WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) -- An 18-month-old girl held at a U.S. immigration detention center was hospitalized with a life-threatening respiratory illness last month and returned to custody days later without receiving the prescribed daily medication, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday.
The girl and her parents were arrested during a scheduled check-in with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in December and transferred to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center (Dilley) in south Texas, a remote family detention facility, the lawsuit said.
The girl, who had been healthy before her detention, was diagnosed with pneumonia, COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus and severe respiratory distress when being sent to a hospital in January, according to the lawsuit.
After spending 10 days in a hospital, the girl was returned to immigration detention and was denied "access to the medication that doctors prescribed for her at the hospital," the lawsuit said. As NBC reported, medical experts who reviewed her records said the girl was in "extreme danger" and faced a "high risk for medical decompensation and death."
After her lawyer filed an emergency habeas corpus petition in federal court on Friday, the girl and her parents were released. The lawyer added that ICE still retained the child's prescriptions and birth certificate.
"DEEPLY TROUBLING"
The case has drawn renewed attention to Dilley, the only family detention center currently in operation in the United States. According to a report from DetentionReports.com, the population there has surged from fewer than 500 in October to 1,332 as of late January. As Austin Kocher, an assistant research professor at Syracuse University, estimated, approximately 800 of those detained are likely children.
Immigration attorney Eric Lee, who visited the facility in late January, described conditions at Dilley as "deeply troubling." U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro, who also visited the center, said what he observed amounted to "inhumanity."
According to a report by ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, children detained at Dilley said they had experienced inadequate food, contaminated water, insufficient medical care and limited access to education.
Dilley is not the only ICE facility to have raised concerns. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Monday that a Palestinian woman who had been detained by ICE in Texas since March was hospitalized after suffering a seizure on Friday. In a statement, the woman's legal team said she had experienced dizziness, fainting episodes and other symptoms linked to poor nutrition while in custody.
The legal team said ICE failed to inform the woman's lawyers and family of her condition and whereabouts following her hospitalization.
With prolonged detention, some immigrants remain in ICE custody even after agreeing to leave the United States. Ana Alicia Huerta, a senior attorney at the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, told local media that some detainees continued to wait for court hearings despite having signed voluntary deportation forms.
In a 2001 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court said immigration detention should not be indefinite, finding six months to be a presumptively reasonable period. However, the DHS said its policies follow the law, citing a court ruling that the administration can continue to detain immigrants without bond.
The media have reported that at least six immigrants have died in ICE detention centers in the United States so far in 2026. One was initially reported as a suicide by ICE and then the local authorities ruled his death a homicide. In two other cases, family members and lawyers have questioned whether detainees received timely medical treatment, raising concerns over delayed or ignored care.
Under provisions of U.S. federal law and DHS appropriations statutes, ICE is required to provide detailed reports on immigrants who die in the agency's custody within 90 days of their deaths. However, according to a report by Zeteo, since October, ICE has failed to do so for at least eight immigrants who have died in detention centers.
WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?
According to ICE data, over 90 percent of people are held in privately-run immigrant detention centers, which annually gain profits of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars from contracts with ICE.
The American Immigration Council recently issued a report, saying ICE has signed extensive new contracts with private prison companies to reopen shuttered prisons and detention centers or expand existing facilities.
New plans suggest that the administration may open a tent camp and even purchase unused commercial warehouses and convert them into jails to hold thousands of people at a time.
Private-prison operator GEO Group has rejected a shareholder vote designed to shed light on alleged human rights violations in its operation of ICE detention centers, local media reported on Monday.
"The fact that the company isn't transparent with us, that raises red flags," said Bryan Pham, a Jesuit priest who leads the investors' talks with GEO. "Does it have something to hide?" ■