Cruelty is a growth industry, and the deportation business is booming.
Surprise! MAGA's favorite mass-deportation program has produced at least one conspicuous group of winners: the companies paid to lock people up.
America's two largest private-prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, reported a combined $1.4 billion in revenue for the second quarter, as the number of people held in immigration detention approached 66,000. — Read the rest
A new report from Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) details shocking allegations about the conditions inside an ICE detention facility in Texas. The report, which was published on Friday, was based on interviews Senate staff conducted with “approximately 20 family units and approximately 40 women detained in the adult detention unit” at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, it said. In a statement released along with the report, Durbin described the findings as part of “an ongoing investigation into medical and mental health care” in immigration detention facilities. He also called for the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he is the ranking member, to hold a hearing on the issue.
“Children and their parents described a top-down culture of cruelty among Dilley staff, including guards deliberately disrupting children’s sleep at night, purposely entering rooms without knocking, and taunting children who are often provided with inedible food by eating candy and pizza in front of them,” Durbin said.
Steven Owen, the vice president of communications at CoreCivic, a private prison company that operates the Dilley facility, disputed the claims made in the report in an email to TPM.
“The critical characterizations of the Dilley Immigration Processing Center (DIPC) do not reflect the operations, standards or care provided at the facility. DIPC was purpose-built to meet the needs of families, and families are housed together in accommodations designed to support family unity, safety and children’s well-being,” Owen said, adding, “Claims that children are denied care or experience delayed medical assessment are false. DIPC maintains on-site pediatric expertise, and emergency services are activated when a child’s clinical presentation requires off-site care.” The children and their families at DIPC receive health care that is clinically rigorous, federally overseen and delivered with dignity. Residents receive:”
When reached by TPM, the White House referred all questions about the report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE did not respond to a request for comment, but an unnamed spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, provided a statement. The DHS spokesperson stated “any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention facilities is FALSE.” They also claimed “Dilley does meet federal detention standards and actually undergoes regular audits and inspections.”
“Another day and another hoax about the South Texas Family Residential Center. Nearly every single day, this office responds to media questions on FALSE allegations about illegal alien detention centers,” the DHS spokesperson said. “The media is clearly desperate for these allegations of inhumane conditions at this facility to be true.”
Along with the other disturbing claims, Durbin’s report alleges there is “substandard medical care” at Dilley.
“Poor medical care was the most urgent concern raised by both families and adult women. They described a range of unaddressed health issues and voiced that, because they were not receiving adequate care, those medical conditions are worsening,” the report said.
Specific issues detailed in the report include a mother and child who were ill yet allegedly “were repeatedly refused blankets to address the extremely cold temperatures in their unit.” The report also described multiple instances where detainees said they were not given care despite “extreme” pain and others who said chronic or troubling conditions were not addressed.
Along with the allegedly inadequate medical care, the report also claimed facility staff failed to provide detainees with proper meals.
“One family reported finding worms and a fingernail in their food. Several families said their children refused to eat facility meals entirely,” it said.
A lack of required educational programs is another issue detailed in the report, which said Judiciary Committee staffers found “no evidence that the facility was meeting … basic education standards.”
“One 16-year-old described the education offered at Dilley as ‘drawing in coloring books,’ which was not appropriate for students his age,” the report said.
The lack of school programs was described in the report as part of a pattern of “psychological harm to children” that included “demeaning, dismissive, and abusive behavior by Dilley staff.”
“One parent reported that guards who are perceived as ‘too nice’ are scolded by supervisors and told to be harsher. A guard told the parent: ‘You only have three rights here: drink, sleep, eat.’” the report said.
The report also said Dilley detainees face a lack of access to family members and attorneys.
“Many of them stated they have committed no crimes, have pending immigration cases, have minor children at home, and have lived in the United States for years. They stated repeatedly that they have followed the rules, and they are not criminals—and do not understand why they are being treated as if they are. They are desperate to be reunited with their families and spoke about their efforts to seek release through habeas petitions,” the report explained.
Dilley has been a hotbed for protests and activism that have taken place around the country in response to ICE and President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Durbin claimed the Judiciary Committee staff had issues speaking to detainees as part of what the report described as “DHS obstruction.”
“My staff visited Dilley as part of an ongoing investigation into medical and mental health care, solitary confinement, and access to counsel in immigration detention. During that visit, in an attempt to curtail oversight, DHS imposed an arbitrary two-hour time limit on visiting the facility,” Durbin said in his statement.
Other members of Congress have similarly accused DHS and ICE of attempting to thwart lawmakers’ right to conduct oversight in what they have called a violation of legislation. The practice led to a successful lawsuit in federal district court. In his statement, Durbin also suggested some of the things Judiciary Committee staff observed at Dilley violate the Flores Settlement Agreement, a court ruling that sets standards for immigration detention.
Durbin has previously released reports on conditions at ICE detention facilities in Florida and Louisiana. Overall, his latest report blamed the issues in detention centers on Trump administration policies.
“The Trump Administration is intentionally subjecting longtime law-abiding residents of our communities and children who have grown up in our communities to neglectful and dangerous detention conditions,” the report said, adding, “In a desperate attempt to meet Stephen Miller’s quotas in furtherance of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation campaign, immigration officials now target law-abiding families attending immigration
court hearings and ICE check-ins.”
Durbin’s report also predicted the issues observed at Dilley will have devastating consequences and that “more people will die in detention without necessary medical care.”
“Medical care in immigration detention is dangerously inadequate. Immigration detention facility staff routinely deny or defer necessary medical treatment, providing only minimal care until emergency care is required. Without better policies for quickly addressing urgent medical needs, including facilitating release, more individuals, including children, will die in Detention,” the report said. “Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025—the highest number in more than two decades. Twenty-two people have already died in ICE custody thus far in 2026.”
This story was updated at 9:31 pm with a response from CoreCivic. It was also updated at 4:38 pm on August 1, 2026 with the statement from a DHS spokesperson.
Caregivers in the U.S. are paid just under $26,000 a year on average for the most important work there is. And this June, we learned the government drew up a plan to mark many of them dead.
Let’s back up: When someone who receives Social Security dies, the government owes nothing for the month of the death, even if she lived to its final day. Benefits run a month behind, so her last payment lands after she’s gone, and the bank is told to send it back. We have a system that can find a dead woman’s last dollar and claw it back inside a month. It’s made to ignore the living woman who bathed her, fed her, and sat with her at the end.
And now we know just how little this government values her.
Last month, The Washington Post reported on a whistleblower disclosure from senior Social Security Administration executive Jeremiah Schofield, filed with Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. It describes a plan, devised by Elon Musk’s DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security, to enter nearly 2.7 million living immigrants into the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, the database used by banks, employers and agencies to confirm who has died. To be marked dead is to be severed from wages, banking and all social benefits.
That was the point: make immigrants miserable enough to self-deport. Two memos reportedly from then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to the acting Social Security Commissioner, Leland Dudek, waved off the legal warnings, the disclosure says, stating “death is a state of ineligibility.” It didn’t matter that the people were alive.
The agency says the plan wasn’t carried out. But roughly 6,000 immigrants were marked dead last year, some of whom had to walk into a government office and prove they were still breathing. And when they did, Immigration and Custom Enforcement was there waiting to arrest them.
Even without the fear that this stunt evoked, aides and the night nurses are already leaving — their protections revoked, status in question — but the need for them isn’t shrinking. Over the next decade, the U.S. will have 10 million openings in direct care. We’ll squeeze this need into the margins.
Even without the fear that this stunt evoked, aides and the night nurses are already leaving — their protections revoked, status in question — but the need for them isn’t shrinking.
The care crisis will be intensified by the Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling in Mullin v. Doe, which clears the way to revoke the Temporary Protected Status of roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians by July 10. This decision has been covered as a healthcare-staffing crisis, and it is that. But that is smaller than the truth: This will be a whole-lifespan problem, as the same workforce holds up both ends of American caregiving, elder care and childcare.
The PHI, a national research organization for the direct-care workforce, has already warned that without immigrant care workers, family caregivers will be forced to leave the workforce or cut their hours to fill the gap. That loss lands hardest on women across every sector and level of the workforce — caregiving is already the number one reason women voluntarily leave their jobs, cited by 42% of those who quit, according to Catalyst research — at a moment when women’s declining labor force participation is already draining the U.S. economy to the tune of an estimated $650 billion a year, or 2.9% of GDP.
New York and Massachusetts sit among the states with the most engaged care policy in the country. Florida and Ohio sit near the opposite end of that spectrum. It hardly matters. Take the caregivers out, and all four states end up in the same place: families with no one to turn to. No state legislates its way out of this loss. Without a caregiver, there is no care. Hard stop.
In much of East Asia, however, shaped by Confucian ideals of filial duty, and in Latino families bound by familismo, tending to the old and the dying is a calling claimed with pride. In the Philippines, which sends caregivers to the whole world, the work is a point of honor.
Other societies put public money in the place of reverence. The Netherlands has covered long-term care under universal insurance since 1968 and now devotes more of its GDP to it, about 4%, than any country tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Sweden, Norway and Denmark similarly fund it as a public good, not a private scramble.
In Japan, the two meet. A Confucian, deeply familial culture, it wrote care into law, requiring every citizen over 40 to carry long-term care insurance, and spending, in 2020, 67% more of its economy on that care than we did. Reverence and infrastructure, together.
The U.S. managed neither. We file care work under menial; overwhelmingly staff it with women, people of color, and immigrants; and pay as if they could feed their families on the sheer joy of being useful.
The reverence born in other countries arrives here, carried by the first generation, and finds nothing to hold onto: no paid leave, no funded care, no status, no relief. If it survives, it does so against the steady pull of a country that degrades and ignores caregiving. The further individuals get from arrival, the easier it becomes to forget cultural standards. That is not immigrants shedding their values. It is a country that imports devotion and budgets nothing to keep it alive.
One in five of the people caring for our children are immigrants — more than 40% in New York City, half in LA — more than half of whom are not citizens. When these hands go, the need remains. Intense work lands on the daughter, the wife, the sister, who absorbs the collapse, on top of her own life and career, uncompensated. It lands on the Panini Generation, pressed between aging parents and young children without paid leave or reprieve.
That daughter is often the one the family was proudest to send away. Education carries a woman farther from home — two to three times farther from her family, research finds, than her less-schooled peers. In her memoir, “My Life In Full,” Indra Nooyi, who left her parents in India to ultimately run PepsiCo, wrote that her mother raised her with “one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake, to go succeed and then come back to family.”
So, we lose. We lose in our communities, as neighbors disappear and businesses shutter with a workforce afraid to show. We lose in our homes, where we need those extra, loving hands. We lose in our accounts, drained by the care no one will fund. We lose in our companies, as women leave when caregiving can’t be negotiated. We lose in our relationships. We lose our people. And then, we reach our melting point and quietly lose ourselves.
The U.S. machine can find the dead and reclaim their last dollar inside a month. It purposefully leaves destitute the people who rocked, fed, bathed, lifted and bury us. Whose hands have caught everything this country dropped and asked almost nothing back. That’s what they get — and we lose.
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