danger nor a flight risk and granted bond but later reversed that decision after ICE appealed.
The family’s lawyer has argued it’s unconstitutional to jail children for their father’s alleged crimes. Yet they remain.
DHS said they are continuing to investigate to what extent the family knew about their husband and father's alleged attack. "They will remain in custody pending removal proceedings," the statement said.
In a call last week, Soliman — who was recently separated from her family and moved to a section of Dilley reserved for adults without children — described what she called her family’s slow descent into hopelessness. One of the twins, she said, has been having a recurring nightmare in which she is chased by a large animal but cannot escape because she and the creature are locked inside a cage.
“We’re not the same people who came here,” Soliman said.
But she hasn’t lost all hope. If she’s ever allowed to return to Colorado, she still plans to pursue her dream of attending medical school.
America, she said, could use more doctors with compassion for the vulnerable.
