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 aroun…