‘They treat us as if we weren’t human’: Migrant minors denounce deplorable conditions in US detention centers

“The place where I sleep is actually a cell. It’s extremely cold. The bathroom has no door and the floor is very dirty. It’s very embarrassing not to have privacy to use the bathroom.” This is part of a statement by a 16-year-old girl reflecting the conditions that minors suffer inside migrant detention centers in the United States. Several human rights organizations have collected testimonies from children and their families to denounce the treatment of minors who arrive, with or without their parents, seeking asylum. They hope that the harshness of the statements will serve to stop the Trump Administration’s motion seeking to eliminate the protections that minors are guaranteed—at least on paper—with the Flores Agreement.

Both parties will appear on August 8 before District Judge Dolly M. Gee of Los Angeles, who will likely decide whether to terminate the Flores Agreement, which has guaranteed minimum conditions for the well-being of children since 1997. According to the regulations, facilities where children are housed must be “safe and sanitary” and provide them with “access to restrooms and sinks, drinking water, and food… with adequate temperature and ventilation control.”

President Donald Trump believes the Flores Agreement is no longer necessary because it “does not serve the public interest,” according to a motion his administration filed in May. The administration also claims that the situation is very different now from when the law was passed 27 years ago, that there were not as many immigrants then as there are now, and that conditions inside these centers “have substantially improved” since then.

The testimonies of children and their families, however, paint a very different picture. In the centers controlled by the Border Patrol (CBP), nicknamed “iceboxes” because of the low temperatures in which they are kept, detainees sleep crowded together on thin yoga mats, share a bathroom with more than 20 other people, often without a door, and have no access to natural light. Instead, they are kept under artificial light 24 hours a day and woken at night to check the anklets placed on them. The poor nutrition and lack of access to medicine make many ill, according to their parents.

“I could only bathe my daughter once every two weeks because those were the only times the shower water was lukewarm,” says one mother. “When my daughter got sick, a member of the medical staff told me it was my fault my daughter was sick because it was my decision to bring her here. When I asked for medication, the staff told us to go home and we would get it there,” says another.

The young woman who made the statement at the beginning of this story—and who remains anonymous for protection reasons—arrived in the United States with her mother and two younger siblings in April to request asylum through the appointment app CBP One, which the Trump administration has since eliminated. After an arduous journey that included walking through sewers, the mother surrendered to border police, who handcuffed her and took the entire family to the detention center in Chula Vista, California, about seven miles from the Mexican border.

“We were still soaked, dirty, cold, and smelly… They spoke in English, thinking we wouldn’t understand the profanity they were uttering, but I understood quite a bit of English… I heard one officer say about us, ‘They smell like shit,’ to which another officer replied, ‘They are shit.’ They treated us like we weren’t human,” the young woman said. They were unable to leave their cell for five days.

The 72-hour limit has been exceeded

One of the recommendations included in the Flores Agreement is that minors should not spend more than 72 hours in CBP detention centers, but more and more children are being held for extended periods. Advocates for the minors report that children are frequently transferred to the recently reopened Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Family Detention Centers for additional weeks of detention, where the clock is “reset” on the time children spend in custody.

“Children are particularly vulnerable to the trauma caused by the endemic confusion, cruelty, and deprivation of CBP custody,” said the National Center for Youth Law and Children’s Rights, the organizations that compiled the statements.

“Border Patrol facilities are not a place to hold anyone for days on end, much less children or people with vulnerable medical needs,” the American Immigration Council said in a statement following the death of a girl in CBP custody in 2023. Anadith Danay Reyes Álvarez, who suffered from sickle cell anemia and heart disease, died on May 17 of that year at a Texas detention center, where she had been held with her parents for nine days. Subsequent investigations have revealed that medical staff ignored the parents’ pleas to be taken to the hospital after seeing their daughter’s condition worsen. Anadith suffered a high fever and chest and abdominal pain, among other symptoms, according to attorneys for the family, who filed a wrongful death lawsuit last May.

Last April alone, 213 minors exceeded the recommended 72-hour detention period and 14 children were held for more than 20 days, according to data compiled by the organizations filing the petition. One child was held in a CBP facility for more than a month. “That’s insane,” says Scott Bassett, an attorney with Amica, an organization that provides legal services to unaccompanied migrant minors.

The Flores Agreement was initially approved specifically for the latter, but was later extended to all minors. It takes its name from a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl, Jenny Lisette Flores, who crossed the border alone in the 1980s. She was held in a center for adults and subjected to body searches.

The agreement, which Trump wants to eliminate after trying and failing to do so during his first administration, was supposed to be temporary, on the basis that legislation would be passed to include the same protections for minors, but the law never came. In 2024, the Biden administration approved a new regulation for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where unaccompanied minors are transferred. The Democratic administration also wanted to eliminate part of the Flores Agreement because the new regulations already included some of the same protections for children who arrive alone, but child advocacy organizations opposed it.

No toys and no moving

The Flores Agreement requires unaccompanied minors to be transferred within 72 hours to ORR, where conditions are better: children receive educational, religious, and recreational services, which were previously denied to them at CBP facilities.

“There wasn’t a single toy. They weren’t even allowed to jump, move, or play with each other. Can you imagine being three years old and being told not to move for five days? Officers would walk through the room, and if the children moved, they would be told that if they didn’t stop, they would be taken away,” one father said in statements submitted to Judge Gee.

Amica works with minors held at the ORR, advising them and offering legal defense in their asylum cases. The Trump administration has also attempted to cancel legal services for these minors, but a judge has ordered the funding for their attorneys to continue temporarily. Bassett explains the risk of leaving children without legal representation in immigration court, as the government wants: “One of the most frustrating things is that almost all of these children are eligible to win their cases. Only with a lawyer, someone who knows what to do, could they stay here. The problem is that the system is so complex for them that they can’t do it without a lawyer.”

To reduce the number of minors it must care for, the administration has begun offering voluntary deportation, as they cannot be deported directly by CBP. “But even voluntary departure can be very confusing for children. It’s something we need to seek legal advice about,” Bassett adds.

Returning to the countries they fled, where most of them experienced traumatic experiences, isn’t very appealing, but the conditions in which they are held in detention centers aren’t ideal for children either. “We can’t play. We just sleep, eat, cry, and wait,” summarizes one of the children.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition