The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prison camp called the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas has drastically reduced the number of detainees housed inside, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro said at a Monday afternoon press conference.
Following a late-January visit to the camp in Dilley, an hour Southwest of San Antonio, Castro said the population stood at roughly 1,100, including more than 400 children. More recent data from the Department of Homeland Security shows the total had dropped to 900 by Feb. 5.
Now, the overall population at the family lockup is around 450 detainees, including 99 children, Castro said. That means the number of inmates has dropped by 59% since the San Antonio Democratic congressman’s January visit.
While Castro said 400 detainees — almost 100 of them children — is still too many, he added that public pressure has helped reduce population at the facility. The site has been under intense public scrutiny in recent weeks over complaints from inmates and advocates about the lack of medical care and decent food inside, not to mention the mental strain incarceration has put on its youngest residents.
“I believe that the public outcry is making a difference. That people are leaving Dilley. That more people are being released,” said Castro, joined by a delegation of U.S. House Democrats along with San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones.
Even so, it’s unclear how many of the Dilley detainees have been deported versus released into the United States for further litigation. Reports indicate that even before Castro’s late-January visit, the detention center had already started reducing its population.
In mid-January, the Holding Institute in Laredo got a call from ICE officials asking about the facility’s capacity to host inmates transferred from Dilley, according to a report by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom focused on criminal justice. That same day, families started arriving at the community center by the busload, sometimes 35 or 40 at a time.
Reopened detention site
Even January’s population of 1,100 doesn’t approach the Dilley camp’s capacity of 2,400. The closest the camp came to that was in November 2023, when it had a population of 2,050 under the Biden administration. However, Biden stopped detaining families at the facility in 2021.
The Biden White House completely shut down the prison camp in summer 2024, but President Donald Trump reopened it in March 2025, once again using it to house immigrant families.
“I’ve said very clearly that my goal is to shut down Dilley. I don’t think anybody should be kept in that trailer prison, and most especially children,” Castro said Monday.
Telling stories
The purpose of the congressman’s presser was to update members of the media on the detained “mariachi family” — McAllen’s asylum-seeking Gámez-Cuéllar family — and their Monday afternoon release from Dilley. But the congressional representatives — who came from as far away as California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania — also wanted to lift up stories of detainees who hadn’t received media attention.
Castro described a boy of 4 or 5 years old inside the camp whose belly was swollen because hadn’t had a bowel movement in eight days. The delegation also met with three pregnant women, one just 19 years old. She told Castro that when she last received medical care three weeks ago, the doctor told her that her baby wasn’t growing and that she needed to eat more.
“But she says she doesn’t get enough to eat at Dilley,” Castro said. “And she feels like she is not getting enough medical care for her pregnancy.”
House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D—California) also shared stories of her interactions with Dilley detainees.
“I met with a nursing mom who was separated from her baby when the baby was 2 1/2 months old — that was five months ago. She has not seen him since,” Clark said. “I met with a family who has a 2 year old with a very infected tooth. It’s prevented her from eating. She is in pain. But there was no urgency around getting her treatment.”
Last week, Emmanuel Damas, a Haitian man from Boston, died due to not being treated for an infected tooth while being detained in Arizona, Clark added.
Clark also read a note a 9-year-old girl handed her inside the facility.
“Every day we see people leave but not us. I want to get out and eat pizza and bananas,” the girl’s note read.
“A woman, 32, who showed her stomach — most distended — she’s been to the medical unit. She’s been vomiting. She is now vomiting blood,” U.S. Rep. Madeline Dean of Pennsylvania said of a detainee she met on her visit. “They said she needs to just calm down.”
“Someone else, to treat anxiety, they said, ‘Eat more calories,'” Dean added.
‘They staged it for us’
Dean reserved particularly scathing criticism for Dilley’s educational unit, which she said only had one teacher on staff.
“More than 600 people work there, and they thought it appropriate to have a single teacher?” Dean asked rhetorically.
She added that the facility only started its educational program a week ago because of a court order, even though President Trump reopened the camp a year ago.
“The education unit was a joke, but it’s not funny,” Dean said, adding that staff displayed buckets of crayons on the tables when the members of congress visited. “When [U.S. Rep.] Nanette Barragán opened up the crayons they were showcasing, not a crayon had been used. They were perfect.”
Dean added: “They staged it for us.”
Castro said he next expects to visit the family detention facility around March 20.
“There are so many stories of people who are suffering, who are traumatized, as much as the young mariachi singers, as much as Liam Ramos, but the public has no idea who they are, and so that’s why we keep going back,” Castro said.
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