Trump deported a sick baby who was exposed to measles in an ICE concentration camp

The doctor wasn’t there when a two-month-old boy named Juan Nicolás in an ICE concentration camp required immediate medical attention because he couldn’t breathe.

It was approaching midnight on a Monday in February, and the infant needed help. His mother screamed for help the way only a mother can scream. 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.

The baby had spent half his life inside the South Texas Family Residential Center, a private prison run by CoreCivic under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

For three weeks of his 60 days on earth, he has been the property of a corporation that bills the federal government for the privilege of jailing infants.

When guards finally rushed Juan Nicolás to the medical area overnight, the doctor was absent.

Personnel checked on him hourly and gave his mother a nasal aspirator for the phlegm. Then they called an ambulance.

At the hospital, doctors diagnosed bronchitis.

According to U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, the infant had been unresponsive — a word that carries particular weight when applied to a newborn. After a few hours, the hospital discharged him. ICE returned him to detention.

Then they deported him.

‘Choking on His Own Vomit’

The baby’s mother told Univision reporter Lidia Terrazas that early that morning, she found her son unresponsive, choking on his own vomit.

This is what life looks like inside a facility where measles recently walked through the door, where two confirmed cases triggered a quarantine and halted all movement last month.

Migrant Insider editor Pablo Manríquez has been tracking conditions at Dilley. He puts it bluntly: “Babies in a measles, tuberculosis and bronchitis-infested detainment environment — we’re finding them unresponsive. When I say unresponsive, I mean you poke them and they don’t move.”

The facility holds families with children — some as young as two months old — behind razor wire in South Texas, about 70 miles southwest of San Antonio.

It has a capacity of 2,400. It is run by CoreCivic, the same private prison company that has faced years of lawsuits over medical care, including those from the warehouse converted to a concentration camp in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

When Castro visited the facility on Jan. 28, he walked into the medical wing in the middle of the afternoon. There was nobody there. Not a nurse. Not an aide. The clinic that CoreCivic advertises as evidence of its humane care sat empty.

Deported While Sick

On Tuesday evening, Juan Nicolás, his 16-month-old sister Mía, and both parents were loaded up and driven to the border. ICE deported them to Mexico.

The family received the money left in their commissary account from the detention center: $190 total.

They were essentially dumped on the other side with a sick infant, according to the baby’s mother. The family fled their home country for a reason. Their plan now is to travel to Guatemala, where the father is from, if they can raise enough money to fly there.

In Mexico, doctors delivered a more serious diagnosis than the one received in Texas. Juan Nicolás has RSV — respiratory syncytial virus — a highly contagious illness that can prove fatal for newborns. He also has severe bronchiolitis, a lung infection dangerous for infants because their airways are so small.

He is out of the hospital now and stable, according to Terrazas. But the question hangs in the air: What kind of country deports a sick 2-month-old?

‘The Best Healthcare’

The Department of Homeland Security offered a statement Tuesday evening defending its actions. Officials said the child received “the best healthcare than many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

The statement did not mention that the family had been deported.

DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told The Hill that the mother crossed the border illegally Jan. 21 near Eagle Pass, Texas, and “chose to take her child with her when she was transferred to ICE custody for removal proceedings.” The child was “medically cleared for removal,” and pediatricians gave the parents a nasal saline spray to continue care upon removal.

McLaughlin added that parents can avoid detention and receive a free flight back to their home country plus $2,600 by using the CBP Home app — a program for migrants interested in leaving voluntarily.

Castro had a different response. “To unnecessarily deport a sick baby and his entire family is heinous,” he wrote. “We are laser-focused on tracking them down, holding ICE accountable for this monstrous action.”

A Pattern of Sickness

Juan Nicolás is not the only sick child to cycle through Dilley’s inadequate medical system.

An 18-month-old girl identified in a federal lawsuit as “Amalia” was hospitalized for 10 days with COVID-19, RSV, viral bronchitis and pneumonia. When she returned to Dilley, detention center staff took away her nebulizer, respiratory medication and nutritional drinks prescribed by hospital doctors. She had lost 10 percent of her body weight. ICE initially denied she was denied medication, then released the family after the lawsuit was filed.

A 5-year-old boy wearing a blue bunny hat was detained outside his Minnesota home in January, his photo circling the globe as a symbol of the administration’s tactics. A federal judge ordered his release, criticizing the administration. ICE is now seeking to deport him.

At Dilley, staff have begun raiding dormitories to confiscate and destroy letters and drawings from children detailing conditions inside — a response to a ProPublica article that featured children’s own words describing their detention. Guards tore up pictures, according to reporters who spoke with the children.

The Public Health Failure

Medical experts watching the Dilley outbreak are blunt about what it represents.

“Measles is among the most contagious viruses known to medicine and among the easiest to prevent,” Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious diseases physician in Dallas, wrote in an essay published this month. “Two doses of a measles-containing vaccine provide durable immunity for most people and cost less than $2 per child.”

The two confirmed measles cases at Dilley last month triggered a quarantine and halted all movement in the facility. But as Kuppalli notes, those steps came only after exposure had already occurred.

“Detention facilities remain predictable flashpoints for vaccine-preventable disease, not because outbreaks are inevitable, but because prevention is repeatedly deprioritized,” she wrote.

Data backs her up. Between 2019 and 2023, ICE facilities documented sustained transmission of influenza (2,035 cases), mumps (252 cases) and hepatitis A (486 cases) across 20 facilities. Nearly half of all reported infections — 44.7% — occurred at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley.

“When a nation that calls itself a beacon of freedom detains children behind razor wire, separates families from their communities, and holds them in isolated conditions, we have crossed a dangerous line,” said Roman Palomares, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, at a rally outside the facility this month.

Measles is among the most contagious viruses known to medicine and among the easiest to prevent. Two doses of a measles-containing vaccine provide durable immunity for most people and cost less than $2 per child.

That reality makes the reports of measles inside a federal immigration detention facility in Texas not just alarming, but indicting.

An infectious diseases physician living and working in Texas, said measles quickly exploits gaps created by policy failure.

“This outbreak should not be framed as an anomaly or a breakdown in operations. It is the foreseeable result of policy choices that confine people, including children, in high-risk environments without the basic protections required to safeguard health and life,” according to the doctor.

Two people detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley have been confirmed to have measles. In response, facility movement was halted, and quarantine measures were implemented.

While these steps may help limit further transmission, they occurred only after exposure had already taken place. Detention facilities remain predictable flashpoints for vaccine-preventable disease, not because outbreaks are inevitable, but because prevention is repeatedly deprioritized.

This outbreak comes amid a rapidly accelerating resurgence of measles nationwide.

As of Jan. 29, 588 confirmed cases have already been reported in the U.S. this year, following 2,267 cases in 2025 — itself a sharp increase from 285 cases in 2024.

Declining vaccination coverage, rampant misinformation and an eroded public health infrastructure are dismantling protections that once made measles outbreaks rare.

Against that backdrop, placing people — including children — into congregate detention facilities without systematic vaccination safeguards is not merely a lapse in preparedness.

It is a violation of basic public health principles and of the government’s duty of care to people it confines.

This is all the more true for the migrants contained in the South Texas Family Residential Center. They are from marginalized populations with structural barriers to immunization. Many move frequently and were born into poverty in resource-limited settings, without consistent access to routine medical care or insurance to cover it.

Epidemiological evidence shows that people held in immigration detention bear a disproportionate burden of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases. Between 2019 and 2023, a case series of ICE facilities documented sustained transmission of influenza (2,035 cases), mumps (252 cases) and hepatitis A (486 cases) across 20 facilities, demonstrating how easily vaccine-preventable pathogens spread in these settings.

Another study from 2017 to 2020 found repeated, prolonged transmission of influenza (1,280 cases), varicella (chickenpox) (1,052 cases) and mumps (301 cases) across 17 detention centers, with crowding and frequent transfers driving outbreak persistence.

Nearly half of all reported infections — 44.7% — occurred at the South Texas Family Residential Center, with an additional 16.5% at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center, both in Texas.

These findings matter because one person with measles can infect 12 to 18 others. It is airborne and can persist in enclosed spaces for hours. Congregate detention facilities — with shared sleeping quarters, communal dining, limited ventilation and frequent population movement — are structurally primed for rapid transmission.

In clinical practice, once measles enters a congregate setting, the question is rarely whether it will spread, but how far and how fast.

This is a deliberate policy choice that places people in environments where infectious diseases are allowed to spread unchecked.

The Human Cost

Two-month-old Juan Nicolás 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. He knows hunger. And now he knows, in whatever way a 2-month-old body registers such things, that he is sick — and the people responsible for him were not there when he needed them.

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.

The family is now in Mexico, trying to raise money to reach Guatemala.

They have $190 and a sick baby. The baby’s mother told reporters that they feel like they’ll be safe in Guatemala.

They fled their home country for a reason, but the country they fled to deported them anyway.