Trump detains more than 6,300 immigrant children, Dilley center fills up

Children with no criminal record have been funneled into a detention system built for enforcement, not childhood. More than 6,300 people under 18 were detained by federal immigration authorities during President Donald Trump’s second term, and nearly half of them were held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas, the only active federal family detention center in the country.

Dilley reopened in March 2025 after the Biden administration closed it in 2024, and it quickly became the center of the administration’s renewed family-detention strategy. Operated by CoreCivic, the facility has a capacity of about 2,400 people, yet it has been used to hold far more than a few isolated cases. PBS reported in February 2026 that Dilley had held around 3,500 people since reopening, more than half of them children. Human Rights First and RAICES said more than 5,600 people, including parents, toddlers and newborn babies, had been imprisoned there between April 2025 and February 2026.

The conditions described by reporters and advocates have been harsh and prison-like. Complaints have included lights left on 24 hours a day, worms in food, intimidating guards and sick children. Those accounts have sharpened the policy-human gap at the center of the story: the government is holding children, many of them not accused of any crime, inside a facility that is designed to confine families rather than serve as a child-welfare setting.

The legal framework meant to restrain that system is the Flores Settlement Agreement, in place since 1997. It requires safe and sanitary conditions, the least-restrictive placement and release without unnecessary delay when detention is not required. The Trump administration has sought to terminate those protections, but a federal court rejected that effort in 2025. Child-welfare and immigrant-rights groups say the spike in child detention marks a sharp reversal from the end of family detention under Biden and raises due-process and trauma concerns for children who are being held even when they have no criminal record.

The numbers point to a larger shift in immigration enforcement during Trump’s second term. Dilley’s rapid refilling, its status as the country’s only active family detention center and the scale of child detention together show how quickly the administration has moved to rebuild a system that previous officials had tried to shrink.