On Friday, July 31, Sen. Dick Durbin released a report on what Senate Judiciary Committee staff found inside an ICE detention facility in Dilley, Texas.

The staff interviewed roughly 20 family units and 40 women held at the South Texas Family Residential Center, which is run by the private prison company CoreCivic.

Here is the phrase the report uses for what those families described: a "top-down culture of cruelty."

Not a bad apple. Not a staffing problem. Top-down.

What "top-down" means, in their words

One parent told staff that guards seen as "too nice" are scolded by supervisors and told to be harsher.

A guard told that same parent: "You only have three rights here: drink, sleep, eat."

That's the culture. Kindness gets corrected. The rest follows from there:

• Guards deliberately disrupting children's sleep at night.
• Guards entering rooms without knocking, on purpose.
• Guards taunting children who'd been given inedible food — by eating candy and pizza in front of them.

Read that last one twice. Adults, on the government payroll, eating pizza in front of hungry kids to make a point.

The food

"One family reported finding worms and a fingernail in their food. Several families said their children refused to eat facility meals entirely."

The medical care

Poor medical care was the single most urgent thing both the families and the adult women raised. The report says people described untreated conditions that were getting worse because nobody would treat them.

One mother and her child, both sick, were repeatedly refused blankets in a unit they said was extremely cold. Others reported being denied care while in what the report calls "extreme" pain.

The report's conclusion about where this leads is not subtle:

"Immigration detention facility staff routinely deny or defer necessary medical treatment, providing only minimal care until emergency care is required. Without better policies for quickly addressing urgent medical needs, including facilitating release, more individuals, including children, will die in detention."

And the number behind that sentence:

Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025 — the highest in more than two decades. Twenty-two have already died in 2026.

We are seven months into 2026.

The school

Detained children are supposed to get schooling — Durbin said some of what his staff observed at Dilley appears to violate the Flores Settlement Agreement, the court ruling that sets standards for immigration detention. Committee staff found "no evidence that the facility was meeting … basic education standards."

One 16-year-old described the schooling at Dilley as "drawing in coloring books."

Who is actually being held

The report describes the people it interviewed plainly:

"Many of them stated they have committed no crimes, have pending immigration cases, have minor children at home, and have lived in the United States for years. They stated repeatedly that they have followed the rules, and they are not criminals—and do not understand why they are being treated as if they are."

The report links that directly to policy. It says that "in a desperate attempt to meet Stephen Miller's quotas," immigration officials are now targeting "law-abiding families attending immigration court hearings and ICE check-ins."

People who showed up to their own hearing, as instructed, and got taken.

They tried to stop Congress from looking

Durbin's staff didn't get free rein. They got a clock.

"During that visit, in an attempt to curtail oversight, DHS imposed an arbitrary two-hour time limit on visiting the facility."

Two hours to inspect a facility holding families. Durbin's staff still came out with all of the above.

This isn't unique to Dilley. Members of Congress have repeatedly accused DHS and ICE of blocking their legal right to conduct oversight — a fight that has already produced a successful lawsuit in federal district court. Congressional oversight of detention isn't a courtesy the executive branch extends when it feels like it. It's the law.

Durbin has also previously released reports on ICE facilities in Florida and Louisiana. This is the third.

What the government and CoreCivic say

They deny it, and that belongs here.

A DHS spokesperson told TPM: "any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention facilities is FALSE," said Dilley "does meet federal detention standards and actually undergoes regular audits and inspections," and dismissed the report as "another hoax," adding that "the media is clearly desperate for these allegations of inhumane conditions at this facility to be true."

CoreCivic's vice president of communications, Steven Owen, said the report's characterizations "do not reflect the operations, standards or care provided at the facility," that Dilley "was purpose-built to meet the needs of families," and that "claims that children are denied care or experience delayed medical assessment are false." He said the facility maintains on-site pediatric expertise.

So the question is whether you believe the dozens of families and women Senate staff sat down with — or the agency that gave those staff a two-hour window and calls every report a hoax.

Somebody paid for this

Detention facilities are not free, and they didn't fund themselves.

In June, the Senate voted to hand ICE nearly $70 billion with no oversight requirements, no transparency requirements, and no accountability attached. We went through that vote name by name.

Senators had the option to attach conditions. In early June, one amendment would have required ICE agents to wear body cameras. It failed. Susan Collins was among those who voted against it — and then, weeks later, took credit for asking ICE nicely to wear them anyway.

This is what "no strings attached" buys. Worms in the food. Coloring books instead of school. A guard telling a parent they have three rights.

The people who wrote that check don't get to be surprised.

Source

Hunter Walker, "Senate Report Describes 'Top-Down Culture of Cruelty' in ICE Detention", Talking Points Memo, July 31, 2026. Photo: Getty Images, via TPM.