ICE's Youngest Prisoner
Two-month-old Juan Nicolás has spent half his life inside America’s largest family detention center. When he got sick, the doctor was gone.
WASHINGTON — The doctor wasn’t there.
It was approaching midnight on Monday in Dilley, Texas, and a two-month-old boy named Juan Nicolás required immediate medical attention because he couldn’t breathe, and the doctor wasn’t there.
His mother — a woman who had crossed whatever desert and river and checkpoint stood between her child and a life — screamed for help the way only a mother can scream. And what came back was a shrug dressed in official language. No physician on site at this hour. Nothing to be done.
This is the United States of America in 2026.
Juan Nicolás turned two months old inside an ICE private prison. Do the math on that. He has been alive for roughly sixty days. For more than three weeks of those sixty days — half his time on this earth — he has been the property of CoreCivic, a brutal private prison company that bills the federal government for the privilege of jailing infants, and which will tell you with a straight corporate face that emergency care is available around the clock.
It wasn’t available in the overnight hours when this baby needed it.
A doctor is not a press release. A doctor is a person who shows up.
Congressman Joaquin Castro walked into the Dilley medical wing on January 28th. He looked around. There was nobody there. Not a nurse. Not an aide. Not a clipboard with a pulse reading. The clinic that CoreCivic advertises as evidence of its humane care sat empty in the middle of the afternoon like a diner that stopped serving food but kept the sign lit.
Castro has been pushing ICE “hard” to release the baby and his mother. This is what it has come to in America — a United States congressman has to push hard to get a two-month-old out of a cage. He has to go on Instagram Live. He has to call local television. He has to treat the release of an infant as a legislative priority.
Meanwhile, Juan Nicolás’s immune system — still being assembled, still figuring out how the world works — has been fighting respiratory illness in a facility where measles recently walked through the door, where mothers report struggling to get clean water for formula, where sick children cycle through ibuprofen and basic antibiotics until they deteriorate badly enough that someone finally calls an ambulance.
Which is what happened Monday night. An ambulance came. It was, depending on how you look at it, either a rescue or an admission of guilt.
The people who built this system will tell you it is not a choice. They will say these are complex policy questions. They will say that if you release one family, a thousand more will follow. They will hide behind the word deterrence the way other people hide behind the word regrettable.
But deterrence is an abstraction, and Juan Nicolás is not.
He is a boy who has been alive for two months. He has never seen a park. He has never felt grass. He does not yet know what a dog looks like, or what it feels like to sleep somewhere that isn’t a government contract. He knows his mother’s voice and he knows hunger and now he knows, in whatever way a two-month-old body registers such things, that he is sick and the people responsible for him were not there when he needed them at three in the morning.
That is not complexity. That is a choice. Someone made it. Someone signed the contract with CoreCivic. Someone set the staffing levels. Someone decided that a newborn asylum seeker was a detention problem and not a human emergency.
Put their name on it. That is all journalism has ever asked.
As of this writing, Juan Nicolás is in a hospital somewhere in South Texas. His condition is unknown. ICE cites privacy. We do know that the baby’s mother is with him at the hospital, where he is under 24-hour supervision by medical staff and federal agents with guns.
As a nation, we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Photo and video of Juan Nicolás are courtesey of Lidia Terrazas for Univision whose reporting you should follow here.
I AM ashamed to be an American citizen! Gods help us all!
I can not get my head around this. We dare to call ourselves a Christian nation. We're not even close. Words without action are meaningless.