The kids in ICE detention
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What are the experiences of children detained by ICE?
Out in McAllen, Texas, there's a band that goes by Mariachi Oro. They're so good, they got invited to the White House and were congratulated on the floor of Congress.
I am honored to have the students and directors here today.
Just eight months later, two teenage brothers in the band were detained along with the rest of their family by ICE. Most of the family ended up at a detention center in Dilley, Texas, and there was immediate outrage. This is a family that came here through the legal process. For all we know, there are great, great kids doing mariachi and enjoying life. And yet, the Trump administration has them sitting in a prison in Dilley, Texas. All that outrage got the entire family out early. Less lucky are the kids who don't end up with massive campaigns to get them out of detention. On Today Explained, we're going to find out what it's like to be a kid detained at Dilley. Chances are your favorite websites used to depend on Google for traffic and money.
But that's not really working anymore. Now publishers are scrambling for new lifelines. Neil Vogel, who runs People Inc., says his company figured it out a couple years ago.
You would think, given what everyone said about us, that we would be the guys that would be doing the worst now. We're kind of the guys doing the best now.
How did a family of musicians end up in ICE detention?
I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, the show about tech and media and what happens when they collide. You can hear my conversation with Neil Vogel now, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Hello, my name is Ariana V. I'm 14 years old and I'm from Honduras. I've been detained for 45 days and I have never felt so much fear to go to a place as I feel here.
I met Ariana when she was detained in the Dilley Immigration Detention Center in South Texas.
I've been in this country for almost seven years, and in those seven years, my mom and I found a home and made a bigger family.
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.
Since I got to this center, all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.
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.
I have never been separated from my siblings. And it's honestly sad because they're little and they need their mom and their sister.
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.
Since the day my mom and I got detained in Manhattan, New York, my life was instantly paused.
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.
Not a lot of people know what is happening in the centers where immigrants are placed that I haven't been getting any school time either, or the other kids in here.
She later recorded herself reading her letter to me so we could hear it in her own voice.
Every single person in here had their jobs. They had their lives. They aren't any danger for this country.
I was able to speak with people via video calls as well.
There's always an officer here.
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.
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