Although the Trump administration repeatedly claims it’s deporting the “worst of the worst” in its sweeping immigration crackdown, the numbers tell a different story.
To meet the White House goal of arresting 3,000 immigrants daily, U.S. Immigration and Customs enforcement is incarcerating people with no criminal records or with infractions as minor as traffic tickets, according to the government’s own records.
Multiple South Texas lockup facilities — including two notorious privately run detention sites a short drive from San Antonio — are ground zero for the “shock-and-awe blitz” orchestrated by President Trump and advisor Stephen Miller.
Both the South Texas Family Residential Center (STFRC) in Dilley, an hour southwest of the Alamo City, and Pearsall’s South Texas ICE Processing Center (STIPC), an even shorter drive in the same direction, face a growing chorus of complaints from attorneys, advocates and Democratic lawmakers.
Prisoners — the Dilley site includes families and children as young as infants — at the facilities are subjected to inhumane treatment, denied adequate food and medical care and are kept longer than allowed under federal rules, critics charge.
“We’ve seen the brutality of ICE out on the streets. We’ve seen it in Minnesota, in Minneapolis. We saw it with the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti,” U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro said. “But there’s also a brutality behind closed doors. Behind the walls of these prisons, and people don’t see that. That brutality is also very disturbing, and I don’t believe most Americans would support it.”
Castro, a San Antonio Democrat, undertook recent fact-finding tours of the Dilley camp after Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old Minnesota boy whose detention by ICE drew national outrage, ended up at the facility.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, the Dilley site, operated by private prison firm CoreCivic, and the Pearsall lockup, run by Geo Group, another for-profit prison enterprise, have operated at near capacity.
The Dilley site’s population swelled to more than 1,300 in late January, including some 800 children, while Pearsall had a daily average of 1,759 people packed into its confines, federal numbers show.
“We’re seeing companies make a lot of money off the U.S. government to then treat people like animals,” Castro said. “If nobody’s going to hold them accountable, then they’re going to try to maximize their profits for shareholders.”
Neither CoreCivic nor Geo Group officials responded to the Current’s request for comment by press time.
However, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol, replied with a tersely worded email suggesting the media is fabricating lies about the two sites.
“Nearly every single day, my office responds to media questions on FALSE allegations about illegal alien detention centers,” the unnamed spokesperson said. “The media is clearly desperate for these allegations of inhumane conditions at this facility to be true. Here are the facts: Dilley and Pearsall meet federal detention standards and undergo regular audits and inspections. When will the media stop peddling hoaxes about illegal alien detention centers and start focusing on American victims of illegal alien crime?”
ICE has apparently taken sufficient heat over Dilley that it now operates a page on its website titled “Debunking the mainstream media lies about South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.”
The Dilley site is “retrofitted for families,” a statement on the page reads, adding children have access to teachers, classrooms and age-appropriate toys. Further, all new arrivals receive medical screenings within 12 hours of their arrival, and a variety of healthcare professionals are on staff to care for them, according to the statement.
“In most cases, this is the best healthcare illegal aliens have received in their entire lives,” the statement continues, adding “all of this is generously funded by the U.S. taxpayer.”
ICE’s claims are widely disputed, however. More on that later.
The agency’s message on the Dilley website concludes with the claim that “being in detention is a choice.” It urges undocumented parents to access the federal government’s offer to self-deport.
Booming business
As of Feb. 7, more than 68,000 people were locked up in federal immigration detention nationwide, up from roughly 41,000 at the same time last year, according to the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The largest percentage of those people are warehoused in Texas — more than a quarter of the total.
Debunking White House claims that its anti-immigrant sweep targets murderers and rapists, nearly three in four current ICE detainees have no criminal convictions, TRAC data shows. What’s more, many of those convicted only committed minor offenses such as traffic violations.
Those numbers have showered a windfall on the private prison companies facilitating the administration’s enforcement sweeps, including CoreCivic and Geo Group.
On Feb. 11, CoreCivic reported $2.2 billion in 2025 revenue, a 13% jump from the previous year. The following day, the GEO Group, reported $2.6 billion revenue, up 9% from its 2024 numbers.
“Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,” Damon T. Hininger, CoreCivic’s then-CEO, told shareholders last May.
However, the outlook from those locked up inside the companies’ San Antonio-area detention facilities is far from rosy.
At the CoreCivic-run STFRC in Dilley, families live under conditions that, according to recent reporting by the Current, include “worms in food” and lights that remain on “around the clock.” Parents described children struggling to sleep, while advocates pointed to “poor medical care” and an atmosphere of prolonged confinement that’s leaving visible psychological scars.
U.S. Rep. Castro said after a recent tour that the camp’s operators showed him medical facilities, but they were empty at the time. Prisoners told him that doctors were only onsite for a portion of the day — something he confirmed with site officials — and staff regularly told people to drink water or take Tylenol, regardless of the severity of their medical conditions.
Meanwhile, a Wired magazine report from last year documented a flurry of 9-1-1 calls coming from Geo Group’s processing center in Pearsall, ranging from suicide attempts and allegations of sexual abuse to health issues faced by pregnant inmates.
‘A race to the bottom’
Advocates and attorneys representing people inside the Pearsall site have complained of inadequate medical care, heavily rationed and poor-quality food and systemic obstacles that prevent detained people from obtaining qualified legal counsel.
“It’s a money-making machine, and these companies are making money off the most vulnerable people you can imagine,” said Dianne Garcia, the pastor of Iglesia Christiana Roca de Refugio, who organized a march from Dilley to San Antonio last weekend to protest family and child detentions.
The majority of Garcia’s parishioners are immigrants, and they have been especially hard-hit by Trump’s roundups. She knows people in both Dilley and Pearsall, and both reported that their meager resources have been squeezed as they tried to maintain their humanity inside.
For example, fearing the quality of the water and its effect on her children’s health, one of Garcia’s parishioners sought relief at Dilley’s camp commissary but was unable to afford the $30 price tag for a pallet of bottled water.
The dismal conditions inside both lockups are dictated as much by profit motives as federal policy, San Antonio immigration attorney Jonathan Ryan told the Current last summer.
“You always have to remember that these are for-profit detention facilities,” Ryan said. “These are corporations that are profit-based, and medical care is expensive. And so even if they have the facilities to provide medical care, if they are able to offload those services to the local community, they’re going to do that because that’s more money in their pockets.”
The attorney likened the companies’ efforts to avoid spending money on detainee medical care as “a race to the bottom in terms of safety and sanity and health.”
Children behind bars
Public health experts have long warned that detention environments are uniquely harmful to children. Young people in lockup face stress, sleep disruption and elevated infectious disease risks — problems exacerbated by crowding and confinement.
Last week, a group of physicians, including experts in pediatric care, sent a joint letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem urging the immediate end to child detention.
“We are writing to you with an urgent request based on the decades of our collective medical experience — that the children currently held in immigration detention facilities be immediately released,” the letter stated. “The detention of children in these facilities is causing predictable, severe, and lasting harm to their mental and physical health.”
Even though ICE said children in Dilley receive classroom instruction, advocates maintain that it only amounts to an hour a day. Also students of multiple ages are grouped together, so many skip the lessons because they’re bored and already know the material.
Lawyers representing detained families argue the kids’ treatment falls short of basic educational standards required under longstanding legal protections.
Further, they said many of the children detained in Dilley are being incarcerated for months in violation of the Flores Settlement, 1997 agreement requiring the feds to release immigrant children from detention within 20 days.
Letters and drawings smuggled out speak to the emotional toll of confinement in ways statistics can’t.
“I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family,” one child, Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya, wrote in a letter obtained and reported on earlier this year by ProPublica.
The girl had reportedly been incarcerated for 113 days at that point after being arrested on her way to Disney World.
‘Deportation-Industrial Complex’
The moral implications are difficult to ignore. And the broader question isn’t merely about individual incidents inside South Texas detention sites but the legitimacy of outsourcing incarceration itself.
However, the White House appears deaf to that concern. As the administration strengthens its partnership with private prison companies to carry out its deportation crusade, it’s actively taken efforts to end oversight.
Shortly after Trump took office, DHS effectively eliminated the Office of the Immigration Ombudsman and the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, both charged with investigating problems inside immigrant detention sites.
Indeed, two-thirds of ICE’s funding under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is earmarked for detention. That 400% increase blows past the Department of Justice’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2026 for the entire federal prison system, according to an analysis by left-leaning public policy group the Brennan Center.
Both CoreCivic and the Geo Group have responded accordingly.
CoreCivic reopened Dilley last year after the Biden administration ordered its shut down, and the company has told ICE that it’s prepared to make as many as 30,000 additional beds available.
Since January, GEO Group has reactivated four ICE detention facilities with a total of 6,600 beds. Those locations alone are expected to rake in $240 billion in annual revenue, officials told shareholders.
Indeed, the scope of the expansion stands to create a public-private monolith that will be hard to break apart, even after the Trump administration is gone, Brennan Center Senior Fellow Marty O’Herron warned in a recent essay.
“Taken together long-term detention and surveillance contracts, rapid hiring increases for enforcement, and new monetary incentives for reprioritizing law enforcement on immigration will create a deportation-industrial complex — an enforcement machine with financial and political constituencies that will outlast this administration,” O’Herron said.
Castro suggested the misery will continue unless people demand accountability and oversight and push for a reversal of the Trump roundups.
“If [private prison companies] don’t have to have a doctor on-site 24 hours a day, and they only have to have one there eight hours a day, because that makes more money for their shareholders, then that’s what they’re going to do,” the congressman said. “They’re not going to do the right human thing, they’re going to do the right profit thing — and that’s what we see over and over again.”
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