I am a retired bilingual play therapist currently volunteering helping families affected by ICE actions. From January through October 2025, 3,800 children under 18 – including 20 infants – were arrested and detained by ICE. Currently, 160 families are held in Dilley detention center in Texas under awful conditions.
Alternatives to incarceration have already been piloted and proved more humane and cost effective: less than $8 a day versus $150 per day for incarceration. In 2016, the Family Case Management program cost $36 per day with no detention for a misdemeanor, and families still showed up for required check-ins with immigration officials. Incarcerating a family of three costs $800 per day.
Currently, ICE is in violation of the Flores settlement of 1997, which requires keeping children “in the least restrictive setting possible.” Flores also defines standards of care, access to lawyers and release within 20 days. These standards are not being met, and six children have died in Border Patrol custody this year alone.
Given that incarceration is more costly, cruel and unnecessary, why are we doing it to people who did not cause the problem of a bogged-down immigration system? This is another constitutional violation: cruel and unusual punishment. Homeland Security itself documents that 95% of the 73,000 people currently in detention have no criminal history.
Do not ask Congress to reform ICE and detention practices – ask that they be abolished. ICE has consistently violated the constitutional rights of both citizen protesters and immigrants. Obama deported more immigrants without this level of cruelty. Please fight against this secret military force and the unnecessary detention of our neighbors.
Liza Tregillus
Durango
