The Children of Dilley
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.
Fourteen-year-old Ariana Velasquez had been held at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, with her mother for some 45 days when I managed to get inside to meet her. The staff brought everyone in the visiting room a boxed lunch from the cafeteria: a cup of yellowish stew and a hamburger patty in a plain bun. Ariana’s long black curls hung loosely around her face and she was wearing a government-issued gray sweatsuit. At first, she sat looking blankly down at the table. She poked at her food with a plastic fork and let her mother do most of the talking.
She perked up when I asked about home: Hicksville, New York. She and her mother had moved there from Honduras when she was 7. Her mother, Stephanie Valladares, had applied for asylum, married a neighbor from back home who was already living in the U.S., and had two more kids. Ariana took care of them after school. She was a freshman at Hicksville High, and being detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center meant that she was falling behind in her classes. She told me how much she missed her favorite sign language teacher, but most of all she missed her siblings.
I had previously met them in Hicksville: Gianna, a toddler who everyone calls Gigi, and Jacob, a kindergartener with wide brown eyes. I told Ariana that they missed her too. Jacob had shown me a security camera that their mom had installed in the kitchen so she could peek in on them from her job, sometimes saying “Hello” through the speaker. I told Ariana that Jacob tried talking to the camera, hoping his mom would answer.
Stephanie burst into tears. So did Ariana. After my visit, Ariana wrote me a letter.
“My younger siblings haven’t been able to see their mom in more than a month,” she wrote. “They are very young and you need both of your parents when you are growing up.” Then, referring to Dilley, she added, “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.”
Ariana Velasquez’s 5-year-old brother, Jacob, and 2-year-old sister, Gianna, at their home in New York. Anna Connors for ProPublica
Dilley, run by private prison firm CoreCivic, is located some 72 miles south of San Antonio and nearly 2,000 miles away from Ariana’s home. It is a sprawling collection of trailers and dormitories, almost the same color as the dusty landscape, surrounded by a tall fence. It first opened during the Obama administration to hold an influx of families crossing the border. Former President Joe Biden stopped holding families there in 2021, arguing America shouldn’t be in the business of detaining children.
But quickly after returning to office, President Donald Trump resumed family detentions as part of his mass deportation campaign. Federal courts and overwhelming public outrage had put an end to Trump’s first-term policy of separating children from parents when immigrant families were detained crossing the border. Trump officials said Dilley was a place where immigrant families would be detained together.
As the second Trump administration’s crackdown both slowed border crossings to record lows and ramped up a blitz of immigration arrests all across the country, the population inside Dilley …
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.
Fourteen-year-old Ariana Velasquez had been held at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, with her mother for some 45 days when I managed to get inside to meet her. The staff brought everyone in the visiting room a boxed lunch from the cafeteria: a cup of yellowish stew and a hamburger patty in a plain bun. Ariana’s long black curls hung loosely around her face and she was wearing a government-issued gray sweatsuit. At first, she sat looking blankly down at the table. She poked at her food with a plastic fork and let her mother do most of the talking.
She perked up when I asked about home: Hicksville, New York. She and her mother had moved there from Honduras when she was 7. Her mother, Stephanie Valladares, had applied for asylum, married a neighbor from back home who was already living in the U.S., and had two more kids. Ariana took care of them after school. She was a freshman at Hicksville High, and being detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center meant that she was falling behind in her classes. She told me how much she missed her favorite sign language teacher, but most of all she missed her siblings.
I had previously met them in Hicksville: Gianna, a toddler who everyone calls Gigi, and Jacob, a kindergartener with wide brown eyes. I told Ariana that they missed her too. Jacob had shown me a security camera that their mom had installed in the kitchen so she could peek in on them from her job, sometimes saying “Hello” through the speaker. I told Ariana that Jacob tried talking to the camera, hoping his mom would answer.
Stephanie burst into tears. So did Ariana. After my visit, Ariana wrote me a letter.
“My younger siblings haven’t been able to see their mom in more than a month,” she wrote. “They are very young and you need both of your parents when you are growing up.” Then, referring to Dilley, she added, “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.”
Ariana Velasquez’s 5-year-old brother, Jacob, and 2-year-old sister, Gianna, at their home in New York. Anna Connors for ProPublica
Dilley, run by private prison firm CoreCivic, is located some 72 miles south of San Antonio and nearly 2,000 miles away from Ariana’s home. It is a sprawling collection of trailers and dormitories, almost the same color as the dusty landscape, surrounded by a tall fence. It first opened during the Obama administration to hold an influx of families crossing the border. Former President Joe Biden stopped holding families there in 2021, arguing America shouldn’t be in the business of detaining children.
But quickly after returning to office, President Donald Trump resumed family detentions as part of his mass deportation campaign. Federal courts and overwhelming public outrage had put an end to Trump’s first-term policy of separating children from parents when immigrant families were detained crossing the border. Trump officials said Dilley was a place where immigrant families would be detained together.
As the second Trump administration’s crackdown both slowed border crossings to record lows and ramped up a blitz of immigration arrests all across the country, the population inside Dilley …
The Children of Dilley
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.
Fourteen-year-old Ariana Velasquez had been held at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, with her mother for some 45 days when I managed to get inside to meet her. The staff brought everyone in the visiting room a boxed lunch from the cafeteria: a cup of yellowish stew and a hamburger patty in a plain bun. Ariana’s long black curls hung loosely around her face and she was wearing a government-issued gray sweatsuit. At first, she sat looking blankly down at the table. She poked at her food with a plastic fork and let her mother do most of the talking.
She perked up when I asked about home: Hicksville, New York. She and her mother had moved there from Honduras when she was 7. Her mother, Stephanie Valladares, had applied for asylum, married a neighbor from back home who was already living in the U.S., and had two more kids. Ariana took care of them after school. She was a freshman at Hicksville High, and being detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center meant that she was falling behind in her classes. She told me how much she missed her favorite sign language teacher, but most of all she missed her siblings.
I had previously met them in Hicksville: Gianna, a toddler who everyone calls Gigi, and Jacob, a kindergartener with wide brown eyes. I told Ariana that they missed her too. Jacob had shown me a security camera that their mom had installed in the kitchen so she could peek in on them from her job, sometimes saying “Hello” through the speaker. I told Ariana that Jacob tried talking to the camera, hoping his mom would answer.
Stephanie burst into tears. So did Ariana. After my visit, Ariana wrote me a letter.
“My younger siblings haven’t been able to see their mom in more than a month,” she wrote. “They are very young and you need both of your parents when you are growing up.” Then, referring to Dilley, she added, “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.”
Ariana Velasquez’s 5-year-old brother, Jacob, and 2-year-old sister, Gianna, at their home in New York. Anna Connors for ProPublica
Dilley, run by private prison firm CoreCivic, is located some 72 miles south of San Antonio and nearly 2,000 miles away from Ariana’s home. It is a sprawling collection of trailers and dormitories, almost the same color as the dusty landscape, surrounded by a tall fence. It first opened during the Obama administration to hold an influx of families crossing the border. Former President Joe Biden stopped holding families there in 2021, arguing America shouldn’t be in the business of detaining children.
But quickly after returning to office, President Donald Trump resumed family detentions as part of his mass deportation campaign. Federal courts and overwhelming public outrage had put an end to Trump’s first-term policy of separating children from parents when immigrant families were detained crossing the border. Trump officials said Dilley was a place where immigrant families would be detained together.
As the second Trump administration’s crackdown both slowed border crossings to record lows and ramped up a blitz of immigration arrests all across the country, the population inside Dilley …
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