21/03/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/1FDxYeLiTj/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Last week, Ms. Rachel -- the children's educator whose YouTube channel has 19.2 million subscribers and whose Instagram reaches nearly 5 million more -- posted a video call with a 9-year-old boy imprisoned at the nation's largest concentration camp for children in Dilley, Texas. His name is Deiver. His family was recently detained in El Paso after showing up for a routine check-in with immigration authorities as part of their pending asylum case.
In the short video, Deiver told Ms. Rachel he misses his friends and his school. He said the food makes his stomach hurt. He said "nothing's good here." And he told her about the one thing he wanted most: "I wanna go to the spelling bee." He paused. "I wish I could leave before the spelling bee."
Ms. Rachel's video and Deiver's pleas for freedom reached millions of viewers.
This Wednesday -- only days after the video went viral -- the Trump administration announced it is blocking video calls in community areas at Dilley, restricting families' ability to speak with loved ones, lawyers, and reporters. DHS told reporters the move was necessary because "the live streaming of video calls online resulted in the unauthorized dissemination of law enforcement sensitive information" and that the calls had "undermined the security of the facility."
A 9-year-old telling a children's entertainer he wants to go to his spelling bee is now, in the eyes of the U.S. government, a threat to facility security. The real threat, of course, is that the most popular children's educator in America showed her millions of followers what it looks like when a child is locked inside a for-profit, privately run concentration camp funded by American taxpayers -- and that child said, in his own words, "I don't want to be here anymore. Nothing's good here."
DHS says video calls are "still available in private rooms." They have not clarified how many private rooms exist, how they are scheduled, or how accessible they will be to families and children. The practical effect is obvious: fewer calls, fewer chances for children's voices to reach the outside world.
This is only the latest in an escalating campaign to silence the children inside Dilley.
Last month, ProPublica published an extraordinary investigation: handwritten letters and drawings from children imprisoned inside the facility. Rainbows, family portraits, hearts. And words -- in the shaky handwriting of kids as young as seven -- describing what it is like to be locked inside a concentration camp for weeks and months on end.
"I don't want to be in this place. I want to go to my school," wrote 7-year-old Mia Valentina Paz Faria, who had been imprisoned for 70 days.
"Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression," wrote 14-year-old Ariana, imprisoned for 45 days.
"More than 60 days... going to the doctor and the only thing they tell you is to drink more water and the worst thing is that it seems the water is what makes people sick here," wrote 12-year-old Ender.
The children wrote in their own words what hundreds of complaints, federal lawsuits, and investigative reports have independently documented: that conditions inside Dilley are horrific, that medical care is dangerously inadequate, and that children are being held for months in violation of the law.
Their letters reached millions. They were shared across social media, picked up by major news outlets, and read aloud from the dais during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing, where Rep. James Walkinshaw held up the children's drawings and turned to ICE acting director Todd Lyons to demand answers. Lyons could only offer standard Trump administration deflections.
The Trump administration's real response came the following week when guards began raiding cells.
"They noticed we were writing letters asking for freedom," 15-year-old Cariexis Quintero recounted on a video call after a raid. "So they entered our room to rip them up. They threw away all my drawings -- my mom liked them." Cariexis, who has the intellectual capacity of a seven-year-old, was crying. Her mother appeared on the same call holding up a pile of colorful paper scraps -- all that remained of her daughter's artwork.
Multiple former detainees described the same scene to ProPublica: guards sweeping through cells, ripping drawings off walls, confiscating crayons and colored pencils -- even supplies families had purchased from the commissary.
"There were many, many families whose children had their pencils and what they created thrown away," one mother said. In addition to seizing art materials, detainees reported losing access to Gmail and Google services in the facility's library, cutting off another channel of communication with lawyers and the outside world.
In a recent court filing, the Trump administration is now claiming that the confiscated items were “limited to materials identified as protest-related." Apparently, that category includes children's drawings of themselves imprisoned behind barbed wire and letters from 7-year-olds describing the trauma of being imprisoned.
ProPublica's investigation found that more than 3,500 people have been cycled through Dilley since it was reopened under the Trump administration. More than half were minors. Their data analysis showed that roughly 300 children were held longer than a month -- in direct violation of the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, which limits child detention to 20 days. In every month between November and February, the average stay in family detention was over 50 days.
Children inside told ProPublica reporter Mica Rosenberg they were cutting themselves. Some expressed suicidal thoughts. Facility 911 logs documented breathing emergencies, seizures, and sexual assaults. The facility's sole educational offering was a single one-hour class with 12 slots, first-come-first-served -- for hundreds of children.
The National Center for Youth Law is fighting the Trump administration in court over conditions at Dilley, documenting in court filings food contaminated with worms and mold, water containers thick with algae, lights that blaze all night so children can't sleep, and medical neglect so severe that one child's untreated earache caused hearing loss. Families have filed more than 1,000 complaints about inadequate medical care since the facility reopened last April.
The pattern is unmistakable. When the letters were published, DHS issued boilerplate denials. When Walkinshaw read them in Congress, Lyons deflected. When Rep. Joaquin Castro visited the facility, guards warned detainees not to talk to him. When the letters and drawings made it out, guards raided cells and destroyed them. When Ms. Rachel showed her millions of followers a 9-year-old talking about wanting to go to a spelling bee, they restricted access to video calls.
Every time a child's voice gets out, the response is not to fix the conditions or release children but to shut down the channel.
All of this -- the imprisonment of children for months, the confiscation of their artwork, the surveillance and silencing, the medical neglect that has nearly killed multiple toddlers and led to the deportation of a sick two-month-old -- is immensely profitable for the corporation running it.
CoreCivic donated more than $800,000 to Trump's campaign and inauguration. The day after Trump was elected, CoreCivic's stock price jumped nearly 30 percent. Last year, the company posted $2.2 billion in revenue -- an all-time high. CoreCivic's revenue from ICE alone more than doubled in the last quarter of 2025, reaching $244.7 million.
On an earnings call, CoreCivic CEO Patrick Swindle reassured investors eager for more: "As that ecosystem grows, it's gonna result in additional bed demand." ICE plans to dramatically expand its detention network with eight "mega-centers" and dozens of additional sites, a $38.3 billion plan financed through Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill."
Most alarming: the expansion includes three new or expanded detention centers specifically for families, adding more than 5,700 beds -- room to imprison thousands of children at a time.
The cruelty isn't just the point -- it's the business model.
The children inside Dilley can no longer write letters. They can no longer freely make video calls to tell people like Ms. Rachel that they miss their friends, that the food hurts their stomachs, that they want to go to the spelling bee. The Trump administration and the guards made sure of that. But you can still make your voice heard.
--> Call your representatives via the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and demand the immediate release of all children from the Dilley and Karnes detention centers and an end to child detention -- if you don't reach a staffer, be sure to leave a message
--> To watch Ms. Rachel's conversation with Deiver, visit https://www.instagram.com/p/DVzUzozj19K/
--> To demand that CoreCivic stop profiting from the imprisonment of children, contact them at PublicAffairs@CoreCivic.com or call 615-263-3000
--> There's another group of immigrant children who need your help. The Trump administration is threatening legal services for 26,000 unaccompanied immigrant children. Without lawyers, kids as young as toddlers face immigration judges alone. Demand Congress defend this life-saving program at https://actionnetwork.org/letters/restore-legal-services-for-unaccompanied-children/
--> The National Center for Youth Law is fighting the Trump administration in court over conditions at Dilley. To support their critical work, visit https://youthlaw.org/
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For a powerful novel-in-verse that tells the story of child immigrant detention through the eyes of a 9-year-old girl imprisoned in a U.S. detention camp, we recommend "Land of the Cranes" ages 9 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781338343861 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4lImdkB (Amazon)
For children's books that encourage empathy and understanding of Mighty Girl immigrants of the past and present, visit our blog post, "A New Land, A New Life: 25 Mighty Girl Books About the Immigrant Experience" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12855
For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
For books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history that will help them appreciate how precious democracy truly is, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
To stay connected with A Mighty Girl, you can sign-up for A Mighty Girl's free email newsletter at https://www.amightygirl.com/forms/newsletter
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To read more about DHS' latest crackdown on the voices of Dilley's imprisoned children, visit https://www.sacurrent.com/news/san-antonio-news/dilley-immigrant-prison-camp-clamps-down-on-video-calls-in-further-censorship-of-detainees/
To read ProPublica's piece on DHS's retaliation over the children's letters and drawings last month, visit https://www.propublica.org/article/dilley-detention-center-kids-art-removal
To read ProPublica's powerful expose "The Children of Dilley," visit https://www.propublica.org/article/life-inside-ice-dilley-children
For more about DHS' current efforts to vastly expand their detention facilities -- including ones for children -- you can learn about their efforts to buy massive warehouses around the country at https://wapo.st/3OfarSk -- and about community opposition to their plans at https://wapo.st/3OIfSJn
The first step to oppose such expansion is to learn about any plans for your state, and then connect with others to oppose warehouse detention centers in your state. Connect with local immigrant rights groups and/or local Indivisible chapter to see if there are current efforts already underway to support. To find an Indivisible group in your area, visit https://indivisible.org/groups
To read about the plans to develop more detention capacity for children as described in an internal ICE planning road map obtained by The Washington Post, visit https://wapo.st/4skDfI0
To read more about the private prison contractors celebrating 'growth opportunities,' visit https://time.com/7378284/ice-immigration-detention-contractors-record-revenue/
For an in-depth article by The New York Times about ICE's detention of children, visit https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/migrant-children-ice-detention.html?unlocked_article_code=1.L1A.8FGL.m4qk_b7TATEH&smid=url-share
