An immigrant mother said she shared a tiny bed with her 7-year-old son in a cold Border Patrol station room, with no food except chips.
A 12-year-old child said his family was held in a hotel room with guards who slept on the couch and gave them no privacy.
A lawyer searched for over a week for a family, not knowing where they’d been taken, only to learn later it was a hotel halfway across the country.
These accounts, from declarations filed in federal court, illustrate the wide range of locations where immigration officials have held children and families.
Children detained for long stretches are usually sent to the ICE immigrant camp in Dilley, Texas. But the Trump administration has also held children and families for shorter stints in locations that lawyers say are “black boxes,” where families and lawyers cannot find them. Children, parents and lawyers describe holdrooms in office buildings where they have limited access to food or privacy, and hotels where they are heavily monitored by guards who are in the room at all times, making it uncomfortable to sleep or use the toilet.
ICE has detained more than 8,750 kids since Trump retook office. The data, obtained by the Deportation Data Project, does not specify when the agency detained children in hotels. But court filings document 86 children who were held for more than three days in hotels in February and March.
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to questions about children held in hotels. But in court filings, government officials said some hotel stays were necessary due to flight delays or challenges obtaining travel documents.
In February, a woman in Long Island, New York, went with her two children to a scheduled check-in with ICE. Officers detained them. The mother, who asked to be identified only by her initials, M.S.P., because she fears retaliation from the government, said the family was taken far from their longtime home of New York and jailed in a hotel in Texas.
M.S.P. said in Spanish that the guards told her they were private contractors hired by ICE. She said she was permitted two three-minute phone calls to her mother-in-law. She said the guards warned her that if she told anyone where she was, her children would be taken away from her.
For nine days, she said they were not allowed to leave the room or even look out the windows. M.S.P. said two guards were in the hotel room at all times. Her teenager spent much of the time crying and worrying about failing missed classes. Her other child, age 12, worried about their cat back at home.
Her attorney later wrote in court filings that he could not find them in ICE’s detainee locator and was left in the dark about their location — unable to provide legal advice.
In April, the federal judge overseeing a class action lawsuit known as the Flores Settlement repeated an order for ICE to stop keeping children in hotels, with “a narrow exception for brief, one to two-night stays while in transit or prior to flights.” The judge has also appointed an independent monitor, who can inspect hotels where children are held.
Children held in hotels are typically detained with family members. But this year, ICE has also separated some kids from their relatives and kept them in hotels alone, said Michelle Brané, a former Homeland Security official under President Joe Biden and currently the executive director of Together and Free, an advocacy organization for immigrant families.
Brané described an 11-year-old who was kept in a hotel room for five days, while his father was sent to an immigrant camp for adults. The child was later transferred to the custody of the government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, while his father pursued an asylum claim from detention. In another case, a baby and two other young children were held without their mother for around 10 days. No one in their family could locate them. The family later learned the children were kept in a hotel room before they were reunited and placed on a flight to Venezuela.
Brané said the government argues it is removing “the worst of the worst” in an effort to increase public safety. But in reality, many people being arrested are vulnerable children who have viable paths to be in the United States legally.
“The only reason this would benefit the government,” Brané said, “is to instill fear and chaos and cruelty and frighten people into getting their numbers of removed individuals up.”
Have you worked for a company involved in transporting, housing or caring for immigrant children or families in ICE custody? Or have your children been transported or detained somewhere other than the Dilley detention camp? We want to hear about what you saw or experienced. We take your privacy seriously, and you can contact us securely on Signal at tmp.2014 or email us at immigration@themarshallproject.org.