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 Consтιтutional 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 pᴀssed. 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 pᴀssed 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 “anтιтhesis 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 unconsтιтutional 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 compᴀssion for the vulnerable.
