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Medical emergencies involving children and pregnant women held at a for-profit immigration detention center in Texas occur multiple times a month, according to 911 recordings and documents obtained by the Scripps News investigative team.
The calls to 911 are from staff at the family detention center in Dilley, Texas, that opened in March of 2025.'He's a six year old male,' a man tells a dispatcher in one call about a child with a fever.'Sixty?' the dispatcher says.'Six-year-old,' the person responds.Some of the calls are for babies detained at Dilley, including a request for an ambulance for a two-month-old named Juan Nicolas. He was taken to a local emergency room with breathing difficulties.Another call went out for medics to help a one-year-old struggling to breathe.A third emergency call references a child with dangerously low oxygen levels.'I'm calling because we have a little boy in respiratory distress,' someone on the line with 911 says. 'He needs to be sent out.'Emergency call logs obtained from Frio County, Texas, show the boy's condition was so severe that first responders wanted to fly him to the hospital by helicopter but couldn't because of bad weather.The call logs also show two ambulance requests for pregnant women at Dilley.'I have a patient that's three months pregnant,' a caller says in one 911 recording. 'She fainted and is being evaluated.'The other call was for a pregnant woman who had a seizure.RELATED NEWS | Measles cases prompt lockdown at ICE facility in TexasKristin Etter represents some of the families at Dilley and is director of policy and legal services at the Texas Immigration Law Council.'They're in very large rooms with like 60 people in a room,' Etters said. 'You can see what a desolate, bleak, and dystopian place it really is.'ICE arrested Jarson Herrera and Kelly Vargas, detaining them at Dilley with their six-year-old daughter Maria Paula, who developed a bad cough while detained.'The only thing they did was give her allergy medicine,' Vargas said. 'And the three of us had stomach problems caused by the food and the water.'Maria Paula was at Dilley for two months despite a longstanding federal court ruling that says children should not be held in detention for more than 72 hours.'It's very sad to see how skinny she got,' Vargas said. 'They threw her out of there vomiting, because my daughter had been vomiting for three days.'The family was deported back to Colombia.The Department of Homeland Security says any claim about inhumane conditions at ICE detention centers is false.CoreCivic, the for-profit company that owns and operates Dilley, says the health of detainees is a priority.A company website says there are 120 medical professionals on site.MORE ON IMMIGRATION DETENTION | ICE contracts fuel revenue surge for owners of for-profit immigration detention centers
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