Micah Rosenberg

I met Ariana when she was detained in the Dilley Immigration Detention Center in South Texas.

She was a high school freshman in New York, and she went in with her mom for their regular ICE check-in, which they had actually been doing for years last December.

And they went in in the morning, and by that evening, they were sent across the country to Texas to a detention center.

I had been corresponding with her mother and who actually has two U.S.

citizen children, a toddler who's almost two and a five-year-old.

And they were left behind because this particular detention center, you know, can't hold U.S.

citizens.

They ended up in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, which is the nation's only immigration detention center that's operating right now for families.

The Biden administration actually ended the practice of family detention in 2021.

But when Trump was reelected, he quickly reopened this facility for families.

There's an increasing number of families that are like Arianez, who are people who've been living in the United States for years and are getting swept up in these broad immigration arrests all around the country.

My name is Micah Rosenberg, and I'm an investigative reporter at ProPublica.

So I was able to meet Ariana and her mother in person.

After I met with them, Ariana sat down and wrote me a letter about what she was going through.

She later recorded herself reading her letter to me so we could hear it in her own voice.

I was able to speak with people via video calls as well.

One thing that we were really trying to accomplish with this reporting was to really get that perspective of the children who you really don't hear from very often.

One of the things that we asked is if the kids would be interested in writing us letters or sending us drawings about what they were actually experiencing.

My name is Usage F, and I'm nine years old.

They didn't understand why they were there.