A 13-year-old boy in immigration custody experiences severe emotional distress, including nightmares and bedwetting, prompting his mother's concern about his mental health and the impact of detention. The article highlights the broader issue of the detrimental effects of holding children in immigration custody and questions the care they receive.
A woman and her child arrive at a hearing as federal agents patrol the hallways outside of New York Federal Plaza Immigration Court on August 20, 2025.in Texas last summer, 13-year-old Carlos began experiencing nightmares that would leave him screaming for his mother, Ingrid, as many as five times a night.
After a week in custody, the teenager began wetting the bed — something he had never done before, Ingrid said in a sworn declaration provided to The Cut by the legal non-profit. Concerned, she took Carlos to the detention center’s psychiatrist. The doctor “said that he pees at night because he drinks too much water during the evening, but that is not true,” Ingrid wrote in her declaration. Additionally, the psychiatrist chalked up Carlos’s night terrors to the movies he may have watched during the day, even though the teen said he didn’t really pay attention to the films. To help Carlos through the night, the doctor prescribed pills — Ingrid wasn’t sure which medication specifically — but now the 13-year-old would sleep until nearly noon and take naps throughout the rest of the day. Ingrid was concerned that Carlos went from an active and happy child who would go out and play to one who was “stressed, anxious, and desperate” and sleeping much more than what seemed healthy. “My son has changed a lot. I just want my son to be okay,” she said in her declaration. “I don’t want him to be overmedicated or to be suffering from insomnia. I want him to be a normal child.” As Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents apprehend more children like Carlos every day, it raises a simple question that’s also one of grave moral concern: What does, and therefore they should not be held in immigration custody. “There are no safe ways to detain children, and history has really shown that to us, whether it’s with families or,” says Dr. Sural Shah, a Los Angeles–based pediatrician and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health. Because of this, the Academy opposes the detention of children and“When there is prolonged activation of the body’s stress response, we can find all kinds of effects in the long run,” Shah continues. “There can be issues with brain development. There can be systemic issues, where the whole body is impacted, including affecting organ systems like the cardiovascular system as well as the brain architecture and immune system.” Kids in detention can also face nutritional deficiencies that curb their growth and see their chronic medical conditions worsen due to lack of adequate health care,“They are literally gambling with these children’s lives, and it’s just a matter of time before there’s a catastrophe,” says Dr. Lara Jones, a California provider who specializes in pediatric critical care and who co-authored. Carlos’s experience of nightmares and bed-wetting is unfortunately very common, according to Shah. “In my interactions with families, I see a regression of developmental milestones. They don’t want to eat. They have problems sleeping. They wake up screaming,” she says. “Even older kids can become clingy. More commonly, they can become very withdrawn. They can self-harm. Sometimes we see aggression, and that is a normal response to this amount of stress and trauma, so we are doing this to them with our system and the policies that are in place.”, there’s been a sharp increase in the number of children in detention. Over the past year, the administration has held more than 3,500 people at Dilley, which. More than half of the detainees at Dilley have been children, according to the outlet. Families with minors have also been held for extended periodsremains in effect and requires that minors are held in custody for a maximum of 20 days, about 400 children were detained for longer than the court-mandated limit between August and September alone,that at one point there was no doctor on site to treat the infant. Juan Nicolás was eventually evaluated at a hospital before the Trump administrationfacing delays and denials of medical care, finding worms and mold in their food, and staff threatening to separate families. Detainees repeated these concerns to Representative Sara Jacobs, one of several congressional Democrats who joined Castro on March 9 during one of his oversight visits to the detention center. “It really felt like it was state-sanctioned child abuse,” she says. “The despair of the people in there was overwhelming.” Jacobs says the detention center looks like a prison; it’s very cold and there are harsh fluorescent lights. Multiple families share small living spaces, sleeping on bunk beds. Though the medical unit was fully equipped, the lawmakers didn’t see anyone accessing care there, she says. And while the administration says that children are able to play outside every day, the playgrounds were equally empty during the oversight visit. Additionally, Dilley just began providing schooling to children in earnest earlier this month. “Prior to this program starting, there was a single teacher and the kids could voluntarily come and get a packet. That was the education there for kids for over a year,” Jacobs says. “During our visit, we went into one of the classrooms and it was spotless. The crayons hadn’t even been used. It was a little bit suspicious.” Staff told the lawmakers that, at the time of their visit, there were 59 families in custody — of the 169 people who made up these family units, 99 were children. Jacobs says the families she spoke with all complained about lack of adequate medical care and access to healthy food. “I met a 3-year-old who was not eating. The family went to the doctor, and the doctor basically said, ‘Oh, it’s fine, he hasn’t lost enough weight yet,’” Jacobs says. The lack of proper nutrition is one of the biggest concerns when it comes to children’s development, says Dr. Ashley Cozzo, a Connecticut-based pediatrician and neonatal-perinatal expert who co-authored the letter along with Jones and Dr. Anita K. Patel, a pediatrician and pediatric critical-care provider in Washington, D.C. Cozzo referencedof a 9-month-old who reportedly lost eight pounds while in custody for a month last year. “Children are not supposed to lose weight. That’s an automatic red flag,” she says. “Then, consider that a 9-month-old’s average weight is 18 to 20 pounds. An eight-pound loss is 50 percent of that child’s body mass. That’s catastrophic.” If a child is not growing and gaining weight, their brain will not develop correctly and they could have long-term health consequences, Cozzo says. Any parent with a baby in day care knows how quickly childhood illnesses spread. Detention centers raise those risks to the extreme, as seen in the measles cases in February. “They are functionally congregate living facilities, and there’s inadequate protection for preventing the transmission of communicable diseases,” says Shah, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council chair. “Measles is an extremely contagious disease. There need to be extremely robust protections and policies in place to mitigate transmission, but there’s very little transparency into what those policies and procedures are right now.” The risks are not theoretical either: In the past, children Some of the blame falls on how isolated detention centers can be in the case of medical emergencies. “Knowing all about the risks of these centers to public health in general … To even place the largest detention center of children and families 60 to 70 miles away from the nearest pediatric hospital and emergency room tells you from the jump how children’s health and safety were not in consideration at the very basic level,” says Cozzo.shows that hospital and emergency-room readiness for pediatric patients has a direct impact on those children’s morbidity and mortality rates. DHS issued a statement in response to a detailed list of questions about the issues outlined in this story: “All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers. In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.” The agency did not address why it continues to hold children in detention despite the medical community’s consensus that doing so is harmful to their well-being. CoreCivic — which manages Dilley under a federal contract expected toin which the company denied that the detention center’s food, water, medical care, and accommodations are inadequate. “No child at Dilley Immigration Processing Center has been denied medical treatment or experienced a delayed medical assessment,” adds Ryan Gustin, CoreCivic’s senior director of public affairs. “We take all concerns seriously and continually evaluate our practices to ensure that families in our care receive safe, appropriate, and timely medical attention.” There are other ways in which the prisonlike conditions at Dilley specifically can harm children. Staff keeps the lights on at all times, which often prevents children from sleeping,. To Patel, this setup is deeply concerning. “The highest risk factor for delirium in children is lack of daylight cycles,” she says. “So not only are we putting health risks on these children, but we are actually driving them crazy.” Families have also often complained about. Jones spoke with a mother whose 5-year-old has unspecified kidney issues and who says she had to beg staff to give her clean water. Her only other option was to buy it at the commissary. “In order to get clean water in Dilley, you have to payof large bottles, which is absolutely insane,” Jones says. “I don’t understand how that’s not illegal. I can tell you that a child who has kidney problems is one episode of severe dehydration away from having permanent lifelong consequences like kidney failure, needing dialysis, or a kidney transplant.” DHS denied there are issues with the water quality, saying staff also drink it and that bottles of water are available to purchase at Dilley for $1.21. Experts say it doesn’t have to be this way. “We don’t have to detain people. It’s not a law that we have — it’s a policy that we have opted to do,” says Dr. Katherine Peeler, a medical adviser with Physicians for Human Rights who has studied the issue of children in immigration detention. “The majority of people are administratively detained. They’re not criminally detained, particularly those who are in family detention. We have systems in place where you can be released with some check-ins with ICE.” That approach would certainly prevent children from experiencing the sort of physical and mental health issues connected to being detained—especially because we don’t know what impact being held in custody will have in the long-term. Since November, ICE has detained three families who attend Iglesia Cristiana Roca de Refugio in San Antonio, Texas, says Pastor Dianne Garcia. The first family was a mother and her 3-year-old son; their arrests shook Garcia’s majority-immigrant congregation. “She had gone to the ICE office to present herself, so everybody’s like, Oh my gosh, she was doing everything absolutely right and obviously this boy is not a criminal — and yet they’re having to go through this experience, just a happy, boisterous kid running across the church during the service,” she says. But that changed after spending about 60 days in detention — three times longer than what theagreement allows. “In the first few weeks after their release, he never left his mom’s side. He was super-clingy and quiet. His mom said that he was more angry, upset more often,” Garcia says. “He was just really afraid all the time, really anxious. He was no longer running around like he used to.” The pastor saw the 3-year-old late last week, and he seems to be slowly becoming the child he was before. Still, Garcia worries about the lingering effects of this traumatic experience and how they may manifest in the future. She says, “We can’t tell, and we probably won’t know for years.”Manage preferences.The late labor icon abused at least two girls as well as fellow civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, according to a New YorkLooks Like It’s Clog O’ClockAll the Celebs in the Front Row at Valentino The brand’s fall/winter 2026 show featured notable names like Lily Allen, Tyla, Clairo, and Gwyneth Paltrow sitting in the front row.Every day in downtown Manhattan immigrants arriving for routine hearings are targeted by ICE agents and taken from their families.It was the family’s first public appearance since the loss of Eric Dane, who died of ALS in February.The Best Ulta 21 Days of Beauty Deals to Shop This WeekYou'll receive the next newsletter in your inbox.New York
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