Free the Children – Again
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Nominee Markwayne Mullin, father of six: “What say you?”
The science is settled. The doctors have spoken. The communities are rising up. It is well past time for Congress to demand the release of children from immigration prisons across this country, and for DHS Nominee Markwayne Mullin to commit to protecting children from further harm.
On February 26, 2026, nearly 4,000 health care professionals from 49 states sent a letter to former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, with the request that “the children held in immigration detention facilities be immediately released.”
The evaluation of these 3,954 “physicians, nurses, mental health professionals, allied health care professionals, and public health professionals who care for children in clinics, emergency departments, hospitals, and intensive care units across the United States” was not political. It was clinical.
As they write:
The detention of children in these facilities is causing predictable, severe, and lasting harm to their mental and physical health. It is well established that even brief confinement can cause psychological trauma and lifelong harm by exposing children to toxic stress that disrupts brain development.
The clinicians add:
Conditions in these facilities compound harm and create additional medical risk. Public reports describe inadequate bedding, clothing, hygiene facilities, and access to food and clean water, along with unnecessary family separation. Of particular concern are the numerous reports of limited access to timely, appropriate medical care. The recent measles outbreak at the detention facility in Dilley, Texas – which apparently included critically ill infants without adequate medical evaluation – underscores the immediate preventable danger children face in these settings.
Since September, at just the pro-profit detention center in Dilley, Texas, 911 has been called at least 11 times for children suffering from emergency distress.
Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX), who represents my hometown of El Paso, Texas, has also found the care provided at immigration detention facilities to be dangerous after numerous visits to Camp East Montana, the nation’s largest immigration detention facility, located at Fort Bliss in El Paso via a $1.2 billion no-bid contract.
In a letter by Rep. Escobar and 24 of her congressional colleagues to former Secretary Noem and Acting Director Todd Lyons of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which was also sent on February 26 on the heels of three deaths at the facility in just six weeks (including the death of Lunas Campos, which was ruled a “homicide” by the El Paso County Medical Examiner), they call for the closure of the facility.
An ACLU report documented a detained teenager at Camp East Montana who alleged that staff block security cameras while officers piled upon him and assaulted him. The injuries he sustained were so severe that he lost consciousness, had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance, and is still suffering hearing loss and pain in his testicles weeks later.
These letters and reports are being issued and describe a crisis from the viewpoint of health care professionals, lawmakers, and legal professionals who are documenting the grave harm that those detention centers are having on people and children.
In their review of the evidence, the 4,000 health care professionals point out:
Immigration violations are civil, administrative matters. Yet children are being confined in detention environments that would be unfit for even violent criminals.
What the Science Says and Has Said for Years
The harm that child detention causes is not speculative. It is not contested. It is not a matter of political interpretation. It is a thoroughly documented phenomenon in pediatrics and developmental psychology.
In February, researchers at Arizona State University’s Children’s Equity Project published a new report titled The Scars of Family Detention and Separation in the U.S. Immigration System. It opens with a statement that synthesizes the research on detention and family separation:
A plethora of research, and common sense indisputably point to the fact that both detention and family separation are traumatic for children of all ages, and harm children’s wellbeing, development, mental health, and education.
Detention places a child, regardless of age and regardless of whether a parent is present, in a fenced, monitored facility operated by a private prison corporation, stripped of a normal life, cut off from friends and family, unable to cook a family meal, unable to move freely, and unable to attend school.
…detention or the separation of families for purposes of immigration enforcement or management are never in the best interest of children.
The ASU researchers found that in numerous studies, detained children demonstrated substantially worse outcomes across every measure – internalizing problems, trauma symptoms, hyperactivity, and conduct problems. These findings include something particularly harrowing: “developmental regression,” which includes children losing their ability to count, name colors, or control their bladders after detention.
There is no safe duration of detention for a child, and we have known this for quite some time.
In 2018, Drs. Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson spoke out as whistleblowers in a letter to Sens. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) that, after 10 investigations of family detention centers over four years, they had observed “serious compliance issues resulting in harm to children….”
They concluded:
The fundamental flaw of family detention is not just the risk posed by the conditions of confinement — it’s the incarceration of innocent children itself. In our professional opinion, there is no amount of programming that can ameliorate the harms created by the very act of confining children to detention centers. Detention of innocent children should never occur in a civilized society, especially if there are less restrictive options, because the risk of harm to children simply cannot be justified.
And yet, the Administration is rapidly increasing the number of detention facilities, and Congress has appropriated billions in additional funding to expand systems that experts, such as the Children Trive Action Network (CTAN), have repeatedly warned are damaging children.
Pediatricians Andrew D. Racine, Sural Shah, and Kimberly Mukerjee, writing in USA Today, explain further:
There are humane, community-based alternatives to detaining children. All children held in immigration detention should be immediately released, and these facilities should be permanently shuttered.
As federal policymakers negotiate the Department of Homeland Security budget, they have an obligation to prioritize child safety. They can do this by prohibiting immigration enforcement actions at or near sensitive locations such as schools, health care facilities, places of worship, childcare facilities and other places where children gather.
In addition to congressional actions, judicial oversight must continue. Recently, the AAP, along with 16 other groups, spoke out against efforts by the government to end a three-decade legal settlement establishing standard of care for immigrant children in U.S. government custody.
Children, regardless of their immigration status, belong in their communities, in school and with their families. Liam’s story is one of far too many. Our nation deserves immigration policies that prioritize child health and well-being.
Tragically, We Have Seen This Before
Sadly, the U.S. government has a history of such abuse, including slavery and reconstruction, Indigenous boarding schools, Japanese American incarceration during World War II, and past periods of immigration raids, detentions, and deportations.
During the first Trump Administration, Laura Bush, in a June 2018 Washington Post op-ed, wrote that the images of detained children were “eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.” She called the Administration’s zero tolerance policies “cruel” and “immoral.”
The former First Lady also referenced the evidence:
We also know that this treatment inflicts trauma; those who have been interned have been twice as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned.
Later that year, in an article called “Free the Children,” we called for ending the practice of detaining children. I wrote:
In the future, our own children and grandchildren will look back and wonder how we as a nation could have possibly been so cruel and inhumane to children. We are bearing witness to government-sanctioned child abuse.
Source: These were pictures taken at protests during the first Trump Administration against child detention and family separation.
And yet, here we are again, and the numbers are much worse.
Since the start of this Administration’s second term, ICE has detained more than 3,800 children, a sixfold increase. More than 1,000 children have been held beyond the 20-day limit established by the Flores Settlement Agreement, which was a legal agreement established in 1997 to create a minimum level of protection, care, and duration of detention for children in U.S. custody.
As of early March 2026, at least 14 confirmed measles cases were active at Camp East Montana. The facility’s contractor, Acquisition Logistics LLC – a small Virginia company with no prior experience running a detention facility – was paid $1.2 billion by the Pentagon under a no-bid contract, while detained parents reported rotten food, undrinkable water, sewage flooding, and dormitories cleaned once every eight days.
The Administration is planning two dozen more facilities like this one.
Communities Are Saying No
Something important is happening in the communities where this expansion is being imposed.
In Surprise, Arizona, DHS quietly purchased a 400,000-square-foot warehouse for $70 million — designed to hold 7,000 to 10,000 detainees, 300 yards from homes, about a mile from a high school where more than 60% of students are Hispanic. City officials weren’t told in advance. More than 1,000 people showed up to a city council meeting in protest.
We do not warehouse people in our country. This isn’t the United States I grew up in.
A high school student stood up and said:
I get a pit in my stomach when I think about how, in a few months, I have to go to school knowing humans are screaming for help.
In El Paso, residents have held vigils, students at six high schools have staged walkouts, and community members have rallied repeatedly outside Camp East Montana.
El Pasoan Jeannie Norris said:
I am so shocked what’s happening in our country... it’s close to home and you have a big detention center right in your hometown which is an international city, which has always loved immigrants before, and we treat them so badly, it’s heartbreaking.
This is why Rep. Escobar and her colleagues told Secretary Noem in their February 26 letter:
For the safety of everyone at the facility, for an end to abuses to detainees, and for fiscal responsibility to the American people, the site cannot continue to operate.
These are not partisan grievances. A high school student in Arizona asking not to go to school next to a facility where “humans are screaming for help” is not making a political argument. They are asking their government not to do something monstrous.
The Specific Demand: No Funding for Child Detention
On March 5, 2026, First Focus Campaign for Children and the Coalition on Human Needs led 125 national and local organizations in sending a letter to every member of the House of Representatives. The letter arrived as Congress prepared to vote on FY2026 Homeland Security funding. The ask was straightforward:
We strongly urge Congress to reject provisions that expand enforcement or detention capacity, to ensure child-centered protections, and to prioritize investments that promote children’s well-being, family stability, and equitable access to services.
In January, writing about the Dilley detention center in Texas and the broader ICE detention expansion, I put our position as plainly as I know how:
End child and family detention. There is no safe or humane way to detain children beyond the short-term. Instead of pouring funding into large-scale detention facilities, we should invest in community-based alternatives that keep families together while respecting due process and human dignity.
Children are being dehumanized.
Time and time again, anyone who has carefully looked at this issue has reached the same conclusion. The evidence leaves no other answer. DHS’s policies are inflicting grave harm to children.
What Congress and DHS Secretary Nominee Mullin Should Do
When it comes to Congress, the letter from 125 organizations calls upon the House and Senate to:
End child and family detention. Detaining children causes irreparable harm. No appropriations bill should fund its circumvention or elimination.
Restore sensitive location protections. Schools, hospitals, child care centers, and houses of worship must be off-limits for enforcement. When children fear that going to school will lead to their parent’s arrest, they stop going to school. The research confirms this. It is already happening.
Ensure legal representation for children in immigration proceedings. We do not allow children to appear in criminal court without counsel. We should not allow them to appear in immigration court without it either.
Preserve and strengthen the Flores Settlement and other minimum child welfare standards for children and youth in custody.
Fund community-based alternatives. The Family Case Management Program works. It costs less. It keeps families together. Fund it.
Demand congressional oversight of ICE and DHS. Three people have died at Camp East Montana in six weeks. Congress must insist on the oversight authority it already possesses.
Embed a “best interests of the child” standard across all policy decisions by the federal government.
And as DHS Secretary Nominee Mullin looks into these issues before his Senate confirmation hearings and vote, we would urge him to reflect upon the children and his own words about their lives.
For example, in February 2020, Sen. Mullin tweeted:
Whether we are Republican, Democrat, or Independent, surely we must all agree that every human life is a sacred gift from God!
Every human life.
In June 2023, Mullin spoke about being a father as one of the “greatest blessings of my life” and how he wanted to wish a Happy Father’s Day to “all dads, grandfathers, and father figures across Oklahoma!”
All dads.
And a year later, he tweeted:
As the father of six loving children, three of whom came into our lives through the blessing of adoption, I believe every child is fearfully and wonderfully made by our Creator and worthy of life.
Every child.
If he becomes the Secretary of DHS, his support for every human life, all dads, and every child should certainly govern his thoughts about how to treat children. As he thinks about each decision he would need to make, we urge him to ask and answer one simple question: “Is it good for the children?”
After reviewing all the evidence, we would hope he would agree to reject the views and policies of White House aide Stephen Miller and his DHS predecessor Kristi Noem and drop any and all policies that are doing irreparable damage to children.
As a nation, we have a choice, and for God’s sake, let’s choose to end government-imposed child abuse once and for all.
FREE THE CHILDREN!
What You Can Do
Call or write your senators and member of Congress and demand that they protect funding for children and reform the Department of Homeland Security to protect children from harm.
Urge your senators to ask DHS Secretary Nominee Markwayne Mullin to explain, in detail, what policies he will adopt regarding how the DHS and ICE will treat children and families under his direction during his confirmation hearing, which may happen next week.
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Bruce, when I heard about Sen. Mullin's appointment I felt a tiny sliver of hope. He is fully enrolled Cherokee. I tweeted to him that these detention centers make the Indian Schools look like Disneyworld, which they most assuredly were not. He has on adoption/child welfare/ ICWA issues ok. So perhaps establishing some empathy w/ him will be helpful on these issues (the WH and Stephen Miller notwithstanding).....at least it's worth a try.
Thank you so much for writing about this 🫶🏼