Donald Trump’s administration has confirmed at least two “active measles infections” among immigrant detainees at a family detention center in Texas, hours after the release of a five-year-old boy and his father whose case fueled outrage against the president’s mass deportation efforts.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “ceasing all movement” at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center and is quarantining anyone “suspected of making contact with the infected,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.
“All detainees are being provided with proper medical care,” according to a statement Sunday.
The statement follows growing alarm from immigration attorneys and members of Congress who feared an outbreak inside the facility, which holds more than 1,000 families, including young children.
ICE appeared to confirm there is an “outbreak” in a statement to Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro, according to a federal court filing from his office.
Early Sunday morning, Castro escorted five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias from the Texas detention center to their home in Minnesota after a federal judge ordered their release Saturday.
Liam and his father were detained by federal officers from the driveway of their home in suburban Minneapolis on January 20 and brought to the facility, where the preschooler was reportedly sick and asking for his mother, according to family and lawmakers who visited him.
Days after they were detained, two-year-old Chloe and her father were brought into federal custody on their way home from the grocery store, according to Minneapolis officials.
They are among at least seven Minneapolis-area children detained by federal agents in recent days in scenes that mirrored arrests during other immigration enforcement operations around the country as Trump surged federal officers into Democratic-led cities.
At least four children detained during the Minneapolis dragnet are inside the same Texas facility, according to Columbia Heights Public Schools.
Last year saw the most measles cases in the United States in decades, with more than 2,200 infections, including cases from at least 762 people in West Texas, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
At least two young children died and 99 people were hospitalized, according to the state.
ICE detentions have exploded within the year since Trump took office, with more than 70,000 people being held at any given point, the most in modern American history.
While the federal government does not publicly disclose information about children in immigration custody, data from advocacy groups, attorneys and investigative news organizations suggest that a growing number of those detainees are children.
At least 3,800 people under 18 years old, including 20 infants, were in immigration enforcement custody last year, according to The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on criminal justice.
And roughly 600 children were detained in facilities intended to house unaccompanied young people detained at the U.S.-Mexico border, more than the number of children detained in federal shelters during all four years of Joe Biden’s administration, according to ProPublica.
Immigration attorneys and advocates also are concerned about the prolonged detention and re-detention of those children inside those facilities, which are operated by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The length of stay has increased from a low of 27 days in 2023 to 117 days within the last year, according to Kids In Need of Defense.
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