The kids in ICE detention

0:00Out in McCallan, Texas, there's a band that goes by Mariachi Orro. They're so good they got invited to the White House and were congratulated on the floor of Congress. I am honored to have the students and directors here today. Just eight months later, two teenage brothers in the band were detained along with the rest of their family by ICE. Most of the family ended up at a detention center in Dilly, Texas and there was immediate outrage. This is a family that came here through the legal process. For all we know, there are great kids doing Mariachi and enjoying life. And yet, the Trump administration has them sitting in a prison in Dilly, Texas. All that outrage got the entire family out early. Less lucky are the kids who don't end up with massive campaigns to get them out of detention. On today's sprained, we're going to find out what it's like to be a kid detained at Dilly. An all-new season of the secret lives of Mormon wives is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.

1:05Mom talk has just been blowing up. Whitney and Jen are on dance with the stories. Taylor is a bachelorette. Saying that out loud is crazy. That is huge. But all the cool opportunities could pull us apart. It's causing issues in everyone's marriage. My whole world is falling apart right now. It's chaos. Watch the Hulu original series, the secret lives of Mormon wives. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. Plus for bundle subscribers, terms apply. How can we understand the decisions facing the United States and Israel and Iran as they weigh next moves in this war? War that was meant to prevent from reaching a bomb eventually might push them beyond the rubicon and to have that bomb. I'm John Feiner. And I'm Jake Sullivan. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, former Israeli defense intelligence officer Danny Strenowitz joins us from Israel to discuss the war against Iran. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game, wherever you get your podcasts.

2:06Hello, my name is Ariana V. I'm 14 years old and I'm from Honduras. I've been detained for 45 days and I have never felt so much fear to go to a place as I feel here. I'm at Ariana when she was detained in the Dilly Immigration Detention Center in South Texas. I've been in this country for almost seven years and in those seven years my mom and I found a home and made a bigger family. She was a high school freshman in New York and she went in with her mom for their regular ice check-in which they had actually been doing for years. Last December and they went in in the morning and by that evening they were sent across the country to Texas to a detention center. Since I got to the center, all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.

3:06I had been corresponding with her mother and who actually has two U.S. citizens, children, a toddler who's almost two and a five-year-old. And they were left behind because this particular detention center, you know, can't hold U.S. citizens. I have never been separated from my siblings and it's honestly sad because they're little and they knew their mom and their sister. They ended up in the Dilly Immigration Processing Center which is the nation's only immigration detention center that's operating right now for families. The Biden administration actually ended the practice of family detention in 2021 but when Trump was re-elected he quickly reopened this facility for families. There's an increasing number of families that are like Adianna's who are people who have been living in the United States for years and are getting swept up in these broad immigration arrests all around the country.

4:12Since the day my mom and I got detained in Manhattan, New York, my life was instantly passed. My name is Micah Rosenberg and I'm an investigative reporter at ProPublica. So I was able to meet Adianna and her mother in person. After I met with them, Adianna sat down and wrote me a letter about what she was going through. Not a lot of people know what is happening in the centers where immigrants are placed that I haven't been getting any school time either or the other kids in here. She later recorded herself reading her letter to me so we could hear it in her own voice. Every single person in here had their jobs, they had their lives, they aren't any danger for this country. I was able to speak with people of your video calls as well. One thing that we were really trying to accomplish with this reporting was to really get that perspective of the children who you really don't hear from very often.

5:22One of the things that we asked is if the kids would be interested in writing us letters or sending us drawings about what they were actually experiencing. My name is Gabi M&M and 14 years old I'm from Columbia. Hello, I'm Andrew and I'm 12 years old. I have been at the center for two months. I was at the edge of an unknown year's old. They didn't understand why they were there, they said that they weren't criminals and you know they thought that the administration would be going after criminals. I used me to catch my mom and now I'm in jail and I'm sad and I've fainted two times here inside. When I arrived every night I cried and now I don't sleep well, Antonia H9. I missed their friends, they missed their teachers, they missed their homes. I don't want to be in this place, I want to go to my school, I miss my grandparents, I miss my friends, Mia, age seven.

6:23I have a home and school, I get bored a lot and I don't know what to do. Gabi, age 14. Kids who are being damaged mentally, they wouldn't know how their parents and other people are being treated. So this facility at the time that I was meeting her there was holding hundreds of people, parents and families together, where up to 12 people are sharing a room together. Some of the families told me about food where they said that they found worms in the food or that it was moldy. The food is bad, I feel so much sadness and depression of not being able to leave. They don't give me my diet, I'm vegetarian, I don't eat well, there's no good education and I miss my best friend, Julieta. Another kid that I met was Alexander Perez, a 15-year-old from the Dominican Republic.

7:25He told me about what it was like to go to school at Dilly, he said school was limited to, you know, an hour a day. It was in these classes that were mixed with a bunch of different ages and were capped at 12 kids. There was, you know, handouts and work sheets that, you know, were sort of too simple. So, you know, a lot of boredom, a lot of, you know, sickness because so many kids were packed together. To get any medicine pill or anything, it takes a while. There are various viruses in here. People are always sick. One baby who I met who on video call was, you know, waving at me and blowing kisses. Her name was Amalia, she was 18 months old and, you know, she was really adorable to look at on the call, but she had just recently ended up being hospitalized.

8:27She was diagnosed with COVID and RSV and it developed into pneumonia and bronchitis and she was in a very serious state. After more than a week in the hospital, that family was transferred back into detention. Serious situations happen and the officers can't take them serious enough. They don't even care. Some of the parents told me about more difficult instances of, you know, kids who had actually tried to harm themselves or talked about suicide. The Trump administration and ICE and Corsific, the private prison operator, that runs the facility, they said that, you know, no one is denied medical care and that they, you know, take health and safety standards, you know, as a most important, but this was the experiences that we heard from the detainees inside.

9:27Are there legal limits that protect children in these situations or can they just be detained indefinitely? So there is this longstanding legal settlement that's basically been in place since the 1990s. It's called the Flora's Agreement and it gives sort of general guidelines that children shouldn't be held in immigration detention for longer than 20 days. After nearly two years of work by the Department of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services professionals, the Trump administration has established a new rule to respond to the realities of current immigration flows. The Trump administration has argued that this settlement is outdated, that there's new rules and regulations that govern the detention of children and families that, you know, are now in place and that this settlement should be terminated. Flora's settlement agreement is operationally outdated and does not respond to the current immigration crisis. The families who have been detained at Dilly, there's hundreds of them that we found through our analysis have been held past, you know, past that limit.

10:34They told me I could only be here 21 days, but I have already spent more than 60 days waking up and eating the same repetitive meals. 50 days in Dilly Immigration Processing Center. 113 days in detention and I miss my friends. I feel that they're going to forget me. And what about the kids you spoke with? What about Ariana and all the rest? Are they still in Dilly, Texas or have they gotten out? So a lot of the people that we spoke with, especially after we asked the administration about specific cases, have been subsequently released. Some of them have been released into the U.S. Others have been deported. There's not a clear pattern to who was released and who wasn't. The center really sort of burst onto the public stage after the arrest of Liam Conejo-Romers, the five-year-old who was arrested in Minnesota and his little blue bunny hat.

11:35And once he was taken there, there was a lot of public outrage. Congress members started trying to visit there. And the detainees themselves staged a protest in the yard. One of the things that we heard from detainees after all of that happened is that they had experienced guards confiscating art supplies like colored pencils and crayons and paper. And things that they had used to write these protest signs and the letters. In past weeks, some of their communications like Gmail and Google services were cut off. After I met with Ariana and her mother in Texas, they were released and I was there after they were reunited with their family in New York. It was really quite moving, obviously. And I think one thing we've been seeing in our reporting is not only the effect that these detentions are having on the kids who are actually detained, but then on the kids who are left on the outside.

12:46Ariana's little siblings, in the case of Jacob, he was afraid to go to kindergarten in the morning because he was worried that his mom and his sister wouldn't be there when he came home. He finally was convinced to go back to school, but he wanted to spend the whole night in her bed and was really affected by their sudden disappearance from their lives. You know, a lot of the kids said that there wasn't a whole lot to do. A dilly, a lot of them ended up playing sports and one of the things that was there was a volleyball net. And so, you know, Ariana told me that she ended up playing a lot of volleyball in dilly. When she ended up going back to her high school in New York, she was playing volleyball in gym and realized that she had actually gotten a lot better. And was better than some of the kids at the school, and so she was thinking about signing up for the volleyball team.

13:51Find Micah Rosenberg's investigation, the children of dilly at pro-publica.org. FYI, we had people read the letters, kids at dilly wrote Micah except for Ariana. That was her votes. Regene change is underway at the top of the department of Homeland Security. We're going to ask if the new guys are going to run detention and deportation any differently when we're back on today. Support for the show comes from Indeed. When you're looking for talent, indeed, sponsored jobs can be just the boost you're looking for.

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18:58The Vox Media podcast stage will also feature sessions from Brunei Brown and Adam Grant, Marcus Brownlee, Keith Lee, Vivian II, Robin Arzone and more. Visit voxmedia.com slash South by Southwestern to pre-register. And get a special discount on your South by Southwest Innovation badge. That's voxmedia.com slash South by Southwest. Hope to see you there. Reese Gorman reports on politics at notice and if you're like. What do you work for? Nurse. Who? Nurse. I don't even know what the hell that is. So it's a little play on POTUS, SCOTUS, all that good stuff. Get the show for real. So the new pick for the Secretary of Homeland Security is Mark Wayne Mullin, a senator from Oklahoma, the junior senator. He was elected in 2022. He is a staunch conservative. He is a staunch Trump supporter. It's staunch Trump ally. And it's really kind of all led to him getting this position following Chrissy Nome's ouster.

20:02And before we spend half of our episode talking about him today, how likely is he to be confirmed by the Senate? I would say it's about 99% chess. Okay. Well, in that case, let's talk about him. And we have to start with his name, Mark Wayne. Where does that come from? So he, his two uncles were named Mark and Wayne. And they combined the names to Mark Wayne. And at some point he, there's parents thought that he, they would drop one of them, but he just kept them. And it's just a very Oklahoma name, Mark Wayne Mullin. Okay. And what's his origin story? How do you get into politics? The Mark Wayne Mullin is, is a member of the Cherokee Nation, one of the few Native American citizens in Congress. That is something that he is really proud of that he talks a lot about. He is also from still well, Oklahoma, which is one of the poorest cities in the United States. He grew up there and he never graduated college. He has an associate's degree. He always started a plumbing company. Hi, I'm Mark Wayne Mullin with Mullin Plumbing at V.

21:02Do you have a stool that just doesn't flex right? And ask someone who went to college there and worked there for a while when I was just a student of Oklahoma, you would see Mullin plumbing vans all over the state. This is one of the biggest plumbing companies in the state. And he decided to run for Congress as this outsider where his, because literally his tagline, his cards were not a politician, a businessman. I got fed up when I realized that my biggest competitor isn't my competition, it's the government. And in the Senate and in the House, he has a reputation for being something of a fighter which comes from his reputation from being an actual fighter. He was an actual professional MMA fighter. He is big into wrestling. And one of the most viral moments of his career is when Team Search President Sean O'Brien testified before Senate Committee and Mullin being from Oklahoma, which is famously not a very friendly state to labor unions. If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here.

22:02Okay, that's fine, perfect. Team Mr. President Sean O'Brien and him are going back and forth. You want it now? I'd love to do it right now. And Mullin told him to quote, stand your butt up. Stand your butt up then. And then Sean O'Brien responded. You stand your butt up. Oh, hold it. Oh, stop it. Say you solution every bullet. Mullin then stood up, then started taking off his rings as if he was about to get in a fight. And then Bernie Sanders basically was like, you're a United States senator. No, you're a United States senator. Sit down. Sit down. Okay. Sit down please. And his voice, you're an act like it. And it was one of the most viral moments of a deathly of his career, I believe. If you're not pointing at me, that's disrespectful. I don't care about respecting it at all. I don't respect you at all. I don't respect you at all. So hold it. Hold it. No. Okay, but most pertinent to our conversation today is that President Trump likes this guy. President Trump has a soft spot for this hard dude from Oklahoma. How did their relationship develop? Their relationship developed really early on. Mark Wayne has somebody that to his credit

23:03is really good at building relationships. And so in Trump's first term, I mean, that was no different. He was really close with Trump. The relationship really grew when Mark Wayne Mullin's son had a really traumatic injury. It almost life threatening injury from wrestling. He had to go, he had to be flown out to California to a specialty hospital to be operated on. It was a really scary moment for Mullin and his family. Trump would visit his son at one point and would routinely call weekly to check in on Mullin and his son. Wow. And Mullin really credits that to his growing relationship with Trump. Didn't know the president was out there checking on people like that. That being said, as you earlier let us know, this was not a guy who had a lot of experience in say, I don't know, law enforcement, defense security, anything of the sort. He was a plumber, a radio host, an MMA fighter. Does he have the typical resume for secretary

24:06of the Department of Homeland Security? I mean, if you compare it to Chrissy Nopes, it's pretty similar. I mean, equally to not have glowing resume. But if you look at a lot of Trump's cabinet secretaries, he doesn't really go with the most qualified choice of time. Trump really tends to pick people who he likes and who he thinks will be good at the job and also just who would give him loyalty. And that tends to be one of the main things that Trump's looks for when appointing people to the cabinet. And what was it that turned Trump against Mark Wayne's predecessor or potential predecessor, Christina? The straw that broke the Campbell's back was her answer to a hearing question last week by Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana where he asked if Trump had approved of this $220 million ad campaign. Which looked almost as though a political ad and she said that Trump had signed off on it.

25:06The president approved ahead of time you spending $220 million running TV ads across the country in which you are featured prominently. Yes, sir, we went through the legal processes. Did it correct? Did it work with OMB? Yes. He did. Yes. Okay. Which in since Trump, he was adamant that he did not approve this. Have you had sexual relations with Cory Lewandowski? Mr. Chairman, I am shocked that we're going down and peddling tabloid garbage in this committee today. Reclaiming it, ma'am? When she was asked about her alleged affair with her advisor Cory Lewandowski and she did not say no. She just completely just dodged the question and said she was appalled that it was even being asked and that was something that also infuriated Trump. But she didn't say no because she is having an affair with Cory Lewandowski, right? That is the rumor. No one's really been able to prove it, but I mean, they've been seen together. I was at Trump's watch party last in 2021.

26:07There's a group of reporters and I. We were sitting at the pool and who walks down up at Cory Lewandowski and Kristi Nome. Just hanging out by the pool and we're just looking like they're not even trying to hide it. They're poor, they're poor spouses. They're both married. And the thing that's crazy is when Kristi Nome was asked about her alleged affair with Lewandowski, her husband was sitting right behind her while she was denying to answer the question. Has Mullin said how he wants to run DHS differently? Then, you know, Kristi Nome did? Following the death of Alex Prattie when he was shot and killed by Border Patrol, Mullin's statement was not much different from Kristi Nome. She said... Individual, a deranged individual that came in to have to cause max damage with a loaded pistol, with an extra mag that was completely loaded, was shot and killed. How much more does this got to go on before the Democrat leaders there take responsibility for their words? And so that... He didn't go as far to say he was a domestic terrorist

27:09as Nome had said. From that sense, I think that you won't necessarily see a lot of change maybe in the rhetoric or the mission of deporting people who are here illegally. But what I think you might see is more loyalty to Trump. Nome was constantly on TV getting ahead of the administration and was really obsessed with the visuals of it all. And so I think maybe some of that might change the more visuals of it. But the actual overall mission is still going to be to this mass deportation effort of people who are here illegally. And as much as Republicans in Congress may have wanted leadership change at the Department of Homeland Security, they haven't yet come out and said we want a policy change from the White House. Not at least publicly. There's definitely members who I talk to on a daily basis who are... Do you express some reserve about the administration's efforts right now? But they are afraid to go on the record of publicly being a Republican and criticizing the administration

28:09is... It's not great for your political success. And so a lot of these members are afraid to criticize us publicly. But it is a real concern that a lot of them have, especially vulnerable members, the optics of this are really not good. ... Reese Gorman. Notice.org. He also hosts the on-notice podcast. If you can't get enough Reese. Peter Ballon on Rosen made our show today, Miranda Kennedy edited. Andrea Lopez-Crusado fact-checked. David Tadashore and Patrick Boyd mixed. I'm Sean Ramesfirm and this is today explained. ... Rince knows that greatness takes time.

29:09But so does laundry. So Rince will take your laundry and hand-deliver it to your door expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time one spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rince, it's time to be great.