Statement on the Trump Administration’s Criminal Treatment of Immigrant Children

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security is horrified by the Trump Administration’s treatment of immigrant children, exemplified by the case of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, the adorable little boy in the blue bunny hat, who was detained with his father at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas after being apprehended in Minneapolis. Liam’s detention sparked protests and brought into public view very concerning information about the treatment of children in the facility. The conditions at Dilley are in breach of U.S. law, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policies, and international human rights standards. Conditions in the facility alongside the Trump Administration’s assault on immigrants nationwide may also constitute violations of international criminal law, particularly the Rome Statute. We concur with Genocide Watch that the Trump Administration is committing crimes against humanity. The Lemkin Institute further believes that the Trump Administration’s treatment of immigrant children is evidence of genocidal intent towards immigrant communities. As in most genocides, this intent is closely tied to the profit-making schemes of Trump’s close associates.

Children are some of the most vulnerable people within any group, dependent as they are on the adults around them. Due to their vulnerability, humanitarian and human rights organizations as well as respected medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and UNICEF, argue that children should never be detained. Detention usually subjects children to cruel and inhumane conditions. It makes them vulnerable to sexual and physical abuse and human trafficking. In and of itself, detention of immigrant children and adults can be seen as a form of human trafficking as it makes money for government agencies and private businesses while serving no other clear purpose. The detention of children causes long-term physical and psychological trauma, negatively impacting children’s education and wellbeing through adulthood. Even short-term detention can cause terrible long-term harm.

The United States government should know about the terrible impact of child detention. While the U.S. detention rate for children has declined since 2000, the U.S. still incarcerates more children annually than any other country in the world. In fact, its incarceration rate for children is two times the global average and much higher when compared with other NATO countries. Each year, the United States detains over 200,000 children, the vast majority of whom are children of color. These are children accused of various infractions, most of them very minor, such as being ‘disruptive’ at school or being “incorrigible.” They are then thrown into the US mass incarceration system due to entrenched racism, a cultural tendency to show cruelty towards children and other vulnerable populations, and the profit motive. While detaining children in jails and prisons costs American taxpayers an estimated $1 billion a year, it generates hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for private prison companies.

The detention specifically of immigrant children in the United States dates back to the Reagan Administration, but it has been an enormous black mark on the United States since the two Obama Administrations, when family detention was embraced and defended as a policy to “deter” migrants from coming to the U.S. Since the first Obama Administration, immigrants have become the fastest growing prison population in the United States.

The federal government largely relies on private companies to detain immigrants. CoreCivic Inc, the second-largest private prison operator in the US, has signed $680m worth of contracts with the federal government since President Donald Trump took office in January 2026. It reported a 10 percent increase in its second quarter earnings profits from the same period the previous year. GEO Group, the largest private prison operator in the US and ICE’s largest contractor, reported a 5 percent increase in the same period, mostly due to increased federal funding for immigrant detention and transportation. GEO Group’s subsidiary, GTI, provides ground and air transportation for ICE detainees. It expects a $40-50m increase in annual revenue from the federal government. These companies receive enormous sums of US taxpayer money from the federal government for operating facilities. For example, the GEO Group expects to receive more than $240m a year in revenue for only four facilities (with a total of 6,600 beds) that the group reactivated in 2025. Despite the ample funding, conditions in private prisons and detention centers are abysmal, with overcrowding, understaffing, unhygienic living conditions, uneatable and meagre food, dirty water, and inadequate medical care documented across the industry. They operate “far outside of federal oversight,” according to the Equal Justice Initiative.

On 20 January 2026, five-year-old asylum seeker Liam Conejo Ramos was detained in one of CoreCivic’s private facilities along with his father after being arrested by ICE agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After apprehending both of them in their driveway, an ICE agent instructed little Liam to knock on the door of his house to see if anyone else was home, “essentially using [him] as bait,” as the superintendent of Liam’s school district put it. Liam was one of four children in that school district alone to be detained since the start of 2026. The others were aged 17 and 10. Following his detainment, Liam was transferred with his father to Dilley Detention Center, which is operated by CoreCivic. Congressman Joaquin Castro, who visited Liam in detention on 28 January, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that Liam appeared “depressed and lethargic.” Liam also was not eating well and had been asking for his mom. When Congressman Castro spoke with the principal at Liam’s school, he noted that Liam had been asking for his hat and backpack, which ICE took from him and had not returned, and that Liam was saying that he wanted to return to his school and his classmates.

Beginning Saturday, 24 January 2026, protests erupted inside and outside the Dilley Detention Center in support of Liam’s release. On Wednesday, 29 January, Texas state police used pepper balls against protestors outside of Dilley. Liam and his father were finally released from detention on 31 January, but his life has been completely altered by his nightmarish experience in the US’s cruel immigration detention archipelago. The family is now in hiding. Liam no longer goes to school and his father reports that “he’s not the same boy he was before …. He can’t sleep well at night. He wakes up three or four times a night screaming, ‘Daddy, Daddy.’” The federal government is now actively seeking to end asylum claims for Liam and his family in a clear act of retaliation. On 9 February an immigration judge granted Liam’s family a continuance on their asylum claim, giving the family more time to make its case.

The detention of Liam and the subsequent protests regarding his detention have brought the conditions at Dilley Detention Center and ICE’s detention of children in general under public scrutiny. The center first opened during President Obama’s second term – in December of 2014 – and has a long history of holding a large number of child detainees. At one point children made up over half of Dilley detainees, 1,000 out of 1,735 people total. According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times from June 2015, lights were kept on 24 hours a day for “security” purposes. Dilley was shuttered in 2024 – three years after President Biden largely put an end to family detentions in 2021 – but was reopened by the Trump Administration in 2025. Since its reopening, detained families have alleged that the food provided at Dilley is mouldy and full of worms and that the water provided is undrinkable. One lawyer has reported that families are forced to mix baby formula with “putrid water” and the guards are often “verbally abusive.” Once again, the lights are being kept on all day and night, and Dilley is failing to provide proper medical care for children. Six days following Liam’s detention, attorney Eric Lee, who represents another family currently held at Dilley, gave an interview to MSNBC discussing the living conditions at the center. He stated that one of his child clients almost died of appendicitis after being told to take a Tylenol when he tried to obtain medical care. According to reporting from the Marshall Project published on January 29, 2026, the youngest detainee at Dilley is a 2-month-old infant. Thousands of other children have been abducted and subjected to inhumane conditions in ICE detention. Under the second Trump Administration, at least 3,800 children have been detained by ICE, including 20 infants. The Marshall Project found that under President Trump, ICE is holding roughly 170 children on an average day (a much higher number than the Biden Administration’s average of 25 children on a given day).

According to ICE’s own manuals on family detention and family residential standards, detention facilities must adhere to strict guidelines, including structured activities, clean water, medical care, and 24-hour access to food. An internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection memorandum from 2021 recognized children in custody under the age of 13 as “tender-age” and noted that they may require greater care than other detainees. Immigration detention is categorized as a form of civil detention, and therefore those held in immigration detention are not supposed to be put in conditions that punish them. It is obvious that providing mouldy food and undrinkable water can be seen as a form of punishment. Withholding necessary medicine is most certainly a form of punishment. ICE is also known to retaliate against those who try to expose the treatment of those detained in Dilley. After 18-year-old Habiba Soliman, who had been held with her entire family inside Dilley for eight months, spoke to the press about her detainment, she was separated from her family and moved to a different area of the facility. She was told that if she spoke out again, she could be moved to a different facility altogether, meaning she would have no idea when she would see her family again.

In private immigrant detention facilities, conditions are usually indistinguishable from criminal incarceration. This is of particular concern because the US federal government does not provide people in civil detention with the same legal safeguards as people in criminal detention, including “the right to government-appointed counsel, the privilege against self-incrimination, the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and the right to a speedy trial.” This leaves immigrant detainees completely vulnerable to the violence of the state and its agents.

ICE’s current detention system is entirely about punishment of immigrants, documented and undocumented, especially immigrants of color. According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, 74.5 percent of immigrant detainees have no criminal record. The majority of those with a record were convicted for minor offenses, such as traffic violations. Although statistics are difficult to find, many of the people currently in immigrant detention appear to be “in status” in the United States, meaning that they are in the country legally. Some of them are U.S. citizens. This is often the case with children who are being detained and deported with non-citizen parents. All of these people are being thrown into filthy, punitive, dangerous, and cruel facilities for no reason other than the fact they are immigrants, especially immigrants of color.

The situation of Liam Ramos is a microcosm of how ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), in their efforts to apprehend and detain ever greater numbers of people living inside the United States, have used children in unconscionable ways during their violent apprehension processes. Since President Trump assumed the presidency, ICE has gone viral on social media multiple times for its use of children in the attempted abductions of parents, for its tactics in attempting to abduct children, and for the poor treatment children have been receiving in detention centers. In one case from Leominster, Massachusetts, ICE agents held an autistic child outside her home to lure her father out of it. In April 2025 ICE deported a four year old child with stage 4 cancer. ICE has also forcibly deported children who are U.S. citizens. In many cases across the country, ICE has targeted sensitive areas, such as schools, homes, and daycares, where children are most likely to be present. One of the reasons that Liam Ramos no longer attends school is the constant and traumatizing patrols by ICE officers around the school’s perimeter.

In late 2025, teenage migrant boys were abducted by ICE and placed in a Pennsylvania juvenile detention facility that has a long documented history of physical and sexual abuse of children by staff. This is part of a larger pattern of sexual abuse within ICE facilities and ICE/CBP complicity in sex trafficking. Between 2018 and 2022, detainees from 70 percent of ICE facilities made sexual assault allegations. An August 2025 report from Senator Jon Ossoff found evidence of 41 credible reports of physical and/or sexual abuse in ICE facilities in the first half of 2025 alone. Some detainees alleged being placed into solitary confinement as retaliation for reporting their abuse. Sarah Decker, an attorney with Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, has stated that she believes there is a large underbelly of sexual abuse within ICE facilities that has not been fully uncovered. On 11 February 2026, Rashad Johnson, a “backgrounder” for ICE, Homeland Security and federal agencies (that is, someone who does background checks on potential employees), was arrested in a sex trafficking sting in Bloomington, Minnesota.

According to a report released by ProPublica in November 2025, under the second Trump Administration more children have been sent to ICE detention than during the previous four years combined. The report documents that the average length of time spent by children in detention is nearly six months. Notably, detention of children lasting longer than 20 days is a flagrant violation of the Flores Settlement, which governs detention immigration for children. Since 2019 the Trump Administrations have tried to terminate the Settlement, but a federal court reaffirmed in August 2025 that the federal government remains bound by it.

More generally, over the last year, ICE has become increasingly brazen in its targeting of children during raids. In fall 2025 videos from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Fitchburg, Massachusetts demonstrated how ICE agents are using militarized tactics against children and often treat children with frightening recklessness and callousness. In October 2025, children were caught up in the middle of a massive overnight, military-style raid of an apartment complex in Chicago (see the Lemkin Institute’s October Human Security Brief). Federal agents grabbed residents, including children, with weapons drawn while employing flash bangs, blowing doors off their hinges, and leaving bullet holes in the walls. Children were separated from their parents, zip tied, and detained in trucks outside the building regardless of their status.

2026 has seen further radicalization of ICE’s treatment of children, which is in line with its increasing use of military tactics – and lethal force – against the entire U.S. population, both non-citizen and citizen. In mid-January 2026, a six-month-old was sent to the hospital after being exposed to tear gas when ICE deployed a flashbang near the family's vehicle. A week before that ICE attacked a high school in Minneapolis, tackling people, arresting staff, and releasing chemical agents. As a direct result of fears of ICE raids, school districts in California and Florida have reported increasing numbers of child absenteeism.

By all accounts, the Trump Administration plans to ramp up the monitoring, detention, and deportation of children. In the late summer of 2025, President Trump attempted to deport 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan children in federal custody before their immigration cases had begun, but was blocked by a judge. In early November, The Guardian reported that the Trump Administration planned to open a call center to track unaccompanied minors. Per the Guardian article, and based on a Request For Information notice published by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the newly planned center is meant to “‘support partner encounters in the field … focused on locating unaccompanied alien children.”’ Expected to open in Nashville, the center will operate 24 hours a day and is expecting 7,000 calls daily. The opening of the center not only creates future pathways for the tracking, monitoring, and outright surveillance of minor immigrant children, but it also upholds the for-profit apparatus that has become a central pillar of DHS and ICE under Trump.

As undoubtedly more children are transferred against their will to immigration detention centers, the Lemkin Institute would like to remind the American people that the Convention on the Rights of the Child at paragraph 3(3), obliges States Parties to ​​”ensure that the institutions, services and facilities responsible for the care or protection of children shall conform with the standards established by competent authorities, particularly in the areas of safety, health, in the number and suitability of their staff, as well as competent supervision.” The United States is the only country in the world to have never ratified this Convention – the most widely-ratified human rights treaty – although it did sign it in 1995. Given its almost universal ratification, the Convention on the Rights of the Child has a strong claim for status as part of customary international law, which would make it legally binding even in countries that have not ratified it. Regardless, international law prohibits the detention of any child on immigration grounds and sets out strict standards for the treatment of detained asylum seekers—standards which ICE is not meeting.

Immigrant children in the United States are being placed into what are effectively concentration camps. The detainment centers like the one in Dilley, Texas are housing people who have committed no crimes and who pose no threat to the United States of America. While these facilities make money for certain private companies, they do not otherwise serve any clear purpose other than the concentration of the U.S. immigrant population, its separation from the wider body politic, and the destruction of the mental, emotional, spiritual and physical health of the detainees. Furthermore, nobody knows the full extent and nature of this destruction, as existing detention facilities exist in a legal void. The 2018 Supreme Court ruling in Jennings v. Rodriguez determined that the US state could detain immigrants, including asylum seekers, indefinitely. There is little civilian oversight of the conditions in these camps and the Trump Administration is attempting to further limit the minimal access that currently exists. ICE and CBP have already demonstrated a willingness to flout existing laws and regulations, not to mention their own stated policies, and there are no existing protections that we can see to safeguard children from psychological, physical, and sexual harm while in detention or from human trafficking while under ICE and CBP control.

We remind the American people that at least seven children died during or right after ICE and CBP detention in the first Trump Administration. It is not a question of whether children will die in detention this time around, but when. In January 2026 an 18-month-old baby named Amalia nearly died at Dilley after being returned to detention following hospitalization for COVID-19. According to the lawsuit filed by her parents, the medication, nebulizer, and nutritional drinks provided upon her release from hospital were confiscated when she was returned to ICE detention. There is no moral or legal justification for refusing an 18-month-old life-sustaining medication; such actions are symptomatic of the Trump Administration’s genocidal dehumanization of immigrants.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevetion and Human Security condemns the inhumane abduction of Liam Ramos and the horrific insecurity his family now faces. We further condemn all forms of detention and forcible deportation of children in the United States. The treatment of children by states and armed forces is an important litmus test for criminal intent. During genocides, children – as well as the elderly, the disabled, and pregnant and nursing women – are often singled out for cruel treatment and, of course, their particular needs in detention are flagrantly and intentionally ignored. We see a genocidal logic at work in the Trump Administration’s mass deportation effort, in the cruel and wanton behavior of ICE and CBP agents, in the horrific conditions within immigrant detention facilities, and in the impunity under which all of this is occurring. We reject the notion that this all arose with Trump. The United States has been callously throwing away children for decades under both Democratic and Republican presidents. In particular, the Obama Administration laid the foundation for the Trump Administration’s crimes towards immigrant children. The Biden Administration also bears responsibility, with its increased funding to ICE as well as its failure to investigate and hold accountable the architects of the genocidal family separation policy of the first Trump Administration, including especially current “border czar” Tom Homan, originally an Obama appointee.

The Lemkin Institute calls for the immediate release of all children being held in immigrant detention. We call for the dismantling of the Trump Administration’s concentration camps. We call for the abolition of ICE, CBP, and DHS. We call for an end to private prisons and to the privatization of other aspects of the mass incarceration system. The Lemkin Institute once again applauds the American people for refusing to passively accept the illegal and immoral acts of the United States government and urges communities to keep standing their ground, documenting ICE, and remaining organized against the terror that has been unleashed on their neighbors. The Lemkin Institute would like to remind the American people that there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity or genocide. We maintain our hope for justice for every child forcibly detained and deported by ICE.