More than 6,000 children detained in U.S. immigration facilities in the past year: Reports of lights on 24 hours a day and worms in their food

More than 6,200 children have been detained in migration centers in the United States in the past year, as reported this Wednesday by Texas Democratic congressmen Joaquín Castro and Greg Casar during a press conference held in San Antonio.

A report from EFE revealed that lawmakers visited the Dilley Immigration Processing Center that same day, located south of San Antonio, where nearly 400 people are currently being held, including 49 families, 77 children, and 244 adult women, some of whom have been deprived of their freedom for over a year, according to data presented alongside the organization FWD.us.

The Dilley center, operated by the private company CoreCivic under contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is the only active family detention center in the country and has housed nearly half of the minors detained during the second term of Donald Trump.

The conditions reported by the lawmakers are serious: lights on 24 hours a day, worms and mold in the food, lack of medical attention, and racist insults from security guards such as "wetbacks" and "spics." A family has filed a formal complaint against CoreCivic for these insults.

Castro recounted the case of a five-year-old girl who has been complaining for months about multiple cavities and dental pain, and to whom the healthcare staff at the center prescribed daily ibuprofen for over two months instead of providing dental care. "These individuals are not being taken seriously because they are not being treated as human beings."

The situation of unaccompanied migrant minors has been one of the most controversial topics in the immigration debate in the United States in recent years, especially since Trump's first term, during which 5,500 children were separated from their families between 2017 and 2019 due to his "Zero Tolerance" policy.

Migration specialists warn that the figures provided are not clearly documented and are not directly comparable to other data from the U.S. immigration system.

Migration experts indicate that many of the children labeled as "lost" in official reports were actually handed over to sponsors within the United States, but federal authorities subsequently lost contact with them.