Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old who was pictured in a blue bunny-eared hat being taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, has been released from a Texas immigration facility.
But the conditions at Dilley Immigration Processing Center near San Antonio — and the health of the hundreds of children, including infants, being detained there — remain an urgent issue.
On Sunday, Dilley reported an outbreak of measles.
Now, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, who visited the facility last week and shared photos online of Liam looking ill, is calling for Dilley to be “shut down immediately.”
“Because of the close-quarter conditions at Dilley, lack of prompt medical response and capacity, and lack of expertise with diseases such as measles, Dilley is not equipped to combat any spread,” Castro posted on X Monday afternoon. “ICE confirmed that no person at Dilley is a criminal.”
He added: “Children and families, who have committed no crime, should not be suffering and do not belong in prison.”
A New Measles Outbreak
Liam Conejo Ramos, and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, entered the U.S. through legal means as asylum-seekers, but were nevertheless detained in Minnesota on Jan. 20. Images of their arrest, and of ICE agents seemingly using the child with his Spider-Man backpack as bait sparked outrage amid rising bipartisan criticism of the agency following the extrajudicial killings of two Americans in Minneapolis last month.
Liam and his father’s case spurred protests both inside and outside of Dilley. As condemnations grew, Castro and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, both Democrats, visited the facility and held a press conference.
“Liam is not doing well,” Castro told PBS News Hour last week. “He has been sleeping a lot. He hasn’t been eating well, and he’s been very depressed. He misses his mom.”
Castro and nine other members of Congress said they would inspect the facility on Feb. 6, according to a spokesperson for the congressman.
Then, after nearly two weeks in custody, a judge ordered Liam and his father to be released.
The New York Times ran a guest essay on Sunday written by Elora Mukherjee, a clinical professor of law at Columbia University, and the director of the immigrants’ rights clinic there. It was titled: “Liam Ramos Was Just One of Hundreds of Children at This Detention Center. Release Them All.”
That same day, spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, told CBS News that two measles cases were discovered Friday.
“ICE Health Services Corps immediately took steps to quarantine and control further spread and infection, ceasing all movement within the facility and quarantining all individuals suspected of making contact with the infected,” McLaughlin said to CBS.
Measles is a highly contagious airborne disease caused by a virus spread when an infected person breathes, coughs or sneezes, according to the World Health Organization. It can cause severe complications and even death.
Since none of the detainees at the center have criminal convictions, Castro argued that anyone diagnosed with measles “should be moved to a facility with the medical capacity for proper treatment and containment.”
How Many Children Are Being Held?
The Dilley Immigration Processing Center is the main facility for family detention in the U.S., and Castro told reporters at the press conference that there were about 1,100 detainees currently housed at the facility, which included a 2-month-old infant.
Though state facilities that hold minors in detention, like the Texas Juvenile Justice Department, have some updated data on the number of minors on their website, the Department of Homeland Security is less transparent and harder to parse.
The Marshall Project conducted an analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and found that by October 2025, at least 3,800 children under age 18, including 20 infants, had been detained by ICE since Trump took office. (Most reporting in recent weeks, including in the New York Times, has attributed any numbers related to detainees in Dilley to the nonprofit newsroom.)
The number of children detained by ICE in a given day has jumped sixfold in that time, according to The Marshall Project. The nonprofit newsroom also found that at least 1,000 children were held longer than 20 days, despite that being a court-ordered limit on child detention.
Internal DHS data last month — obtained by CBS News — reflected that the number of detainees in ICE custody had reached a new record high. In mid January, ICE was holding about 73,000 individuals facing deportation in its custody across the country, an 84% increase from the same time in 2025, CBS reported. Six thousand were classified as family units.
‘Hellhole’
Children in Dilley were “despondent and depressed,” Castro told PBS after his visit with Liam last week.
“We saw the whole gamut, the whole spectrum of kids, a 9-year-old who was picked up in Austin who spent New Year’s Eve getting processed into this jail,” he recalled. “One young girl who kept coming up to me, a little girl who was hugging my leg, asking us to help get her out of there.”
“These kids are very traumatized,” he added.
In court documents, as reported by The Marshall Project, families claimed that children were given moldy, worm-filled food and undrinkable water with a foul taste. Parents even described children hitting themselves on their faces — and wetting themselves even after being potty-trained.
In her Times guest essay, Mukherjee described the conditions of the children she has worked with, calling the facility a “hellhole.”
“A 2-year-old boy was breastfeeding in detention. One 6-year-old boy had leukemia. An 8-year-old girl began wetting the bed. A 14-year-old girl engaged in self-harm,” Mukherjee wrote.
Mukherjee said that the facility lacks proper medical care.
DHS officials have pushed back against claims of poor conditions in immigration detention centers. After announcing the measles outbreak at the Dilley facility, McLaughlin said in a statement that the two sick detainees were receiving medical care.
“This is the best healthcare [sic] many aliens have received in their entire lives,” McLaughlin said in a statement.
The facility in Dilley was opened in 2014 under the Obama administration under the name “South Texas Family Detention Center,” according to the Washington Post. The center was shut down under the Biden administration and reopened in the spring of last year after authorities began detaining families.
Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas condemned the actions of ICE officers in detaining Liam and his father as unconstitutional and driven by a “perfidious lust for unbridled power.”
“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” Biery wrote.
On Sunday afternoon, Castro wrote on X that he helped Liam and his father return to Minnesota after their release, thanking those who had expressed outrage.
“Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning,” Castro wrote on X.
“Thank you to everyone who demanded freedom for Liam. We won’t stop until all children and families are home.”