Fear and broken families: Inside a Texas ICE detention centre

Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, migrant arrests have surged in the United States. More than 610,000 people have passed through detention centres run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal immigration agency in under two years. The pace only continues to accelerate: in August 2026, nearly 51,000 arrests were made in a single month – a record for Trump’s second term. Who are the people being held in these centres? What are their living conditions like? And how is Trump’s mass deportation policy upending the lives of families settled in the United States? In this report, Valérie Defert and Pierrick Laurent investigate the issue in Texas – the heart of the new US immigration detention system.

In Texas, a state where a significant portion of the detention system is concentrated, our reporters spent several weeks investigating what happens after an ICE arrest. They went to Diley, just south of San Antonio, where the country’s largest family detention centre is located. It holds up to 2,400 people – both parents and children. ICE bars journalists from entering the facility. Since Donald Trump returned to power, more than 6,200 minors have been detained by ICE, including at least 500 infants and children three years old or younger.

Our team interviewed a Venezuelan family whose mother, Maria Betania, and two children were arrested while on their way to the school bus stop. They spent 17 days in Dilley before a federal judge ordered their release. 

In San Antonio, a pastor meets with the families of detainees every week. She estimates that about one in four families in her congregation has had a loved one arrested and then deported.

Among these detainees is Jefferson, a Venezuelan asylum seeker and father of two. From inside the details Don Hutto detention centre, he describes the months he has spent separated from his family and condemns the living conditions and lack of access to healthcare inside the facility. Deaths in detention have risen sharply. At least 57 people have died in ICE custody since Trump’s return to the White House. According to Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, the mortality rate had already more than doubled during the first 500 days of his second term.

This policy also represents a significant market for private companies tasked with managing some of the centres. In Dilley, a contract awarded to the Houston Chronicle provides for a monthly payment of $13.1 million to maintain the centre’s capacity to house up to 2,400 people. And the system is set to expand further: $45 billion has been allocated to increase detention capacity through 2029.