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As I continue to heal from my own experience in a for-profit ICE prison, I can’t help but wonder if children detained will ever feel safe again.
Each day, I read more news about children as young as two years old who are detained in a for-profit Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Dilley, Texas, away from their friends, schools, and communities. I see reports of handwritten letters from children asking to be released, as they describe the fear they experience day in and day out while in detention. As an applied developmental scientist who spent more than 13 years studying child and youth development, as well as someone who has firsthand experienced the horrors of encountering immigration enforcement and the inhumane treatment and conditions that follow, I am deeply concerned for children impacted by immigration enforcement surges.
There is no shortage of research that demonstrates the connection between family detention and deportation proceedings of children and negative educational outcomes, elevated levels of distress, mental and physical harm, trauma, and decline in multiple aspects of well-being. Currently, approximately 1 in 12 children in the US face risk of deportation of a loved one and the lasting negative impacts on their psychological and physical well-being. ICE has detained at least 3,800 children since mid-January 2025. Of those 3,800 kids, more than 600 unaccompanied children have been put in custody of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and were taken from their parents in many cases.
Regardless of my role as researcher, on a human level I am constantly thinking: What do children feel when they first encounter immigration enforcement, who are usually armed and masked? Do their little bodies tremble or freeze? What happens when federal agents take their parents away from them? What does it mean for a preschooler to be detained? What is their crime? Is it being born or, perhaps, seeking asylum? What sense of childhood remains when immigrant children are detained in inhumane conditions?
What I experienced as an adult paints enough of a bleak picture. As a 30-year-old, I was unlawfully abducted from the street by masked and armed agents for being a co-author in a school op-ed at Tufts Daily that advocated for Palestinian human rights. I was sent to a for-profit ICE prison thousands of miles away from school and the community I’d built in Boston, not to mention thousands of miles away from my family in Turkey. The experience has been profoundly harmful to me, even as an adult. Despite the immense care, love, and support from my community, there has still not been a single day when I have felt safe walking the streets again—not even on my way home or to school. It’s not just the moment of abduction that is terrifying, but also where one will go and the inhumane treatment they may face that cannot be considered developmentally appropriate for any single child. Research suggests that interacting with the immigration system poses harm to children’s long-term development. Previous personal accounts indicate that suffering continues throughout the lifetime.
We must all ask ourselves: Is this really the world we want for our children—one where they are afraid to go to school, home, hospitals, neighborhoods, playgrounds, museums, and libraries for fear of immigration detention?
As I continue to heal from my own experience in a for-profit ICE prison, I can’t help but wonder if children detained will ever feel safe again. I worry about how they will grow up and carry this adverse experience for a lifetime. Interacting with immigration enforcement not only poses developmental risk to children detained in those shameful places for longer periods of time, but also to children (including citizen children) whose parents are detained at the for-profit ICE prisons. In the for-profit prison where I was unlawfully detained, I met countless mothers who cried everyday longing for their children. I met mothers in the deportation process whose hearts were shattered when their children were taken into foster care. I listened as some mothers tried to speak with their children on tablets, only to have officers order them to close the tablets or take them away, leaving their children in tears. I met mothers whose babies were taken from them just weeks after birth. I met with a pregnant mom waiting for her deportation. Her children are American citizens.
But these cruel immigration raids aren’t only harming immigrant children or children with immigrant parents. The experience also affects classmates who are waiting for their detained peers to return. These same children are trying to make sense of what they see on news reports of kids being detained, of disappearing classmates, students, and adults on the street during ICE raids. Children and their teachers are being taken from their communities, leaving classrooms and communities in fear. There are accounts of BIPOC and immigrant children being bullied at school.
We must all ask ourselves: Is this really the world we want for our children—one where they are afraid to go to school, home, hospitals, neighborhoods, playgrounds, museums, and libraries for fear of immigration detention?
I hope there is an end to family detention so that these parents and young children can proceed with their cases while living in their communities, going to school, getting medical treatment, and playing with their friends. Too many children are facing detention because of ICE’s rampant operations. But detention is no place for a child. It’s cruel and unnecessary. We can all take action, whether that means raising our voices to demand an end to child detention, or simply educating ourselves on how current immigration policies are impacting children.
As immigrants are being targeted, cross-movement solidarity is essential in the fight to free all political prisoners.
Incarceration has been used as a core tactic of the United States in upholding racial capitalism and imperialisms through repression, extraction, and violent control. Growing to more than 65,000 people at the start of 2026, more people than ever are being held in immigration detention centers, with 2025 setting a 20-year record for deaths while detained.
The arrest and detention of dissenting people due to political motivations—or, the making of political prisoners—has required alleged charges, manufactured evidence, and the expansion of detention infrastructure. With the creation and rapid expansion of immigration enforcement agencies, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is creating another mass category of political prisoners.
The criminalization of protest and dissent has expanded in mission and in agency, as dissenters without citizenship have been targeted, investigated, and detained.
In a letter sent from inside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in 2025, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil declared, “I am a political prisoner,” as he explained the nature of his warrantless arrest by DHS officers after having been the target of an FBI investigation. Khalil stated, “Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.”
Movements to end mass incarceration, immigrant justice movements, labor movements, environmental justice movements, and all others need to be interconnected in the fight to free all political prisoners.
Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian with a pending asylum application in the US, was arrested after attending a protest, her charges were dropped, and she was later placed into custody at an ICE detention facility where she has been held despite a judge's orders for her release. Kordia’s family has shared the conditions she has faced, including being chained while hospitalized and barred from access to her attorneys and family.
A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that people without citizenship have the same free speech rights as citizens, declaring immigration detention for protest and ideological deportation unconstitutional. Yet, the practice of kidnapping and detaining protesters without citizenship continues. Due to the Israeli occupation, seizure of land, and creation of an apartheid state, Palestinian activists like Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, Mohsen Mahdawi, and others are often considered stateless, making them harder to deport and leading to their indefinite apprehension in immigration detention centers as political prisoners.
In a similar pattern to the prison boom in 1980s California, ICE is rapidly expanding its detention infrastructure. Across the country federal funds are being used to purchase warehouses to convert into detention centers and lease offices to conduct operations in efforts to establish mass permanent presence of ICE around every corner. Abroad, the US is invested in political detention at facilities such as the camps in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador.
Alongside political repression, many of these infrastructure-strengthening actions, such as building and staffing for-profit schools in detention facilities and purchasing surveillance technologies, are increasing profits in the billions for developers, tech giants, and stock holders.
Federal funding of these actions by the billions fuels repression. The backing from elected officials, from local jurisdictions to Congress, supplies the infrastructure needed to build a mass system of political prisoners and violent socialeconomic control.
Prisons are a booming business that require a continued supply of people to ensure continued profit. From what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment,” people have been politicized by the repression they experience. The survival behaviors necessary to navigate life in this repression have been criminalized to keep facilities and pockets full.
Because of the nature of detention under racial capitalism, all imprisonment has been considered political, making all who are detained—whether that be in jails, prisons, immigration facilities, involuntary mental health facilities, and other sites of hold—political prisoners. The expansion, then, does not require formal conviction for the state to justify detention indefinitely.
Just like borders, immigration enforcement and detention creates political prisoners. For immigrants in the US, living within its borders is a political act, and continuing to live is a form of resistance. Once detained, immigrants are marked for life as a threat. A child born in an immigration detention facility is born a political prisoner.
These processes make political prisoners common, legitimizing their treatment and making it more difficult to unbuild the systems that keep them.
Political prisoners of movement spaces, such as Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier, and Xinachtli (Alvaro Luna Hernandez), did not allow their detention to stop their resistance efforts. Many have written letters while incarcerated, providing critical texts revealing the use of detention as a method of political repression while exposing their inhumane living conditions. Others have organized from the inside, building power among incarcerated workers and connections to movements on the outside. And, like those held in immigration detention, some have focused on survival as their act of resistance.
On the outside, organizations such as the National Political Prisoner Coalition, Critical Resistance, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and Close Guantánamo and the Center for Victims of Torture, have centered their actions around campaigns to free political prisoners. With the expansion of political prisonership under immigration repression, cross-movement solidarity is needed to work in coordination to interrupt and end all carceral tactics used for repression. Movements to end mass incarceration, immigrant justice movements, labor movements, environmental justice movements, and all others need to be interconnected in the fight to free all political prisoners.
Our survival depends on each other.
Local protests against plans to build immigration detention centers have been held in states including New Hampshire, New York, and Maryland in recent weeks.
Merrimack, New Hampshire over the weekend became one of the latest US communities to rally against Trump administration plans to use a local warehouse to detain up to 1,000 people at a time, and on Monday, federal lawmakers from the New England state unveiled legislation to ensure the Department of Homeland Security listens to the 1,500 people who showed up to protest.
In the US Senate, Democratic Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen introduced the Respect for Local Communities Act, while Reps. Chris Pappas and Maggie Goodlander, also Democrats from the Granite State, proposed a companion bill in the House.
The legislation would require DHS to open a public comment period and receive approval from state and local officials before building, acquiring, or operating any new Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers or processing facilities—at least two dozen of which ICE plans to open in order to hold up to 10,000 people at a time as part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign.
As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, the administration plans to spend $38.3 billion to acquire and retrofit warehouses in states including New Hampshire, Georgia, and New York to detain immigrants.
The plan has received pushback from both sides of the aisle. Although the Republican Party vehemently backs Trump's mass deportation and detention campaign—which has killed at least 26 people in the last year, including least three US citizens who were fatally shot—lawmakers including Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) have objected to plans to build detention facilities in their states and districts, citing "economic development" and "infrastructure" concerns.
The Democrats who introduced the legislation on Monday spoke about widespread opposition to the "secretive facilities" and the "stunning displays of violence and cruelty" that have been part of Trump's mass detention operation.
"At a time when so many Americans are struggling with high costs for things like healthcare and housing, the Trump administration is instead spending $38 billion in taxpayer money to purchase and operate these facilities,” said Shaheen. “Our new bill responds directly to the concerns we’ve heard from local officials in towns like Merrimack, New Hampshire and across the country: They were never consulted about ICE’s plans, and they don’t want the chaos of new detention facilities in their communities. By requiring DHS to secure approval from state and local officials, our legislation would ensure that Americans and Granite Staters have a say in what the federal government is planning in our own communities.”
The bill would also require DHS to notify Congress before setting up new detention centers.
Last week, Hassan noted in a hearing where acting ICE Director Todd Lyons testified that Wicker had successfully pushed DHS to cancel plans to open a facility in Mississippi.
“I would hope that I would get the same treatment that Sen. Wicker got—which is to say the town doesn’t want the dentition center, so please cancel it,” Hassan said. “And I would expect that my partisan affiliation shouldn’t make any difference to that determination.”
In Merrimack over the weekend, hundreds of locals lined the streets outside the town hall, holding signs that read, "Human rights are for everyone" and “ICE: bringing terror and cruelty to a community near you."
Communities in Tennessee, New York, and Maryland have also spokesn out about plans for new detention centers recent weeks, and in the latter state, Attorney General Anthony Brown sued the Trump administration in Monday over its purchase of a warehouse in Williamsport where it plans to detain up to 1,500 people.
“Federal law gives Marylanders the right to know when and how detention facilities are built in their communities,” said Brown. “That right was denied. Today, our office is taking them to court.”