The Trump Regime’s Misogyny is Rampant in Immigrant Detention Centers

The treatment of women in detention goes to the heart of our humanity.

The South Texas’ Family Residential Center, an immigration detention facility in Dilley, Tex., has been the subject of an onslaught of headlines in recent weeks. National protests followed the horrifying seizure of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, the boy with a blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, who was sent there from Minnesota with his father last month. (They’ve since been released.) By early February, Dilley was the epicenter of a measles outbreak. Pro Publica just issued a searing report as told by the kids detained there — a place where they are served rotten, worm-infested food and dirty water, get little or no classroom time, and are perpetually sick.

Opened during the Obama administration and operated by a private prison company, Dilley has sought to be portrayed as a soft, safe haven — its facilities described with “summer-camp-inspired euphemisms” — where, instead of separating children from their parents, families would stay together or not be detained at all. Shuttered under President Joe Biden only to be reopened last year, around 3,500 people, more than half of them minors have been detained at Dilley under the current Trump administration.

Mariela with her three children before their detention in Dilley. (Carmen Ayala)

The facility is routinely criticized for inhumane conditions. Says Trudy Taylor Smith, who leads the Children’s Defense Fund: “The horror that we are seeing right now is happening on such a shocking scale. There’s no better way to describe it than state-sponsored child abuse.”

Last week, after reports of a toddler detained at Dilley who nearly died because of medical neglect, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) paid an in-person visit, where he says he witnessed more of the same, such as a teenage boy with symptoms consistent with appendicitis who was turned away by a nurse.

Castro also raised the alarm about potential mistreatment of pregnant women. According to local news coverage, Castro’s team requested to speak with pregnant women only to be informed they all were off-site at medical appointments; meanwhile, Castro reported that others at the facility shared stories about women bleeding and possibly miscarrying. Concerned that Dilley officials were “hiding the pregnant women” from him, Castro specifically sought to check in with a woman he’d been told is nine months pregnant (who ended up being deported this week, even though no airline would clear her for travel because she was on the brink of her due date). Castro shared on social media: “I am gravely concerned that ICE is failing to meet the most basic medical needs of expecting mothers while imprisoned. Treating pregnant women and their unborn children with such cruelty is unconscionable.”

Several weeks ago, Castro was joined by Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) at Dilley. For this piece, I spoke with Carmen Ayala, a staffer for Crockett, who described many of the people and families she conversed with there. A father who tested positive for measles; during his quarantine period, his wife and children were relocated with a person infected with tuberculosis. A woman who had found multiple breast lumps right before ICE picked her up; she was denied a mammogram and care while detained. And red flags about many more women in various stages of pregnancy than Dilley representatives acknowledge are present at the facility. (Ayala also shared that the office has been supporting people during and after detention with follow-up casework.)

If this isn’t stomach-churning enough, consider what is happening a few hours south of Dilley, where girls’ reproductive healthcare and freedom is also in grave crisis. The Texas Newsroom and the California Newsroom just issued a joint investigative report detailing how and why the Trump administration is forcing pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children apprehended by immigration enforcement to a shelter in the border city of San Benito.

Why Texas? Why else — because it is a place where abortion is illegal and high-risk pregnancy care is unavailable.

According to the report, girls who wind up at San Benito are highest risk — more likely to be have been raped and/or to have sexually transmitted and other infections that make pregnancy more dangerous, and less likely to have access to prenatal care, nutritious food, and a healthy environment. And, of course, the trauma of being young, alone, and detained.

Damningly, sources for the report are (anonymous) government workers themselves, who shared that “rank-and-file staff, the source said, ‘are losing sleep over it, wondering if kids are going to be placed in programs where they’re not going to have access to the care they need.’” One source said it plainly: “Putting pregnant kids in San Benito is not a decision you make when you care about children’s safety.”

This is entirely by design, of course pulled straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, which included a recommendation that the federal government not detain unaccompanied children in states where abortion is available.

As we go to press on this column, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced yet another lawsuit the state is bringing against a telemedicine abortion provider. The constant split-screen scene in Texas is representative of the nation MAGA wants us to be, where the cruelty is the point and where the anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-freedom banner is flown.

That misogyny was on full display as the Winter Olympics closed this week. The president, when calling to invite the U.S. Men’s Hockey Team to Tuesday’s State of the Union, joked that he would have to invite the Women’s Team, too, or would face impeachment again. The Women’s Team declined the invitation.

We have to keep these stories, and all the women and girls in the state, willingly or not, front and center in the democracy movement. Their humanity is at the heart of all of ours.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.

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