Overcrowding, abuse, and neglect have made conditions far worse, and basic agency oversight has been gutted. The government has also detained at least four thousand children, sending many of them to a notoriously grim facility in South Texas called Dilley. A legal settlement in place since the late nineteen-nineties is supposed to bar the government from keeping minors in immigration custody for more than twenty days, but ICE has routinely flouted that rule. “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” a fourteen-year-old girl from Honduras, who has lived in New York for seven years, told ProPublica; by then, she’d been in custody for forty-five days while waiting to be deported.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter